From eyes to notes: Designing and faciiltating qualitative field interviews with creative visual tools

A number of visual tools have been developed for qualitative field research. Researchers aim to use these tools for various purposes in three stages of field research: data collection, data analysis, and data representation. However, field researchers often find it difficult to determine which existing visual tools to use, or how to create new tools for their own specific projects. Previously, many visual tools have been produced by researchers on their own, but these days more and more researchers work with visual communication designers to co-create visual tools for their projects. This thesis examines the use of creative visual tools in qualitative field research by outlining a theoretical framework and reviewing an in-depth case study of one field research project in Bihar, India. Furthermore, this thesis provides a thorough interdisciplinary design approach which can guide visual communication designers in the creation of visual tools for field research projects

Watching and Being Watched: Gender and Space in the Painting of the Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour with a Comparative View

This article explores the female space in the painting of Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour, which depicts the daily life and activities of the eighteenth-century Chinese city Suzhou. From the observation of the painting, there are semi-open spaces along the streets in which females stand and watch the imperial parade. Women tended to be invisible in the public circumstance during feudal periods: this research analyses the presence and role of these female spaces and whether they can be seen as a step towards the modern space in the process of early-modern China. In analyzing these spaces, it focuses on the relation between the women’s watching and being watched in the space, and how it represents the evolution of feminism consciousness in space in feudal times and, sequentially, how it evokes the consideration of feminist role in modern practice. The study shows that the semi-open space that hosts the female activities can be regarded as an epitome of negotiating space and gender in the urban context. Women in the painting were exposed to the public to a certain extent, while they were still within mental and physical boundaries in the female social structure of the Emperor Qianlong period. These negotiations indicate the transition of gender and space in the late Imperial China and present parts of the process of spatial modernization in the Jiangnan region. From the comparative perspective, this research further investigates the relationships of gender and space by focusing on the space along the streets in the Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour, located within the homogenous space of the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival of Ming dynasty seen Canaletto’s paintings of eighteenth-century Europe and Dianshi Zhai’s pictorials of the late Qing period. The research traces space in these paintings and how it represents the feminism consciousness and the evolution of female space in different historical and cultural backgrounds by looking at the social relations of the production of the specific history of people’s daily lives and the differences of social classes and nations

The transportation of corrosion products in cementitious material under chloride-rich environment

Corrosion products, forming on steel bar in cementitious material, can lead to concrete cracking. Clear the transportation of corrosion products is of great significance to predict corrosion-induced structural deterioration. This study investigates the corrosion products in steel-reinforced concrete specimen. By Raman spectroscopy and SEM method, the chemical constituents and micromorphology of corrosion products at steel-concrete interface as well as those inside the pore of cement paste are investigated. The proportion of corrosion products filling into the cement paste is determined by EDTA titration method. The results reveal that corrosion products diffuse in forms of ion in solution under chloride-rich environment, and the mechanisms of corrosion products filling is explained from physicochemical view

Essays in Industrial Organization

This dissertation studies a few topics in industrial organization. In the first two chapters, I study the education market from the perspective of industrial organization. Chapter 3 studies second-price auctions with participation costs. Chapters 1 and 2 study the high school market of a large city in China that introduced a policy allowing public schools to offer both free and priced admission options within a centralized admission mechanism. Chapter 1 introduces the institutional background, such as details of the admission mechanism, the schools and their price levels, and the new policy. I then present descriptive analysis. I also estimate a high school value-added regression, where I regress exit exam scores on entrance exam scores and other variables. I interpret the value-added as the high school quality. Results show that quality increases after the implementation of the policy. A difference-in-differences regression further shows that top-tier schools are able to increase their value-added more. I use these results as both inputs and motivating facts for my study in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 formally develops a demand and supply model. On the demand side, students consider both their preferences for a school and their probabilities of being admitted to that school to file a report of preferences. I develop an algorithm to quickly find students\u27 optimal reports, and this algorithm helps to reduce the computational burden in demand estimation. On the supply side, I model schools as maximizing a weighted average of profit and quality, so as to allow for the existence of excess demand for good schools. Demand estimation using students\u27 strategic reports quantifies the extent to which students with higher entrance exam scores care more about quality relative to price. Supply side estimation shows that top-tier schools have lower marginal costs of quality and thus choose higher quality. Counterfactual analysis shows that introducing subsidies to low income students while keeping the current priced admission options would give students more equal access to good schools, while keeping the quality gain brought by market incentives. Another counterfactual analysis shows that the quality gain brought by market incentives is driven by an increase in funds to improve quality and schools\u27 preference for quality. Chapter 3 studies equilibria and efficiency in second-price auctions with public participation costs. This is joint work with Jos\\u27{e}-Antonio Esp\\u27{i}n-S\\u27{a}nchez and \\u27{A}lvaro Parra. We generalize previous results by allowing arbitrary heterogeneity in bidders\u27 distributions of valuations and in their participation costs. We develop a notion of bidder strength, based on the best response of a bidder when all of her opponents play the same strategy she does. We then show that a \emph{herculean equilibrium}, in which stronger bidders have a lower participation threshold than weaker bidders, exists in general environments. In other words, the order of bidders given by their strength, which is a non-equilibrium concept and can be easily calculated for each bidder using only one equation, predicts the order of the participation thresholds in a certain equilibrium which exists in general. Combined with a sufficient condition for equilibrium uniqueness that we further provide, bidders\u27 strength points out the direction for finding and simplifies the formulation of the equilibrium. Furthermore, even though all equilibria are \emph{ex-post} inefficient, an \emph{ex-ante} efficient equilibrium always exists. Therefore, under the uniqueness condition, the \emph{herculean equilibrium} is the unique equilibrium of the game and is \emph{ex-ante} efficient

Controlling Chaos in a Thermal Convection Loop

It is demonstrated experimentally and theoretically that through the use of an active (feedback) controller one can dramatically modify the nature of the flow in a toroidal thermal convection loop heated from below and cooled from above. In particular, we show how a simple control strategy can be used to suppress (laminarize) the naturally occurring chaotic motion or induce chaos in otherwise time-independent flow. The control strategy consists of sensing the deviation of fluid temperatures from desired values at a number of locations inside the loop and then altering the wall heating to either counteract or enhance such deviations