Migration, risk and livelihoods: A Chinese case

China has turned from a 'low risk' to a 'high risk' society since the start of the market reforms in the late 1970s. Market, while bringing diverse livelihood opportunities to rural people, has simultaneously distributed risks, and the exposure and vulnerability to them unequally among different social groups. This paper attempts to apply the risk concept to the study of one of the most socially disadvantaged groups in China, namely rural-urban migrants, through analysing the narratives of members of a migratory family of the Hui Muslim national minority from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, who run a business in the northern city of Tianjin. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the research adopts an actor-oriented perspective combined with qualitative longitudinal research methodology (or 'extended case method') to delineate a livelihood trajectory of this family, and explore the relationships between livelihood, risk, social networks, agency and public policy interventions. --rural-urban migration,risk,contingency,uncertainty,livelihood,social networks,agency,social security,translocality,longitudinal research,narrative,extended case method,China

The political economy of rural development in China: reflections on current rural policy

The paper examines some of the main political economy dynamics of the policy initiatives on rural development that have been taken since 2003, and provides an overview of the main issues that they are addressing. The paper first outlines the major agrarian problems that have emerged over the recent decade and more, indicating their main political-economy causations, and then systematically analyses the prospects of the new policy initiatives to deal with them. Among the new policies the initiatives to reorganise the finance system through a reform of the roles of the county and a development of town and township governments to become points of delivery of public goods and social services are highlighted as particularly potent. Further importance is associated with reforms that strengthen the role of rural residents as citizens. The impact of the Chinese government's economic stimulus package in response to the ongoing global financial crisis is yet to become visible, but it is clear that the changes must be backed up with very substantial political and financial commitments. --rural policy,political economy,rural-urban relations

Context-Aware Single-Shot Detector

SSD is one of the state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, and it combines high detection accuracy with real-time speed. However, it is widely recognized that SSD is less accurate in detecting small objects compared to large objects, because it ignores the context from outside the proposal boxes. In this paper, we present CSSD--a shorthand for context-aware single-shot multibox object detector. CSSD is built on top of SSD, with additional layers modeling multi-scale contexts. We describe two variants of CSSD, which differ in their context layers, using dilated convolution layers (DiCSSD) and deconvolution layers (DeCSSD) respectively. The experimental results show that the multi-scale context modeling significantly improves the detection accuracy. In addition, we study the relationship between effective receptive fields (ERFs) and the theoretical receptive fields (TRFs), particularly on a VGGNet. The empirical results further strengthen our conclusion that SSD coupled with context layers achieves better detection results especially for small objects ($+3.2\% {\rm AP}_{@0.5}$ on MS-COCO compared to the newest SSD), while maintaining comparable runtime performance

The political economy of rural development in China: reflections on current rural policy

"The paper examines some of the main political economy dynamics of the policy initiatives on rural development that have been taken since 2003, and provides an overview of the main issues that they are addressing. The paper first outlines the major agrarian problems that have emerged over the recent decade and more, indicating their main political-economy causations, and then systematically analyses the prospects of the new policy initiatives to deal with them. Among the new policies the initiatives to reorganise the finance system through a reform of the roles of the county and a development of town and township governments to become points of delivery of public goods and social services are highlighted as particularly potent. Further importance is associated with reforms that strengthen the role of rural residents as citizens. The impact of the Chinese government's economic stimulus package in response to the ongoing global financial crisis is yet to become visible, but it is clear that the changes must be backed up with very substantial political and financial commitments." (author's abstract

Does top management team media exposure affect corporate social responsibility?

This study examines the impact of top management team (TMT) media exposure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the moderating effect of TMT characteristics based on the upper echelons theory and stakeholder theory. Based on the observations of 5,352 firms between 2010 and 2019, multiple regression analysis is conducted to empirically test whether TMT media exposure can promote CSR. TMT media exposure is further divided into paper media and online media to reveal the impact of different types of TMT media exposure on CSR. Some robustness tests are also conducted to strengthen the regression results. The results found that a high level of TMT media exposure promotes social responsibility. In addition, the TMT power and political connections negatively moderate the relationship between TMT media exposure and CSR. The main contribution of this study is to develop a TMT media exposure model to assess the impact of TMT media exposure on CSR, providing a theoretical contribution to the existing literature and enriching the research in the CSR context from the perspective of the TMT characteristic moderating role

A Comparative Evaluation of Methods to Monitor Moisture in Historic Porous Masonry Materials

The project aimed to develop a methodology to compare the performance of a range of invasive and non-invasive moisture measurement methods used to assess moisture in porous masonry. This methodology was laboratory-based and used test blocks of common traditional building materials (limestone, sandstone, brick and lime mortar) under controlled conditions of drying and wetting. The performance of each method tested was compared against weight measurements, which give absolute measurements of moisture content – often called the gravimetric method. Experiments were also carried out to evaluate the influence of drying conditions and block size on the test results. A variety of non-invasive handheld moisture measurement devices were tested, including commonly available resistance, capacitance and microwave moisture meters. Also tested was a range of invasive methods, including wooden and ceramic dowels, relative humidity sensors and time domain reflectometry (TDR) probes. For some of the non-invasive methods, further experiments were designed and carried out to evaluate the depths to which they could measure saturated parts of otherwise dry blocks of sandstone and limestone. A simple experiment was also designed to measure the depth to which some of the non-invasive methods could sense metal objects in otherwise dry materials. This was used to evaluate whether the presence of metal in historic walls could affect the moisture measurements obtained. Finally, a short field monitoring exercise was carried out to explore the usefulness of both non-invasive and invasive microwave moisture measurements in comparison with conventional wooden dowel surveys

Research Brief No. 9 - Racial Minority Immigrant Offspring Successes in the United States, Canada, and Australia

How well-off are second-generation immigrants in the US, Canada, and Australia? In this study, we examine the successes of immigrant offspring as compared to the respective mainstream populations (third- and higher-generation whites). We also ask whether cross-national differences in the successes of immigrants carry over to their children. We discover that the educational, occupational, and income achievements of second-generation immigrants are very similar for several ethnic groups across these countries. Each country shows common patterns of high achievement for the Chinese and South Asian second generation, less for those of other Asian origins, and still less for Afro-Caribbean blacks