A Study on Income-Distribution Regulatory Effect of Financial Support in Agriculture

This thesis carries out a quantitative inspection about marginal scale effect and structural effect that both size and structure of expenditures for financial support in agriculture have on income gap between urban and rural residents. According to analyses, it is found that both absolute amount and relative amount of size of financial support in agriculture have widening effect on income gap between urban and rural residents; agricultural infrastructure, three items of agricultural science and rural relief have gap-reducing effect; support for agricultural production and operating expenses of departments do not have significant effect, which may have widening effect in combination with reality factors; and unreasonable structure is a key factor leading to the situation that regulatory effect of financial support in agriculture on unfair income distribution is minor. Thus, to improve income-distribution regulatory effect of financial support in agriculture, it is essential to increase scale of expenditures, form a long-term mechanism, enhance degree of capital integration, optimize expenditure structure and perfect mechanisms of governmental performance examination

Information and Communication Technologies: A Look at Policy in Higher Education for Sustainable Development

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be most strong enabler in efforts to bring positive and sustainable development in all the countries of the world. Evidence from large studies and meta-analysis suggests that use of ICTs, in particular computer technologies, is correlated to positive academic outcomes, including higher test scores, better attitudes towards studies, and better understanding of concepts and ideas. For better performance in traditional measures of academic achievements, a secondary benefit of ICTs in higher education is to introduce new generations with the technologies that have become important components of the modern world. ICTs provide new ideas to students and teachers with which way to learn and teach for development. We have to highlight the needs for policy that gives a vision and frame work for using ICTs within the higher education system. This paper aims to present the current state of how ICTs is being used in higher education and how this policy is beneficial for development and how it can better benefit current and future users. Keywords: Information and Communication Technology Policy, Development, Quality Improvement

Attentive Aspect Modeling for Review-aware Recommendation

In recent years, many studies extract aspects from user reviews and integrate them with ratings for improving the recommendation performance. The common aspects mentioned in a user's reviews and a product's reviews indicate indirect connections between the user and product. However, these aspect-based methods suffer from two problems. First, the common aspects are usually very sparse, which is caused by the sparsity of user-product interactions and the diversity of individual users' vocabularies. Second, a user's interests on aspects could be different with respect to different products, which are usually assumed to be static in existing methods. In this paper, we propose an Attentive Aspect-based Recommendation Model (AARM) to tackle these challenges. For the first problem, to enrich the aspect connections between user and product, besides common aspects, AARM also models the interactions between synonymous and similar aspects. For the second problem, a neural attention network which simultaneously considers user, product and aspect information is constructed to capture a user's attention towards aspects when examining different products. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that AARM can effectively alleviate the two aforementioned problems and significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art recommendation methods on top-N recommendation task.Comment: Camera-ready manuscript for TOI

Matrix-matched iron-oxide laser ablation ICP-MS U–Pb geochronology using mixed solution standards

U–Pb dating of the common iron-oxide hematite (α-Fe2O3), using laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass-spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), provides unparalleled insight into the timing and processes of mineral deposit formation. Until now, the full potential of this method has been negatively impacted by the lack of suitable matrix-matched standards. To achieve matrix-matching, we report an approach in which a U–Pb solution and ablated material from 99.99% synthetic hematite are simultaneously mixed in a nebulizer chamber and introduced to the ICP-MS. The standard solution contains fixed U- and Pb-isotope ratios, calibrated independently, and aspiration of the isotopically homogeneous solution negates the need for a matrix-matched, isotopically homogenous natural iron-oxide standard. An additional advantage of using the solution is that the individual U–Pb concentrations and isotope ratios can be adjusted to approximate that in the unknown, making the method efficient for dating hematite containing low (~10 ppm) to high (>1 wt %) U concentrations. The above-mentioned advantage to this solution method results in reliable datasets, with arguably-better accuracy in measuring U–Pb ratios than using GJ-1 Zircon as the primary standard, which cannot be employed for such low U concentrations. Statistical overlaps between 207Pb/206Pb weighted average ages (using GJ-1 Zircon) and U–Pb upper intercept ages (using the U–Pb mixed solution method) of two samples from iron-oxide copper-gold (IOCG) deposits in South Australia demonstrate that, although fractionation associated with a non-matrix matched standard does occur when using GJ-1 Zircon as the primary standard, it does not impact the 207Pb/206Pb or upper intercept age. Thus, GJ-1 Zircon can be considered reliable for dating hematite using LA-ICP-MS. Downhole fractionation of 206Pb/238U is observed to occur in spot analyses of hematite. The use of rasters in future studies will hopefully minimize this problem, allowing for matrix-matched data. Using the mixed-solution method in this study, we have validated a published hematite Pb–Pb age for Olympic Dam, and provide a new age (1604 ± 11 Ma) for a second deposit in the same province. These ages are further evidence that the IOCG mineralizing event is tied to large igneous province (LIP) magmatism in the region at ~1.6 Ga