The Role of Ecotourism in the Sustainable Development of Qinkou village, Yunnan, China, 2001 to 2013

This study captures evidence of the changes to Qinkou village during the period it was developed as an example of ecotourism in Yunnan province, Southwest China; a process which began in 2001. By examining the aims of the development projects and changes which happened in the village in 2001, 2006 and 2013 respectively, the paper aims to explore how traditions have been understood and deployed with regard to the built environment in Qinkou. It also investigates the shift in focus of academic research into traditional and sustainable development of rural villages over different periods. In 2001, a development project was implemented in Qinkou to demonstrate how tourism could be used as a way to modernise the village. The local government of the Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, where the village is located, worked with academics in the fields of architecture, planning and anthropology to develop the plan and to obtain funding to transform Qinkou into an ecotourism village. By 2006, the infrastructure of the village had been significantly improved. However, many originally planned activities could not be carried out due to the lack of ongoing funding support and effective management. Tourism alone was unable to bring fundamental changes in Qinkou. Instead, many villagers who worked in the cities returned with savings from the higher incomes enjoyed in the cities and also brought back changed lifestyles that contributed further major transformation. At the same time, the village remained a coherent settlement. The head of the village and management group organised many village co-operative activities. Academic research at the time, on the other hand, focused more on the examination of the cultural symbols of the local families and built environment than providing advice to help the village improve living conditions. In 2013, an application for the spectacular stepped paddy fields in the Prefecture to be listed as a World Heritage Site attracted significant funding from the local government. Qinkou was included in the development master plan; however, the development project for the village focused primarily on the preservation of the traditional forms as cultural symbols. Academic research and local policies discussed needs for sustainable development in order to comply with the requirements of the UNSCO process for World Heritage Site listing. Yet, details of how to achieve social and cultural cohesion remained missing. This paper argues that tourism development in the market-oriented economy now operating in China has worked as the catalyst for the transformation of the village and improvement of living conditions. However, social-cultural sustainable regeneration of rural settlements must create places for the needs of different groups in the local community. The academic research also needs to reinterpret the traditions that were formed and changed by the local communities in a way that is perhaps more diverse and flexible than the previous academic research defined

Semi-Supervised Sparse Coding

Sparse coding approximates the data sample as a sparse linear combination of some basic codewords and uses the sparse codes as new presentations. In this paper, we investigate learning discriminative sparse codes by sparse coding in a semi-supervised manner, where only a few training samples are labeled. By using the manifold structure spanned by the data set of both labeled and unlabeled samples and the constraints provided by the labels of the labeled samples, we learn the variable class labels for all the samples. Furthermore, to improve the discriminative ability of the learned sparse codes, we assume that the class labels could be predicted from the sparse codes directly using a linear classifier. By solving the codebook, sparse codes, class labels and classifier parameters simultaneously in a unified objective function, we develop a semi-supervised sparse coding algorithm. Experiments on two real-world pattern recognition problems demonstrate the advantage of the proposed methods over supervised sparse coding methods on partially labeled data sets

The distribution of ejected subhalos and its implication for halo assembly bias

Using a high-resolution cosmological $N$-body simulation, we identify the ejected population of subhalos, which are halos at redshift $z=0$ but were once contained in more massive `host' halos at high redshifts. The fraction of the ejected subhalos in the total halo population of the same mass ranges from 9% to 4% for halo masses from $\sim 10^{11}$ to \sim 10^{12}\msun. Most of the ejected subhalos are distributed within 4 times the virial radius of their hosts. These ejected subhalos have distinct velocity distribution around their hosts in comparison to normal halos. The number of subhalos ejected from a host of given mass increases with the assembly redshift of the host. Ejected subhalos in general reside in high-density regions, and have a much higher bias parameter than normal halos of the same mass. They also have earlier assembly times, so that they contribute to the assembly bias of dark matter halos seen in cosmological simulations. However, the assembly bias is {\it not} dominated by the ejected population, indicating that large-scale environmental effects on normal halos are the main source for the assembly bias.Comment: revised version, submitted to MNRA