Ownership Reform, Foreign Competition, and Efficiency of Chinese Commercial Banks: A Non-Parametric Approach

Since China joined the WTO in 2001, the pressure for bank reforms has mounted as China ought to fully open up its financial market to foreign competition by 2006. Efficiency is key for domestic banks to survive in a liberalised environment, but it appears that the last hope for raising bank efficiency is through ownership reform. Whether ownership reform and foreign competition can solve China?s banking problem remains to be tested. This paper aims to answer this question through using a non-parametric approach to analyse the efficiency changes of 15 large commercial banks during 1998-2005. We find that ownership reform and foreign competition have forced the Chinese commercial banks to improve performance, as their total factor productivity rose by 5.6 per cent per annum. This coincides with the recent bullish Chinese stock markets led by three listed state-owned commercial banks. Despite such encouraging results, we remain cautious about the future of the Chinese banks, as the good results may have been artificially created with massive government support and the fundamentals of the banks may be still weak.data envelopment analysis (DEA), efficiency, banking, China

Impact resistance of Nomex honeycomb sandwich structures with thin fibre reinforced polymer facesheets

In order to investigate the impact resistance of the Nomex honeycomb sandwich structures skinned with thin fibre reinforced woven fabric composites, both drop-weight experimental work and meso-mechanical finite element modelling were conducted and the corresponding output was compared. Drop-weight impact tests with different impact parameters, including impact energy, impactor mass and facesheets, were carried out on Nomex honeycomb-cored sandwich structures. It was found that the impact resistance and the penetration depth of the Nomex honeycomb sandwich structures were significantly influenced by the impact energy. However, for impact energies that cause full perforation, the impact resistance is characterized with almost the same initial stiffness and peak force. The impactor mass has little influence on the impact response and the perforation force is primarily dependent on the thickness of the facesheet, which generally varies linearly with it. In the numerical simulation, a comprehensive finite element model was developed which considers all the constituent materials of the Nomex honeycomb, i.e. aramid paper, phenolic resin, and the micro-structure of the honeycomb wall. The model was validated against the corresponding experimental results and then further applied to study the effects of various impact angles on the response of the honeycomb. It was found that both the impact resistance and the perforation depth are significantly influenced by the impact angle. The former increases with the obliquity, while the latter decreases with it. The orientation of the Nomex core has little effect on the impact response, while the angle between the impact direction and the fibre direction of the facesheets has a great influence on the impact response. </jats:p

Pilot Investigation of Coal Chemical Wastewater Containing Phenol by Pervaporation Process

Coal chemical wastewater contains a large number of industrial raw materials, such as phenol, resulting in difficulty as target to be treated and the resource waste as industrial raw materials. A pilot pervaporation process is investigated to separate and recycle phenols from coal chemical wastewater to reduce the follow-up biochemical processing load. Operation parameters which affect removing and recovering efficiency are studied, such as temperature, flow rate and downstream pressure. Phenol removal efficiency could reach 50% under the conditions of 70o C, 210 L/h and 3000 Pa. The system could continuously run for 20 cycles. Furthermore, the pervaporation procedure could be enhanced when pumped with gas which made the removal efficiency up to 66%

Chromo-fluorogenic detection of aldehydes with a rhodamine based sensor featuring an intramolecular deoxylactam

A chromogenic and fluorogenic detection of aldehydes was achieved via analyte triggered opening of the deoxylactam of N-(rhodamine B)-deoxylactam-ethylenediamine (dRB-EDA). The utility of the sensor was demonstrated by fluorescent labeling of aldehyde-displaying sialoproteins on cell surfaces.NSF China[20802060, 21072162, 30830092, 30921005, 91029304, 81061160512]; Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China[2011J06004]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities[2011121020]; 973 program[2009CB522200

Fluctuating levels of reprogramming factor expression in cultured human undifferentiated keratinocytes

Although human undifferentiated keratinocytes (HUKs) can be reprogrammed to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with high efficiency and rapid kinetics by transducing reprogramming factors (RFs), the endogenous expression of reprogramming factors in cultured HUKs is not clear at different stages. In this study, keratinocytes were isolated from foreskin of adult subject (18 years old) and cultured on collagen type IV-coated culture dishes in a low-calcium, serum-free medium (Epilife, Invitrogen). In order to clarify the expression patterns of RFs and other stem cell markers in cultured human keratinocytes, total RNA was extracted using Trizol reagent, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was performed using established GenBank sequences to design primers. The subsequent PCR analysis was carried out by agarose gel electrophoresis. The expression levels of RFs and other stem cell markers in human HUKs clearly fluctuated during culturing, which supports the hypothesis that HUKs might be reprogrammed into a pluripotent state when the maximum levels of RFs expression are maintained by appropriate culture conditions.Keywords: Human undifferentiated keratinocytes, reprogramming factors, expression fluctuationAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(35), pp. 5389-539

Loss of work productivity in a warming world: differences between developed and developing countries

Comparable estimates of the heat-related work productivity loss (WPL) in different countries over the world are difficult partly due to the lack of exact measures and comparable data for different counties. In this study, we analysed 4363 responses to a global online survey on the WPL during heat waves in 2016. The participants were from both developed and developing countries, facilitating estimates of the heat-related WPL across the world for the year. The heat-related WPL for each country involved was then deduced for increases of 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 °C in the global mean surface temperature under the representative concentration pathway scenarios in climate models. The average heat-related WPL in 2016 was 6.6 days for developing countries and 3.5 days for developed countries. The estimated heat-related WPL was negatively correlated with the gross domestic product per capita. When global surface temperatures increased by 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 °C, the corresponding WPL was 9 (19), 12 (31), 22 (61) and 33 (94) days for developed (developing) countries, quantifying how developing countries are more vulnerable to climate change from a particular point of view. Moreover, the heat-related WPL was unevenly distributed among developing countries. In a 2°C-warmer world, the heat-related WPL would be more than two months in Southeast Asia, the most influenced region. The results are considerable for developing strategy of adaptation especially for developing countries

A new nonlinear vibration model of fiber-reinforced composite thin plate with amplitude-dependent property

Collaborative Technology Ken Koltun-Fromm and Miriam Pallant Handing technology off to students distances their education from the more vibrant, co-creative process of active learning in the classroom. But when students and teachers engage technology collaboratively, a sense of communal involvement and commitment energizes the learning environment and produces strong pedagogical results. For this presentation, we offer various strategies and concrete examples of our collaborative involvements with technology in the classroom: deploying iPads for active student content creation, using TEI markup software to develop close reading skills, and creating a visual syllabus with Prezi as a final student paper. Each of these projects involve close teacher/student and student/student collaborations, advancing pedagogical strategies and cultivating student interactive engagement. But each technology has its limitations, and requires creatively adapting classroom use to fit designed learning goals. When students fail to understand the value and benefit of the technological medium, they tend to disengage from and so drastically alter the learning process. Collaborative technology is an active, pedagogical process that develops a more egalitarian classroom: leveling the playing field, as it were, by fostering collaboration among verbal students and those less inclined to participate in more traditional ways. Students learn from and with each other in a communal, engaged learning environment

Learning Structure-Guided Diffusion Model for 2D Human Pose Estimation

One of the mainstream schemes for 2D human pose estimation (HPE) is learning keypoints heatmaps by a neural network. Existing methods typically improve the quality of heatmaps by customized architectures, such as high-resolution representation and vision Transformers. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DiffusionPose}, a new scheme that formulates 2D HPE as a keypoints heatmaps generation problem from noised heatmaps. During training, the keypoints are diffused to random distribution by adding noises and the diffusion model learns to recover ground-truth heatmaps from noised heatmaps with respect to conditions constructed by image feature. During inference, the diffusion model generates heatmaps from initialized heatmaps in a progressive denoising way. Moreover, we further explore improving the performance of DiffusionPose with conditions from human structural information. Extensive experiments show the prowess of our DiffusionPose, with improvements of 1.6, 1.2, and 1.2 mAP on widely-used COCO, CrowdPose, and AI Challenge datasets, respectively