Determinants of local responsiveness of FMNCS in mainland China

Recent regulations, associated with China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), specifically Decree 113 and Decree 114, have largely changed the situation for foreign multinational construction companies (FMNCs) operating in mainland China. A field investigation has identified that local responsiveness is critical for FMNCs to survive and develop in the complicated and uncertain Chinese construction industry. Government policy, China-specific construction industrial factors and increasing competition intensity imposed by local competitors are recognized as the major determinants driving local responsiveness of FMNCs. This study has also examined that localisation of internal resources, establishment of local networks and cooperation or strategic alliances with local contractors and design institutes are the key local adaptation strategies for FMNCs operating in mainland China

No periodicity revealed for an "eclipsing" ultraluminous supersoft X-ray source in M81

Luminous supersoft X-ray sources found in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds are likely white dwarfs that steadily or cyclically burn accreted matter on their surface, which are promising type Ia supernova progenitors. Observations of distant galaxies with Chandra and XMM-Newton have revealed supersoft sources that are generally hotter and more luminous, including some ultraluminous supersoft sources (ULSs) that are possibly intermediate mass black holes of a few thousand solar masses. In this paper we report our X-ray spectral and timing analysis for M81-ULS1, an ultraluminous supersoft source in the nearby spiral galaxy M81. M81-ULS1 has been persistently supersoft in 17 Chandra ACIS observations spanning six years, and its spectrum can be described by either a $kT_{bb}\approx70$ eV blackbody for a $\sim1.2M_\odot$ white dwarf, or a $kT_{in} \approx 80$ eV multicolor accretion disk for a $\gtrsim10^3M_\odot$ intermediate mass black hole. In two observations, the light curves exhibited dramatic flux drop/rise on time scales of $10^3$ seconds, reminiscent of eclipse ingress/egress in eclipsing X-ray binaries. However, the exhaustive search for periodicity in the reasonable range of 50 ksec to 50 days failed to reveal an orbital period. The failure to reveal any periodicity is consistent with the long period ($\ge30$ yrs) predicted for this system given the optical identification of the secondary with an asymptotic giant star. Also, the eclipse-like dramatic flux changes in hours are hard to explain under the white dwarf model, but can in principle be explained by disk temperature changes induced by accretion rate variations under the intermediate mass black hole model.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, to appear in ApJ

The Implications of Binding Farm Program Payment Limits Associated with Income Means Testing

Replaced with revised version of poster 07/20/11.Agricultural and Food Policy,