Not looking for trouble: Understanding large-scale Chinese overseas investment by sector and ownership

This paper contributes to the systematic understanding of Chinese investment abroad, and particularly the role of state-owned enterprise (SOE) investors, in two ways. Firstly, we identify major problems in the literature stemming from wide-spread data deficiencies in data. Specifically, the reliability of previous research results has been limited by data sets that do not identify the final destination for Chinese investment, nor suitably differentiate between different ownership types. By augmenting the project-level data from the China Global Investment Tracker with detailed ownership information for each firm, this study reveals that large-scale investment in natural resource investment, which surged after 2008, is dominated by state-owned enterprises controlled by China's central government. But it also reveals a newer wave of non-resource investment after 2009 in which non-state enterprise plays the leading role. Further, we investigate the destination selection of large-scale Chinese investment to 192 countries from 2005 to 2015 – to test the extent to which SOEs might be attracted to poorer institutional host environments. We find that Chinese SOE investment in resources, regardless of ownership type is attracted to countries with political stability, but is negatively related to the rule of law measure. For non-resource investment, we find no strong institutional preferences. We therefore suggest that previous findings of different investment motivations between state- and non-state investors likely reflects the dominance of state-ownership in resource sectors, rather than different investment behaviour based on ownership

Intra subject 3D/3D Kidney Registration using Local Mutual Information Maximization

International audienceOne of the goal of the Nephron-Sparing Surgery properative planning is to delineate as exactly as possible the renal carcinoma and to specify its relations to the renal arterial, venous and collecting system anatomies. The classical preoperative imaging system is the Spiral CT Urography, which gives sucessive 3D acquisitions of complementary information The integration of this information within the a patient spacific anatomical referential can be achieved by intra-patient registration techniques. A local MI maximization registration method is proposed in this paper. The kidneys are extracted from the abdomen volumes and then the registration between the extracted kidneys is implemented by maximizing the MI between them. The experimental results demonstrates that this method is effective

A fast algorithm for the computation of 2-D forward and inverse MDCT

International audienceA fast algorithm for computing the two-dimensional (2-D) forward and inverse modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT and IMDCT) is proposed. The algorithm converts the 2-D MDCT and IMDCT with block size M N into four 2-D discrete cosine transforms (DCTs) with block size ðM=4Þ ðN=4Þ. It is based on an algorithm recently presented by Cho et al. [An optimized algorithm for computing the modified discrete cosine transform and its inverse transform, in: Proceedings of the IEEE TENCON, vol. A, 21–24 November 2004, pp. 626–628] for the efficient calculation of onedimensional MDCT and IMDCT. Comparison of the computational complexity with the traditional row–column method shows that the proposed algorithm reduces significantly the number of arithmetic operations

Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Water Table and Vegetation Status of a Deserted Area

Understanding groundwater-vegetation interactions is crucial for sustaining fragile environments of desert areas such as the Horqin Sandy Land (HSL) in northern China. This study examined spatio-temporal variations in the water table and the associated vegetation status of a 9.71 km2 area that contains meadowland, sandy dunes, and intermediate transitional zones. The depth of the water table and hydrometeorologic parameters were monitored and Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data were utilized to assess the vegetation cover. Spatio-temporal variations over the six-year study period were examined and descriptive groundwater-vegetation associations developed by overlaying a water table depth map onto a vegetation index map derived from MODIS. The results indicate that the water table depends on the local topography, localized geological settings, and human activities such as reclamation, with fluctuations occurring at annual and monthly scales as a function of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. Locations where the water table is closer to the surface tend to have more dense and productive vegetation. The water table depth is more closely associated with vegetative density in meadowlands than in transitional zones, and only poorly associated with vegetation in sandy dunes

A review on biological adaptation: with applications in engineering science

Abstract Biological adaptation refers to that organisms change themselves at morphological, physiological, behavioral and molecular level to better survive in a changing environment. It includes phenotype adaptation and molecular adaptation. Biological adaptation is a driving force of evolution. Biological adaptation was described from Darwinian theory of evolution to the theory of molecular evolution in present paper. Adaptive control and adaptive filtering were briefly described also

Blood vessel enhancement via multi-dictionary and sparse coding: Application to retinal vessel enhancing

International audienceBlood vessel images can provide considerable information of many diseases, which are widely used by ophthalmologists for disease diagnosis and surgical planning. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the blood Vessel Enhancement via Multi-dictionary and Sparse Coding (VE-MSC). In the proposed method, two dictionaries are utilized to gain the vascular structures and details, including the Representation Dictionary (RD) generated from the original vascular images and the Enhancement Dictionary (ED) extracted from the corresponding label images. The sparse coding technology is utilized to represent the original target vessel image with RD. After that, the enhanced target vessel image can be reconstructed using the obtained sparse coefficients and ED. The proposed method has been evaluated for the retinal vessel enhancement on the DRIVE and STARE databases. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can not only effectively improve the image contrast but also enhance the retinal vascular structures and details