Economics of Pest Control and Pollination Conservation: Perspectives from a Bioeconomic Model and a Choice Experiment

The first chapter focuses on the need to reduce pollinator exposure to harmful pesticides has led to calls to expedite theadoption of integrated pest management (IPM). We make the case that IPM is not explicitly \u27pollinator friendly\u27, but rather must be adapted to reduce impacts on pollinators and to facilitate synergies between crop pollination and pest control practices and ecosystem services. To reconcile these diverse needs, we introduce a systematic framework for \u27integrated pest and pollinator management\u27 (IPPM). We also highlight novel tools to unify monitoring and economic decision-making processes for IPPM and outline key policy actions and knowledge gaps. We propose that IPPM is needed to promote more coordinated, ecosystem-based strategies for sustainable food production, against the backdrop of increasing pesticide regulation and pollinator dependency in agriculture. The growers of pollinator-dependent crops face trade-offsbetween pest and pollinator management. This trade-off is most pronounced for highly pollinator-dependent crops such as cucurbits-a crop family including squash, pumpkins, watermelons, and cucumbers. In the second chapter, we designed a choice experiment survey asking cucurbit growers in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio about their perceptions and preferences for different sets of pollinator and pest management options which include insecticide sprays at different effectiveness levels, renting honey bee colonies, and setting aside habitat for wild pollinators. Overall, we find that cucurbit growers in our sample have a clear preference for two attributes: high pest control effectiveness and maintained managed beehives strength. We find that respondents who believe wild pollinators are in decline prefer options that protect them by reducing pesticide leaching rather than by options that provide them with habitat

Direct measurement of electric-field-induced birefringence in a polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal composite

We demonstrate a method to directly measure the electric-fieldinduced birefringence of a polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal (PS-BPLC) composite. The induced birefringence follows the extended Kerr effect well and is approximately 3X the ordinary refractive index change. The measured data are validated by comparing the simulated and measured voltage-dependent transmittance with an in-plane switching cell. The impact of these results to the material optimization of emerging BPLC displays is discussed

Social capital for rural revitalization in China: A critical evaluation on the government's new countryside programme in Chengdu

In the context of urbanisation and decline of its countryside in the 21 st century, the Chinese government has initiated a campaign namely "building a socialist new countryside" in 2006 which is now renamed as "rural revitalisation". Bringing together social capital, government intervention and other capital, we argue that rural revitalisation can be viewed as a process of the interaction between land transfer and community building leading to multiple gains of all stakeholders. Given the predomination of top-down government intervention and external capital investment in its campaign, this paper sheds new light on social capital in terms of not only mobilising community members' participation, but also reaching a balance with interests of government and other stakeholders. The importance of social capital can be illustrated from critical evaluation on governmental pilot projects in the suburban zone of Chengdu, a model municipal in China in urban-rural integration. In particular, this paper aims to address the following questions: How does social capital engage and contribute to rural restructuring for sustainable rural livelihoods? What role can social capital play in the decision making of land transfer and community building? This paper contributes to rural revitalisation and land use debates in three aspects. Firstly, we post a triangular model by bringing together government intervention, social and other capital to emphasize the interwoven nature of the relationship between land transfer and community building for better understanding of the intrinsic dynamics within the communities and their interests interfaced with external stakeholders. Secondly, with respect to the impact of land transfer on sustainable livelihoods, we propose an evaluation framework to account and compare 2 the roles of social capital against government intervention and other conditions in land transfer decision making. Thirdly, applying the above framework to sample villages, we identify three types of rural restructuring: government-led, farmer self-organising, and returned entrepreneur-oriented. Policy implications and further research direction are discussed

Bridging social capital as a resource for rural revitalisation in China?: A survey of community connection of university students with home villages

Rural China faces many challenges, including outmigration, brain drains, and the hollowing out and decline of villages. This paper offers a response by drawing attention to the phenomenon of “community connection” among migrants in urban areas who try to keep their identity and attachment to home communities in the countryside. From the perspective of bridging social capital, we argue that community connection is a potential resource for rural revitalisation. The value and conditions of using community connection are revealed through a survey conducted with over 1200 university students in China, coming from a rural family background. This paper contributes to the literature in the following aspects: First, community connection provides a foundation upon which bridging social capital can be linked with and used for the development of home community, an important condition for successful rural revitalisation. Second, the potential of community connection requests in recognising a sense of community among migrants who are attaching to, and willing to bring external resources into, home communities. Third, a sense of community varies greatly with geographic location and the social group with which migrants belong to. A greater sense of community and place attachment is more likely found amongst those coming from remote villages and rural poor, whose livelihoods are heavily dependent upon traditional agriculture. Furthermore, differences in a sense of community may lead to different approaches or attitudes to ongoing land transfer in the countryside. Policy implications, research limitations and directions of further research are discusse

Prospects of emerging polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid-crystal displays

The prospects of emerging polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid-crystal displays, or more generally, Kerr-effect-induced isotropic-to-anisotropic transition, are analyzed with special emphases on the temperature effects. As the temperature increases, both the Kerr constant, induced birefringence, and response time decrease but at different rates. The proposed physical models fit well with experimental results. Some remaining technical challenges associated with this promising display technology are discussed

Improving End-to-End Text Image Translation From the Auxiliary Text Translation Task

End-to-end text image translation (TIT), which aims at translating the source language embedded in images to the target language, has attracted intensive attention in recent research. However, data sparsity limits the performance of end-to-end text image translation. Multi-task learning is a non-trivial way to alleviate this problem via exploring knowledge from complementary related tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel text translation enhanced text image translation, which trains the end-to-end model with text translation as an auxiliary task. By sharing model parameters and multi-task training, our model is able to take full advantage of easily-available large-scale text parallel corpus. Extensive experimental results show our proposed method outperforms existing end-to-end methods, and the joint multi-task learning with both text translation and recognition tasks achieves better results, proving translation and recognition auxiliary tasks are complementary.Comment: Accepted at the 26TH International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2022

Extended Kerr effect of polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystals

Electric-field-induced birefringence of a polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal (BPLC) is investigated. In the low field region, conventional Kerr effect holds. As the electric field increases, the induced birefringence gradually saturates and deviates from Kerr effect. An exponential convergence model, called extended Kerr effect, is proposed to fit the experimental data. Good agreement between experiment and model is obtained. This extended Kerr effect will make a significant impact to the optimization of emerging BPLC display devices

Liquid Crystals Composition and Liquid Crystal Display With Patterned Electrodes

A liquid crystal composition and a display having the same are provided. The liquid crystal composition includes a first class including a highly conjugated liquid crystal compound and a second class including a highly polar compound. The second class includes a liquid crystal represented by Chemical Formula (I): R1-(CyOBO)-R2 Where R1 and R2 may be the same or different, and has an aromatic ring having at least one fluorine atom. The liquid crystal compound represented by Chemical Formula (I) is included at less than 75% by weight of the total content of the liquid crystal composition in one example. This invention relates to a liquid crystal composition and a display comprising the same. More specifically presented liquid crystal medium exhibits blue phase and is intended for polymer stabilized composites