Toward a harmonious countryside: rural development survey results of the People’s Republic of China

The construction of a New Socialist Countryside (NSC) is among the highlights in the People's Republic of China’s (PRC) 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010). The NSC aims to accelerate the development and modernization of the agricultural and rural economy in order to close the widening rural–urban income gap. In an effort to better understand the priorities of and binding constraints to the PRC's rural development, and to aid the development of the NSC, two surveys were undertaken by the Asian Development Bank in six rural areas—Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shaanxi, and Shangdong. The 2007 survey collected village and household information on the first year of the NSC program, and the 2010 survey captured the possible changes after a few years of the program's implementation. A special feature of these surveys is that they allow for comparison of villagers' and village cadres' views on the priorities of the PRC's rural development. This paper summarizes the findings emerging from these surveys, particularly with respect to the challenges and priority areas of the PRC's rural development in 2007 and 2010. Among the key findings are (i) income growth remains the highest priority in the PRC’s rural development agenda; and (ii) lack of capital and lack of necessary job skills are the most binding constraints for growth in agricultural income and nonagricultural income, respectively.China; new socialist countryside; rural development; village survey

Semi-hierarchical based motion estimation algorithm for the dirac video encoder

Having fast and efficient motion estimation is crucial in today’s advance video compression technique since it determines the compression efficiency and the complexity of a video encoder. In this paper, a method which we call semi-hierarchical motion estimation is proposed for the Dirac video encoder. By considering the fully hierarchical motion estimation only for a certain type of inter frame encoding, complexity of the motion estimation can be greatly reduced while maintaining the desirable accuracy. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm gives two to three times reduction in terms of the number of SAD calculation compared with existing motion estimation algorithm of Dirac for the same motion estimation accuracy, compression efficiency and PSNR performance. Moreover, depending upon the complexity of the test sequence, the proposed algorithm has the ability to increase or decrease the search range in order to maintain the accuracy of the motion estimation to a certain level

Software development for flexible pavement thickness design based on aastho and road note 31

Nowadays, road and surface failure has become a critical issue in our country on the flexible pavement which reflects to a bad quality and error during design stage. The thickness design of flexible pavement has become crucial element in the overall efficiency of highway structure system to give a good performance and high serviceability under a traffic loading during the expected design period. The objectives of this study are to develop flexible pavement thickness design software for AASHTO and Road Note 31 by using Visual Basic 6.0. The result comparison between both methods was carried out shown in different of thickness and different percentage of cost evaluations between AASHTO and Road Note 31. This computer software could produce the design thickness of each layer for flexible pavement structure in graphical layout for both design methods. Therefore, the users can easily analyze and compared the result obtained to select the best design alternative between AASHTO and Road Note 31 based on cost and thickness different. The result analysis obtained from this computer software also can be saved and view in a report file to be printed or keep as soft copy for reference in the future. Besides, the result analysis obtained by this computer software is also been compared with the manual calculation (theory) and shown that the computer software has the same and exact result with the manual calculation (theory). Thus, the performance of this computer software was successful tested and validated. Therefore, computer software of flexible pavement thickness design is a very useful tool in highway engineering especially to design the thickness of flexible pavement. By applying the computer program, the design stage can be made in a very short time period of design process and help to minimize the error factor compare to manual calculation or conventional method. Computer software also can give a high accuracy and quality of result for pavement thickness design

Enabling error-resilient internet broadcasting using motion compensated spatial partitioning and packet FEC for the dirac video codec

Video transmission over the wireless or wired network require protection from channel errors since compressed video bitstreams are very sensitive to transmission errors because of the use of predictive coding and variable length coding. In this paper, a simple, low complexity and patent free error-resilient coding is proposed. It is based upon the idea of using spatial partitioning on the motion compensated residual frame without employing the transform coefficient coding. The proposed scheme is intended for open source Dirac video codec in order to enable the codec to be used for Internet broadcasting. By partitioning the wavelet transform coefficients of the motion compensated residual frame into groups and independently processing each group using arithmetic coding and Forward Error Correction (FEC), robustness to transmission errors over the packet erasure wired network could be achieved. Using the Rate Compatibles Punctured Code (RCPC) and Turbo Code (TC) as the FEC, the proposed technique provides gracefully decreasing perceptual quality over packet loss rates up to 30%. The PSNR performance is much better when compared with the conventional data partitioning only methods. Simulation results show that the use of multiple partitioning of wavelet coefficient in Dirac can achieve up to 8 dB PSNR gain over its existing un-partitioned method

Error-resilient performance of Dirac video codec over packet-erasure channel

Video transmission over the wireless or wired network requires error-resilient mechanism since compressed video bitstreams are sensitive to transmission errors because of the use of predictive coding and variable length coding. This paper investigates the performance of a simple and low complexity error-resilient coding scheme which combines source and channel coding to protect compressed bitstream of wavelet-based Dirac video codec in the packet-erasure channel. By partitioning the wavelet transform coefficients of the motion-compensated residual frame into groups and independently processing each group using arithmetic and Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding, Dirac could achieves the robustness to transmission errors by giving the video quality which is gracefully decreasing over a range of packet loss rates up to 30% when compared with conventional FEC only methods. Simulation results also show that the proposed scheme using multiple partitions can achieve up to 10 dB PSNR gain over its existing un-partitioned format. This paper also investigates the error-resilient performance of the proposed scheme in comparison with H.264 over packet-erasure channel

Tourism for pro-poor and sustainable growth: economic analysis of tourism projects

Despite the increasing importance of tourism in economic development and the rise of “pro-poor” tourism development strategies, properly designing and implementing tourism projects remain generally a difficult process. There are both theoretical and practical challenges in justifying public sector investments in tourism and properly measuring the projects’ benefits and sustainability. There is a need to come up with an analytical framework that would address these challenges and help evaluate a tourism project’s economic viability. This technical note introduces a simple framework that could underpin the systematic economic analysis of tourism projects.tourism; economic development; pro-poor growth; economic analysis

Miki: a wiki for synchronous modeling of software requirements

Eliciting a high quality requirements model that can be traced down to implementations is a challenge. Keeping models updated for evolving software systems is a further challenge. Formal modelling methods are one approach - but one that is too rigid and costly for many small software engineering companies [1]. We propose a light-weight alternative, using a wiki as the synchronous bridge between requirements capture and more formal modeling features of the IDE such as Eclipse

A behavioural model of the adoption and use of new telecommunications media: the effects of communication scenarios and media product/service attributes

Recent years have seen the dramatic growth of new modes of communication. Above and beyond using land line and mobile phone for voice real-time communication, people spend increasing amounts of time receiving and sending messages through social networks (e.g. Myspace or Facebook) and also through real-time communication software (e.g. Skype or MSN). As indicated by the significant decline on the amount of call volumes of land line and mobile phone during the period from 2000 to 2006 in UK and in Taiwan, we conjecture that consumers are transferring to these new forms of communication in order to satisfy their communication needs, diminishing the demand for established channels. The purpose of this research is to develop a behavioural model to analyse the perceived value and weight of the specific media attributes that drive people to adopt or use these new communication channels. Seven telecommunications media available in 2010 have been categorised in this research included land-line, mobile phone, short message service (SMS), E-mail, Internet telephony, instant messaging and social networking. Various media product/service attributes such as synchronicity, multi-tasking, price, quality, mobility, privacy and video which might affect the media choice of consumers were first identified. Importantly, this research has designed six types of communication scenarios in the online survey with 894 valid responses to clarify the effects of different communication aims, distinguish consumers' intended behaviours toward these telecommunications media. --Multi-attribute choice model,Telecommunications media,Communication scenario,New product adoption,Substitution effect,ICT forecasting

Environmental Kuznets Curves in the People’s Republic of China: turning points and regional differences

This paper examines the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability in the People’s Republic of China by empirically estimating environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) models using provincial-level panel data from 1985 to 2005. The results show that there exists an inverted-U shaped relationship as hypothesized by the EKC model between per capita income and per capita emissions (or discharges) in the cases of waste gas from fuel burning and waste water, with a turning point at per capita gross domestic product of $12,903 and$3,226, respectively, in 2005 purchasing power parity terms. This relationship does not hold in the case of waste gas from production or solid waste. The estimation results from the model allowing region-specific slope coefficients show that the EKCs of the more developed coastal region have a flatter rising portion with turning points occurring at a higher income level than those of the less developed central and western regions. The paper argues that this may reflect technology diffusion and leapfrogging and institution imitation across regions at different stages of development. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.environmental kuznets curve; EKC; China; economic growth; environmental sustainability

Snap Forensics: A Tradeoff between Ephemeral Intelligence and Persistent Evidence Collection

Digital evidence needs to be made persistent so that it can be used later. For citizen forensics, sometimes intelligence cannot or should not be made persistent forever. In this position paper, we propose a form of snap forensics by defining an elastic duration of evidence/intelligence validity. Explicitly declaring such a duration could unify the treatment of both ephemeral intelligence and persistent evidence towards more flexible storage to satisfy privacy requirements