Suchergebnisse

In the late 1980s, the Chinese government instituted massive educational reforms to promote competition between schools and between students. By the late 1990s, however, educational reforms shifted to regulating and reducing competition in primary and secondary education. Why did a rapid policy swing occur? What was the rationale for the policy change? This article examines the Chinese discourse of competition in education by presenting a textual analysis of 101 commentary articles published by Chinese educators between 1986 and 2014. It reports two different views of competition among Chinese educators, one of which strongly prevailed throughout the 28 years. It also documents historical change in the authors' perceptions of competition: in the late 1980s, as a powerful solution to the educational and social problems facing China, and, by the late 1990s, as a major educational problem itself.

The objective of this study is to investigate the potential of nighttime light data, acquired with Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Operational Linescan System (DMSP/OLS) owned by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in predicting urban daily particulate matter (PM)2.5 with an aerodynamic diameter of less than 2.5 µm average concentrations. To achieve the purpose, we firstly extracted two night light indices, the Nighttime Light Intensity Index (NLII) and the Nighttime Saturated Light Area Index (NSLAI) from DMSP/OLS images. Through Gaussian fitting of the relationship between the indices and the daily PM2.5 concentrations data released by the government, we found that the intraday nighttime light indices were all more relevant with the PM2.5 average concentrations of the next day in Shanghai. Therefore, the 56 sets of data, the light indices were collected from 3 November 2013 to 28 December 2013, the daily PM2.5 concentrations data were collected from 4 November 2013 to 29 December 2013, and these were divided into two parts. The first 40 sets were used for training the model of echo state network (ESN). The last 16 sets were used for testing. The value of R2 of predicted results was as high as 0.6318. In summary, the effectiveness of nighttime light data that used for the prediction of urban daily PM2.5 average concentrations was verified in this study.

After the dissolution of the first national airline in 2002, the Guinean government attempted to set up Guinea Airlines, but it was unsuccessful. This study aims to analyze the current state of air transport in Guinea and to conduct a diagnostic analysis for the revival of the national airline. The objective is to explore the causes of the failures of various attempts to revive the national company. The findings show that air transport has a positive spillover externality to economic long-run growth and the revival of Guinea Airlines could be a major asset to boost the country's economic growth.

A Beijing-based non-governmental organization (NGO) strives to empower rural Chinese women and migrant girls by increasing their awareness of constitutional rights and promoting their capacities to exercise their civil and political rights. This article reports the NGO leaders' perceptions of the goals, strategies, and challenges in their citizenship endeavor, and analyzes their educational activities in theoretical and cultural contexts. By reporting a tension between the two founding leaders and unpacking the different approaches they take to engaging rural women, we demonstrate how the conceptualization of human rights education in the rural Chinese context is influenced by three approaches to human rights—the Confucian emphasis of rites, the Western tradition of emphasizing law, and the "human functional capacities" approach—and how the implementation process is constrained by China's political framework, the social conditions of rural women, and the NGO leaders' vantage points.

Published version. Publisher's version available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/su11092640 ; In recent years, the environmental pollutions at the Three Gorges Dam have become an increasingly concerning issue of the Chinese government. One of the most significant environmental problems is the carbon emissions from the lockage operations at the two ship locks of the Three Gorges Dam. Currently, due to the large amount of vessels passing through the dam, there is always a long queue of vessels on both sides and the average waiting time is long. This has further lead to an increased amount of fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Therefore, it is of great importance to develop a decision-support model for a better navigation scheduling and planning of the lockage operations at the Three Gorges Dam. This paper proposed an improved mixed integer non-linear programming model for the green lock scheduling problem at the Three Gorges Dam. The model aims at minimizing the carbon emissions and the waiting time in the lockage process through scheduling the vessels in a fairer and more efficient manner. Moreover, a greedy particle swarm optimization (G-PSO) algorithm is developed to solve the complex optimization problem. The proposed mathematical model and algorithm are validated through a numerical experiment. The result shows that it may lead to a significant reduction on carbon emissions by giving a specified speed to each vessel with a pre-optimized sequence. Meanwhile, the fairness and efficiency of the lockage process may also be improved.

We explored possible patterns of peer victimization among middle school and high school students using latent profile analysis, and evaluated latent class differences in demographic characteristics and their associations with hostile attribution bias and revenge. We collected self-report
questionnaire data from 14,271 Chinese middle school (grades 6–8) and high school (grades 9–11) students across 43 schools located in five provinces and autonomous regions. The results indicated that there were three latent classes of peer victimization with similar profile characteristics
for middle school and high school students: the non/low-victimized class, the moderately victimized class, and the highly victimized class. The frequency of peer victimization was higher for students in the 8th and 10th grades than for those in the 11th grade. Boarding school students and
left-behind students were more vulnerable to peer victimization. The more serious the peer victimization suffered by adolescents, the higher was their hostile attribution bias and desire for revenge.