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The one-child policy in China brought about a fast decline in fertility levels and an increasingly skewed sex ratio at birth in China. The deep-seated tradition of son preference has been regarded as the main cause. However, news and recent research have pointed out that having daughters appears more popular among young people in urban areas. The analysis reported in this paper was based on empirical evidence drawn from 47 in-depth interviews. Findings highlighted that regarding the preference of sex at birth, a relatively balanced composition is sought in most cases. Other than the absolute dominance of one son and one daughter together, a preference for having a son remains. Although having two daughters has gained greater popularity among young couples, this turns out to be a compromise to some extent. Daughter preference cannot be regarded as a major trend. In practice, a stronger preference for a certain sex increases the fertility rate as couples attempt to fulfil their preferences, whereas no preference signals the least likelihood to realise fertility intentions. In this sense, the desire to have two children with at least one son may help boost fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding a means to extract water body information efficiently and accurately from high-resolution remote sensing images has been an important research direction in the field of water body extraction in recent years. However, shadows from buildings and other obstacles interfere with the accuracy of water body extraction. To address this problem, this paper proposes a neural network method incorporating an attention mechanism for water body extraction. This paper is based on the U-Net convolutional neural network and adds the squeeze-and-excitation module of SENet, an attention mechanism, to the downsampling process of the U-Net network. The module weights the feature maps so that the network focuses more on the features of the water body information and thus reduces attention to the shadow features from buildings and other features, thus improving the accuracy of image segmentation. The dropout and batch normalization layers are also added to improve the generalization ability and stability of the model. In this paper, a water extraction network SE-CU-Net model is presented to overcome the shadowing effect from buildings and other features. Using GF-2 images of Jiangsu province as the data source, the recognition results of this paper are compared with Dense-Net, Res-Net, Seg-Net, U-net, SVM, and RF. Through the comparison experiments, the model of this paper can not only better overcome the influence of shadows from buildings and other features, but it also has a stronger recognition ability and recognition effect. The average ASCR, Precision, mIoU, OA, F1-Score and kappa coefficients in the three tested areas reached 98.27%, 97.17%, 89.33%, 98.2%, 89.3% and 0.883, respectively, with significantly higher accuracy than the other six classical methods, verifying the effectiveness of the model in overcoming the influence of shadows from buildings and other features in water body extraction research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This cross-sectional study looks into how students' perceived teacher support is linked to achievement emotions in mathematics via academic control and value. The data was gathered from 602 secondary students (13-16-year-olds) in 16 mathematics classrooms from three public schools in Jiangsu province, China. Participants were asked to respond to the paper-pencil questionnaire assessing students' perceived teacher support, cognitive appraisals, and achievement emotions in mathematics. Findings showed that cognitive appraisals played complete mediation roles in teacher support and achievement emotions. Intrinsic value and mathematics self-concept were shown to serve a positive role in teacher support and achievement emotions, whereas extrinsic value was found to play a negative one. Besides, teacher support showed the greatest indirect effect on achievement emotions through mathematics self-concept. Lastly, findings indicated the great relevance of teacher support to students' anger, boredom, enjoyment and relaxation in mathematics classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The routine maintenance and rehabilitation of road pavement is vital to keep up with the service level and bearing capacity. However, the current problem is that, with the continuous increase of the scale of maintenance data, the traditional decision-making cannot satisfy the requirements in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The objectives of this paper were to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the maintenance decisions, overcome the decision error caused by insufficient human experience, and develop the mapping process for decision plans. This paper presented a decision-making method for asphalt pavement maintenance using improved weight random forest algorithm (IWRF) based on the correlation analysis (CA) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Firstly, appropriate features were selected through CA of road detection data, and then decision trees were constructed based on Bootstrapping. Finally, qualified decision trees were chosen and weighted by AHP to form a random forest. To examine the feasibility, the algorithm was applied in a maintenance decision of the 80 km highway in Jiangsu province. The results showed that IWRF had a decision-making accuracy of up to 90%. Comparing with the traditional random forest algorithm, the IWRF algorithm had a 4.35% higher accuracy and saved 75% computation time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the sustainability goals, how to promote the integration of port resources and reduce the ecological risks is important for the water transportation industry. Port cities in Jiangsu Province, a major coastal area in China, face a huge risk of resource waste. This paper aims to take Jiangsu as an example, understand the evolution of the spatial structure and the evolution of the water transportation industry, and explore the factors affecting development from the perspective of low-carbon development. Based on ArcGIS and multi-source data, methods such as Standard Deviation Ellipse (SDE) were used to understand the evolution, and the factors influencing the evolution at different stages were explored based on the green total factors such as industrial pollutions. It shows that the scale of the water transportation is expanding, but the industrial upgrading is not realized and has multiple agglomeration cores. The evolution was initially more affected by non-interventional factors such as geographical environment, while later the influence weakened significantly. The disordered development of water transportation industry has been worsening the current inefficient industrial structure and environmental risks. Further integration of industrial structure is needed, and strong administrative means are needed to help tap the unrealized spatial potential of resource integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation based on FLUENT software was performed to analyze the flow and heat transfer of the accident pipeline network in the water hammer burst accident of a thermal power plant in Jiangsu Province, China. Furthermore, the CFD simulation is also performed on the modified pipeline network to verify the effect of pipe network modification. The simulation results from the original accident pipeline show that in the accident pipeline, the steam velocity can reach up to 50 m/s due to the aggregation of liquid water. And when the high-velocity steam strikes the pipe elbow, it will lead to a sharp pressure change and cause the burst accident finally. Then it can be concluded that in the modified pipeline network, the distribution of temperature, pressure, and velocity at the pipe burst place is more uniform and reasonable. In addition, the simulation is also used to analyze the variable working conditions, which ensures that the new design of the pipe network can be used in more complex conditions. The paper is expected to guide the design of other similar pipelines and ensure the safe production and operation of thermal power plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of high-quality asphalt pavement inspection data is a key factor for road maintenance and management throughout the pavement's life cycle. This paper establishes a data cleaning framework that is based on data mining and deep learning to eliminate abnormal data points and interpolate missing points to improve the accuracy of the original road inspection dataset. The first process in the proposed framework is to analyse the influential factors that are used to evaluate data quality and calculate the abnormality of the data through the confidence interval used in Gaussian fitting. Then, a deep artificial neural network is established to learn the mapping between the inspection data and data abnormality. The abnormal points are removed according to their abnormality level. Next, a second deep artificial neural network predicts the missing point values. Finally, by defining the overall cleanliness index of the dataset as the optimisation target, the steps are repeated until the cleanliness threshold is met. In this study, the proposed framework was applied to rut depth data cleaning for a highway maintenance project in Jiangsu Province, China. The cleanliness of the rut depth data increased by 6–95.75% after one cleaning cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, China's air quality problem is very serious. Among them, carbon dioxide emissions have been high, which has caused a series of ecological and environmental problems. In order to deeply study the relevant problems, this paper selects the information priority damping gray model to study and predict the carbon emissions of thirty-one provinces and municipalities in China. The model can give priority to new information and adjust the prediction trend, the accuracy of the model is verified by several cases. Through the data collection and data analysis of relevant provinces and cities, it is concluded that a total of twenty-one provinces and municipalities can reach the carbon peak in 2030, of which the carbon dioxide emission of Beijing is expected to drop to 51.3774 million tons by 2030. Ten provinces will not be able to reach the carbon peak by 2030. Among them, by 2030 the carbon dioxide emission of Jiangsu Province is expected to increase to 84.4668 million tons, but the growth rate is declining. The research results can be used as a reference for relevant departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship plays an important role in developing the agricultural sector and increasing opportunities for farmers to promote sustainable livelihoods. The study aims to enhance discussion and gain an in-depth understanding of farm entrepreneurship in the context of sustainability in China. We conducted a case study of five farmers practicing organic farming through semi-structured face-to-face interviews. The analysis shows that organic farms enhance sustainability through many economic, social and environmental contributions. Additionally, emerging societal awareness of healthy foods and the increasing demand for organic products are among the most important opportunities contributing to the growth of organic farming. Despite this, farm entrepreneurship among organic farms faces many challenges, such as land use rights, lack of business networks and government subsidies. However, the government is the main player in promoting sustainability practices among entrepreneurs and society through agricultural policy development and promotion of organic products. We believe that this paper is the first attempt to study organic farm entrepreneurship in China from an entrepreneurs' viewpoint. The conclusions could have potential implications and guidelines for promoting organic agriculture policies in national and international contexts. The conclusions have significant implications and potential guidelines for promoting sustainability in national and international contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers' potential reactions toward genetically modified (GM) foods affect their commercial feasibility and determine the decisions of economic agents. Inconsistent information on GM foods has created a sense of uncertainty in Chinese consumers' mind. This paper studies how the information about risks and benefits of GM foods from major sources influences Chinese consumer intention to purchase GM soybean oil. This analysis uses data from a survey of 880 residents randomly sampled from 13 cities in Jiangsu province. Using a multinomial logit model, we analyze the effects of information consistency and source credibility. The results show because of new information about 17.36% of consumers increase their intention to purchase GM soybean oil, and 15.10% of consumers decrease purchase intention. Compared to consistent information, inconsistent information can maximize change of purchase intention. The attitude change is greatest when there is a moderate difference between the new information and the initial consumer attitude. Furthermore, trust in biotechnology research institutes, government departments about GM, and GM experts are easier to promote consumers to change their intention to purchase GM soybean oil in a positive direction. Finally, we discuss implications for agencies as to strengthening the regulation and supervision of information sources, and including public-involved policies. Abbreviations: GM, Genetically modified; GMOs, Genetically modified organisms; AGGMO, Center of Agriculture's Genetically Modified Organisms' safety management and policy research organization at Nanjing Agricultural University; MARA, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs; ¥1 (RMB)≈$6.8 (USD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving sustainable development through China's national territory spatial planning requires comprehensive knowledge of all land characteristics. This paper introduces a land-type map of Jiangsu province (104 km2) in eastern China to provide such knowledge. The land-type map focuses on both physical geographic components (e.g. climate types, landforms, and soil types) and human-related components (e.g. land-use types and intensities). These components were represented by parameter layers and integrated with the help of the Geographic Information System (GIS) overlay function. A hierarchical land-type classification system was generated to provide land mapping units that represented certain degrees of geographic homogeneity and land-use potential. Trading off the relationship between resource protection and resource utilization, the space of Jiangsu was divided into seven land-use zones with different land-use policies based on the land-type map. The land-type map can thus be taken into consideration for land planning and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of cross-regional environmental spillover effects can reveal the spatial information of pollution, and helps to promote regional environmental governance under inter-government cooperation. Based on the non-linear granger causality test and social network analysis, we constructed and analyzed the network of cross-regional environmental spillover effects and the driving factors of the network structure. The results showed that Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Jiangsu, and Shandong have the most significant spatial spillover effects of environmental pollution to other provinces. GDP, foreign direct investment (FDI), wage levels (WL) and infrastructure levels (IFL) could explain 61.7% of the variance in the cross-regional environmental effects. Among them, GDP was the most powerful explanation for the network, and FDI, WL, and IFL were the main factors that affect the network's relationship. Finally, based on the above empirical results, this paper put forward the policy recommendations of cross-regional environmental governance. Therefore, in the development of regional economic growth targets, we should take full account of the constraints of regional ecological environment carrying capacity, to further improve the regional industrial production methods to promote the balanced development of cross-regional industries. Implications: As a relationship, the environmental spillover effect links the environmental emissions from different regions into a system, which is represented by the Network of Environmental Spillover Effects (NESE). The change of its structure will have an impact on the status, function and role of each region in the network structure, thus affecting the environmental changes in the region. Therefore, the study of the NESE is helpful to promote cross-regional environmental collaborative governance and reduce environmental pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has experienced a rapid integration into Global Value Chains and a decade long appreciation of its exchange rate. However, these trends have been analysed largely in isolation from each other. In this paper, we explore the linkages between the two based on interviews with a sample of firms in Jiangsu Province. We show (1) how the distribution of the costs and benefits of exchange rate appreciation depends on the power hierarchies between firms in GVCs; (2) how exchange rate changes are important drivers of upgrading and even downgrading in GVCs; and (3) that the firm heterogeneity evident in GVCs provides additional insights into the politics of exchange rate determination in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question, "does market work improve women's household status in rural China?" using survey data of men and women working in Township and Village Enterprises in rural Jiangsu and Shandong. This paper measures household status by domestic labor time, responsibility for domestic tasks, and household decision-making control. It finds that women have lower household status than men, using these three indicators. Based upon regression results, this paper concludes that for women market wages reduce domestic work time and responsibility for domestic tasks but market hours do not. The nature of bargaining warrants further research since the evidence that financial resources contribute to increased household decision-making control is mixed. Should employment opportunities for women increase with China's membership in the WTO, improvements in women's household status will depend upon their wages and the gender wage gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper’s main purpose is to estimate the dietary exposure to lead for the inhabitants of Jiangsu province, China. Lead concentration data were obtained from the national food contamination monitoring programme during 2007–10. Food samples (n = 2077) were collected from 23 food categories in Jiangsu province. Consumption data were derived from Chinese national nutrition and health survey in 2002, which included 3938 inhabitants from 1451 households in Jiangsu province. Concentration data were combined with consumption data to estimate the dietary intake for the inhabitants of 2–6, 7–17 and 18–80 years, respectively. The β-binomial–normal (BBN) model was used to estimate the long-term intake for the population in Jiangsu province. The distribution of individual margin of exposure (IMoE) was introduced to assess the health effect. Uncertainty of IMoE was quantified by Monte Carlo and bootstrap methods. The mean levels of dietary exposure to lead were estimated at 3.019 µg kg−1bw day−1for children aged 2–6 years, 2.104 µg kg−1bw day−1for teenagers aged 7–17 years, and 1.601 µg kg−1bw day−1for adults aged 18–80 years. The mean intakes for the urban and rural populations were 1.494 and 1.822 µg kg−1bw day−1, respectively. From the 25th to 99.9th percentiles, IMoE was 0.125–2.057 for 2–6 years and 0.473–7.998 for 18–80 years, respectively. The distribution of IMoE could indicate a public health concern on lead for the Chinese population in Jiangsu. Control measures should be taken to reduce lead exposure in Jiangsu province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coastal wetland vegetation classification with remotely sensed data has attracted increased attention but remains a challenge. This paper explored a hybrid approach on a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image for classifying coastal wetland vegetation classes. Linear spectral mixture analysis was used to unmix the TM image into four fraction images, which were used for classifying major land covers with a thresholding technique. The spectral signatures of each land cover were extracted separately and then classified into clusters with the unsupervised classification method. Expert rules were finally used to modify the classified image. This research indicates that the hybrid approach employing sub-pixel information, an analyst's knowledge and characteristics of coastal wetland vegetation distribution shows promise in successfully distinguishing coastal vegetation classes, which are difficult to separate with a maximum likelihood classifier (MLC). The hybrid method provides significantly better classification results than MLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a site-based, ecological asset-based, holistic environmental flows assessment approach, and demonstrates its application to reaches of the Jiaojiang (Jiao River) Basin, Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, the People's Republic of China. The methodology broadly combines information on ecological and other assets associated with the river system (in this case, fish, vegetation, water quality and geomorphology) together with information that links these assets to aspects of the flow regime via hydraulic relationships. This is a site-based methodology, and it requires a medium-level effort and budget. The methodology hinges on being able to gain a basic understanding of the ecology and geomorphology of the stream system, having daily flow series' available, and having the capacity to develop hydraulic models. A comparison of the flow regimes recommended for the Jiaojiang reaches with recommendations derived from two hydrology-only methods found little correspondence. This was explained by the failure of hydrology-only methodologies to take into account the downstream change in the relationship between a river's geomorphic and hydrologic characteristics (i.e. expressed as hydraulics). Also, the ecological assumptions made by the hydrology-only methods cannot necessarily be applied in a generic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the topics related to restructuring and the historical outcome of the working class in China. This report examines loopholes in state policy. The article contains a report about the Tongyu, China textile group of Jiangsu. Discussed is the premise for restructuring state-run enterprises. This paper is an account of the restructuring of one enterprise in one locality in one province at a certain historical time in China. The report also reveals how economic transition merely makes acceptable social theft.

The article presents highlights of the 10th China Drying Conference (CDC) in Nanjing City, China from September 21-24, 2005. Three parallel oral presentation sessions were conducted, in which around 60 papers were distributed. CDC 2005 papers focused on the basics of drying, modeling and simulation of drying, drying of food and agricultural materials, and osmotic dehydration and drying.

The article offers information related to the "Journal of Moral Education" (JME). It says that the International Moral Education Conference will be held in Nanjing, China on October 24-28, 2011. It mentions the JME-Taylor Prize for authors with contributions to moral education which will be given at the 2011 moral education conference in Nanjing, China. It also states that JME is calling for papers to be submitted at the JME ScholarOne Manuscript web site.