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This study quantifies China's urban residential CO2 rebound owing to improvements in energy efficiency. We use a dynamic econometric model (error corrected linear approximated almost ideal demand system, ECM-LA-AIDS) to examine the relationship between energy-efficiency promotion, energy consumption behaviour, and the CO2 rebound effect. An improvement in energy efficiency lowers the energy price, resulting in unbalanced short- and long-term energy consumption behaviours. Inconsistent short- and long-term energy-efficiency policies may lead to greater rebound effects. Therefore, this study estimates the residential energy-related CO2 (ECR-CO2) rebound effects considering both short- and long-term consumption patterns to provide targeted policies for controlling residential ECR-CO2. The results indicate that the short- and long-term urban residential ECR-CO2 effects differ across regions and provinces. Additionally, the direct rebound effect contributes more to the total ECR-CO2 rebound effect than the indirect rebound effect. Finally, at the national level, the urban residential ECR-CO2 rebound effects exhibit a U-shaped divergence, indicating that, among the 31 Chinese provinces considered, the ECR-CO2 rebound effect first converges and then diverges, owing to differences in the levels of technological progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the development of China's international talent policy (ITP) during 1978–2020. An analytical framework is constructed to track the profound changes of ITP and examine the main driving forces for these changes. Four main phases of ITP development are identified through analyzing significant changes in the four core components of China's ITP, including guiding frameworks, hierarchy of goals, policy instruments, and governance institutions. The driving forces mainly include crises and policy problems, the authoritative CCP leadership, and government responses to crises/problems. It is concluded that the stable and authoritative leadership in a centralized government is the key to profound policy changes without fundamentally shifting the ultimate policy goal, but lacking societal forces can be problematic especially when the government role becomes weakened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes a measurement model to examine the impacts of social network heterogeneity on the wages of the floating population, and the different impacts under different levels of marketization. The main findings are: (1) Social network heterogeneity can increase the wages of the floating population, which is particularly significant for urban-urban migrants with non-agricultural registration; (2) The effect of social network heterogeneity on the wages of the floating population is due to the different levels of marketization of the destination market of inflows. The levels of marketization vary from place to place: in cities with low marketization levels, the homogeneous social networks can increase the wages more than the heterogeneous social networks. With marketization levels increase, social networks can increase the employment wages of migrants through three stages: the stage of the homogeneous social network is stronger than heterogeneous social network; the stage of no significant difference between homogeneous social network and heterogeneous social network; the stage of heterogeneous social network is stronger than homogeneous social network. In general, for the wages of rural-urban migrants with agricultural hukou, homogeneous social networks and marketization levels have a substitutional relationship, while heterogeneous social networks and marketization levels have a complementary relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the therapeutic effects of a water-soluble biphenyl compound, WLP-S-14, in acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). Wistar rats were injected intraperitoneally with porcine serum twice a week for 8 weeks prior to administration of 600 mg/kg D-galactosamine and 50 μg/kg lipopolysaccharide to induce ACLF. Study groups were treated intravenously with saline or with 100 or 200 mg/kg WLP-S-14. WLP-S-14 ameliorated ACLF with significant reductions in the mortality rate and transaminase levels, indicating improved liver function. The mechanism underlying these effects may involve decreased levels of tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-6, with associated inhibition of apoptotic pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With high-resolution remote-sensing data, there are numerous possible features for object description, making the selection of optimal features a time-consuming and subjective process. While substantial efforts have been made to compare the utility of feature selection metrics, less attention has been paid to the efficiency of such in the context of object-based image analysis. In this study, the statistical measurement z-score was used to ensure compatibility with objects. We assessed the feasibility of a z-score method, and then ranked and reduced input features using a backward elimination technique. The results showed that separability can be efficiently estimated based on z-score values, and the near-infrared band performed the best for crop classification. A straightforward trend was observed, and the optimal feature set was created, which was a combination of spectral, temporal, texture information and vegetation indices. These features complement one another to help increase crop map accuracy. For the 40% of the entire sample sizes, the optimal feature sets produced the best trade-off between the number of inputs and classification accuracy, with the misclassification error of 7.09%. Additionally, reliable crop maps were obtained, with the overall accuracy of 92.64%, and the z-score method showed great potential for the separability of crops at object scale using remotely sensed multi-temporal data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]