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Purpose – China is the world’s largest user market for digital technologies and experiencing unprecedented rates of rural-urban migration set to create the world’s first “urban billion”. This is an important context for studying nuanced adoption behaviours that define a digital divide. Large-scale studies are required to determine what behaviours exist in such populations, but can offer limited ability to draw inferences about why. The purpose of this paper is to report a large-scale study inside China that probes a nuanced “digital divide” behaviour: consumer demographics indicating ability to pay by electronic means but behaviour suggesting lack of willingness to do so, and extends current demographics to help explain this. Design/methodology/approach – The authors report trans-national access to commercial “Big Data” inside China capturing the demographics and consumption of millions of consumers across a wide range of physical and digital market channels. Focusing on one urban location we combine traditional demographics with a new measure that reflecting migration: “Distance from Home”, and use data-mining techniques to develop a model that predicts use behaviour. Findings – Use behaviour is predictable. Most use is explained by value of the transaction. “Distance from Home” is more predictive of technology use than traditional demographics. Research limitations/implications – Results suggest traditional demographics are insufficient to explain “why” use/non-use occurs and hence an insufficient basis to formulate and target government policy. Originality/value – The authors understand this to be the first large-scale trans-national study of use/non-use of digital channels within China, and the first study of the impact of distance on ICT adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper introduces the Cyberinfrastructure and e-Science application of joint research in the Qinghai Lake National Nature Reserve, supporting cross-disciplinary, cross-organizational and international collaborative research. We introduce the e-Science application from the view of how Cyberinfrastructure and information technology can promote the different aspects of research activities, including data acquisition, knowledge discovery by processing and analyzing massive data, and knowledge representation. This e-Science application is the first one applied in the national nature reserve in China and is also the first attempt in China to construct Cyberinfrastructure to support protection and research in plateau area. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]