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Non-timber forest product plantations (NTFP plantations), also known as "economic forests" in China, refer to forest plantations cultivated for the production of non-timber products such as fruits, nuts, oils, seasonings, and medicinal materials. With a rapid increase in the total area in the past two decades, NTFP plantations have become an important type of forestland use in China. The shift of agricultural labor to the non-agricultural sector caused by rising salaries in China will inevitably have a great impact on land use, forestry, and agricultural production. To understand the effects of off-farm employment on the development of NTFP plantations in China, a total of 709 valid household questionnaires from Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces were collected. Heckman's two-stage model was employed in the empirical analysis. The results of the study show that off-farm employment has a significant positive effect on both the probability that a household has planted NTFP plantations and the plantation area. Households engaged in off-farm employment would prefer to plant NTFP plantations. Moreover, the higher the degree of participation in off-farm employment, the more likely households are to choose to plant NTFP plantations. The area of NTFP plantations would increase with the increase in off-farm employment degrees. Besides, the age and education level of the household head show a positive effect on the NTFP plantation planting. The implication of the results is that with a continuing increase in the proportion of off-farm employment, NTFP plantation cultivation could also continue to expand. Funds are still an important constraint for households to choose to plant NTFP plantations. Therefore, if policymakers want to promote the development of NTFP plantations on collectively owned forestland, they should first resolve households' financial constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of problems of bad effect of closed-loop control and poor communication function existed in traditional control instruments of electronic belt scale which uses single-chip microcomputer to realize aggregation operation and control, a design scheme of control instrument of electronic belt scale based on ARM was proposed, and design of hardware and software of the instrument were introduced in details. The instrument is composed of data collector and display controller based on ARM. The instrument uses separate type of structure, namely data collector is installed at site, display controller is installed at monitoring room, and the both communicate through RS485 interface. The experiment result showed that the measuring precision of the instrument is superior to 0.2% and the instrument has reasonable design.

We study finite-coupling corrections on the screening length of a heavy quark-antiquark (Q Q ¯) pair moving in strongly coupled Super Yang-Mills plasma. We performed the analysis by computing the Wilson loop in a general A d S 5 space with curvature-squared (R 2) corrections and the Gauss-Bonnet (GB) background, respectively. For the general case, it is shown that the screening length with R 2 corrections can be larger or smaller than that without R 2 corrections depending on the correction coefficients, and these effects are more pronounced for the perpendicular case compared with parallel case. For the GB case, it turns out that increasing λ G B (a dimensionless parameter in GB gravity) leads to decreasing the screening length thus reducing the binding energy of Q Q ¯ pair. In addition, we discuss how the screening length changes with the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density at strong coupling under GB corrections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]