Search results

Using the latest census data (2010), this paper investigates housing poverty conditions in Shanghai, the largest city in China. The data shows that a large fraction of Shanghai households are still living in excessively over-crowded housing. Meanwhile, the incidence ratio of housing poverty among migrants is more than five times than among natives. In particular, 45% of rural migrant households were living in housing poverty. Poverty decomposition analysis shows that approximately 70% of total housing poverty in Shanghai is attributable to rural migrants. Our finding is supported by estimating the multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The findings in this paper have significant implications to general housing policy making in urban China.

Public hospitals in China usually rely on revenues from medical services and medications to compensate for major costs given their nonprofit nature. The lack of government subsidies and unreasonable prices of medical services have led to high medical costs and unbalanced reimbursement system for public hospitals. There is a critical need of research on improvement of reimbursement system that will create positive effect on China’s health-care system. This paper aims to focus on four dimensions of stakeholders (government, patients, medical insurance agencies and social organization) and six major expenditures to explore reimbursement scheme for public hospitals in China with the purpose of relieving unbalanced income and expenditure of hospitals, avoiding medication markups and reducing medical expenses from patients.

In this paper, the authors study reimbursement scheme for public hospitals from the perspective of four dimensions of stakeholders and how stakeholders reimburse six major expenditures of hospitals. A total of 128 effective samples were collected from financial data of 32 public hospitals through 2009-2012. This paper analyzes the econometric models of the selected revenue and expenditure. This paper analyzes the econometric models of the selected revenue and expenditure using linear regression. The linear relationship between each cost and different types of incomes (i.e. reimbursements from government, patients, insurance agencies and social organization) is analyzed before and after cancelling the medication markups.

Results from empirical research verify that government reimbursement is insufficient, and using medication markups to compensate for medical service costs has become a serious problem for China’s public hospitals. To avoid the medication markups and improve the reimbursement scheme, government should reimburse labor cost, fixed assets cost and research cost; patients and medical insurance agencies should reimburse the costs of medical service, medication and administration/operations; and social organization should supplement the fixed assets cost.

In this study, the authors defined and classified stakeholders of reimbursement scheme for public hospitals in China, which help understand the roles and effects that different stakeholders can play in compensation. Along with the proposed reimbursement scheme framework, this study will help make effective implementation of new health-care reform program in China.

This study aims to focus on the optimized design and mechanical properties of gradient triply periodic minimal surface cellular structures manufactured by selective laser melting.

Uniform and gradient IWP and primitive cellular structures have been designed by the optimized function in MATLAB, and selective laser melting technology was applied to manufacture these cellular structures. Finite element analysis was applied to optimize the pinch-off problem, and compressive tests were carried out for the evaluation of mechanical properties of gradient cellular structures.

Finite element analysis shows that the elastic modulus of IWP increased as design parameter b increased, and then decreased when parameter b is higher than 5.5. The highest elastic modulus of primitive increased by 89.2% when parameter b is 6. The compressive behavior of gradient IWP and primitive shows a layer-by-layer way, and elastic modulus and first maximum compressive strength of gradient primitive are higher than that of gradient IWP. The effective energy absorption of gradient cellular structures increased as the average porosity decreased, and the effective energy absorption of gradient primitive is about twice than that of gradient IWP.

This paper presents an optimized design method for the pinch-off problem of gradient triply periodic minimal surface cellular structures.

In this paper, the mechanical properties and corrosion resistance of CoCr alloy fabricated by selective laser melting (SLM) were studied, and the changes of performance after porcelain sintering process were also analysed. This study is to point out the relationship between the microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion resistance of CoCr alloys prepared by SLM after porcelain sintering process. In addition, the biosafety of the sintered CoCr alloy was evaluated.

The microscopic feature changes of CoCr alloy samples after porcelain sintering process were observed by DMI 5000 M inverted metallographic microscope and Nova Nano430 FE-SEM. Moreover, phase identification and determination were conducted by X-ray diffraction (XRD) using Smartlab X-ray diffractometer. The Vickers microhardness was measured on the HVS-30 microhardness tester, and tensile tests were carried out on a CM3505 electronic universal testing machine. The corrosion resistance was tested by a classical three-point electrode system electrochemical method, then the ion precipitation was measured by using an atomic absorption spectrometer of Z2000 7JQ8024.

The XRD results indicate that the transition of γ phase (FCC) to e phase (HCP) occurs during the porcelain sintering processing of CoCr alloy. Moreover, the Vickers microhardness of the upper surface and the side surface of the CoCr alloy sample was improved by more than 36%. In addition, the ultimate strength of CoCr alloy via porcelain sintering treatment was increase to 1,395.3 ± 53.0 MPa compared to 1,282.7 ± 10.1 MPa of unprocessed CoCr alloy. However, the corrosion resistance of CoCr alloy samples decreases after porcelain sintering process.

There are few studies on the relationship of microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion resistance of CoCr alloys prepared by SLM after porcelain sintering process. In this study, the microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion resistance of CoCr alloy after porcelain sintering process were studied, and the biosafety of the alloy was evaluated. The research found that it is feasible to apply CoCr alloy fabricated by SLM to dental medicine after porcelain sintering process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the banking experiences and awareness of marketing efforts of banks among youth in mainland China.

Four focus-group interviews were conducted. A convenience sample of 26 participants aged 17 to 20 years was recruited in Laiwu, Shandong, a medium-sized city in China. They were asked to report experiences that could illustrate good and bad banking services. They were also asked to recall bank marketing promotions.

Participants’ perceived service quality of banks was determined by staff attitude, service delivery, physical environment and comparison of user experience. The marketing communication activities they recalled most frequently included product placements, advertising slogans, entertaining commercials and co-branding with online games.

The findings were based on a non-probability sample. The study also did not differentiate between personal experience and indirect experience with family and friends. Similar studies can be conducted in large cities or in rural China to compare banking experiences in different social economic settings. Further studies can be designed using quantitative methodology to measure the importance of various factors in influencing perceptions of service quality. Online banking experience can also be studied in the future.

Banks in China can enhance their competitiveness and brand reputation through raising the professionalism of their front-line staff, improving efficiency and transparency and streamlining the service process. Banks can make contacts with youth through offline and online promotional activities, such as co-branding with popular online games.

This is the first study on banking services among youth conducted in a medium-sized city in China.

Thin cracks on the surface, such as those found in nuclear power plant concrete structures, are difficult to identify because they tend to be thin. This paper aims to design a novel segmentation network, called U-shaped contextual aggregation network (UCAN), for better recognition of weak cracks.

UCAN uses dilated convolutional layers with exponentially changing dilation rates to extract additional contextual features of thin cracks while preserving resolution. Furthermore, this paper has developed a topology-based loss function, called ℓ_cl Dice, which enhances the crack segmentation’s connectivity.

This paper generated five data sets with varying crack widths to evaluate the performance of multiple algorithms. The results show that the UCAN network proposed in this study achieves the highest F1-Score on thinner cracks. Additionally, training the UCAN network with the ℓ_cl Dice improves the F1-Scores compared to using the cross-entropy function alone. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the UCAN network and the value of incorporating the ℓ_cl Dice in crack segmentation tasks.

In this paper, an exponentially dilated convolutional layer is constructed to replace the commonly used pooling layer to improve the model receptive field. To address the challenge of preserving fracture connectivity segmentation, this paper introduces ℓ_cl Dice. This design enables UCAN to extract more contextual features while maintaining resolution, thus improving the crack segmentation performance. The proposed method is evaluated using extensive experiments where the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

This paper aims to improve the fault detection adaptive threshold of aircraft flap control system to make the system fault diagnosis more accurate.

According to the complex mechanical–electrical–hydraulic structure and the multiple fault modes of the aircraft flap control system, the advanced fault diagnosis method based on the bond graph (BG) model is presented, and based on the system diagnostic BG model, the parameter uncertainty intervals are estimated and a new adaptive threshold is constructed by linear fraction transformation.

To construct a more reasonable and accurate adaptive threshold range to more accurately detect system failures, some typical failure modes’ diagnosis process are selected and completed for verification; the simulation results show that the proposed method is effective and feasible for complex systems’ fault diagnosis.

This study can provide a theoretical guidance and technical support for fault diagnosis of complex systems, which avoid misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis.

This study enables more accurate fault detection and diagnosis of complex systems when considering factors such as parameter uncertainty.

This study aims to investigate the influence of the gas-flow field distribution and design on the parts quality of 316L stainless steel and the vapor–spatter behavior.

Based on the hot-wire wind speed test method, the exact value of the gas velocity at different locations was accurately measured to establish the effect on the porosity and the mechanical properties of the parts. The influence of the placement of single or dual blow screens on the performance of the parts quality was also studied. Through scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive spectrometer, high-speed photography and other methods, the influence mechanism was explained.

It was found that too high or too low gas velocity both play a negative role, for 316L stainless steel, the range of 1.3–2.0 m/s is a suitable gas field velocity during the multilaser powder bed fusion process. And printing quality using dual blow screens is better than single.

The optimization of gas field design and optimal gas velocity (1.3–2.0 m/s) applied during laser melting can improve the quality of ML-PBF of 316L stainless steel.

This study showed the influence of the gas field on the spatter–vapor in the process during ML-PBF, and the unfavorable gas field led to the formation of pores and unmelted powders.

Increasing consumer choices in health care results in keener competition faced by providers. The existing nonlinear and asymmetric impact of patient perceived quality of care to their choices should provide insights for hospitals to deploy limited resources to areas that produces most significant and positive outcomes. This study aims to develop an algorithm for examining the nonlinear and asymmetrical relationships in the health-care domain with the hope to provide a more precise indication as to how specifically addressing patient experience with meaningful improvements of service quality.

Data were obtained through telephone surveys of 2,000 inpatients who had been hospitalized in a health system in 2006. After coding the original data, the authors conducted regression analysis and Z-test to investigate the nonlinear and asymmetrical relationship between patient recommendation and perceived hospital attributes.

“Spiritual care” is considered as a “delight” for patients. “Procedure efficiency”, “Compassionate care” and “Mutual communication” linearly related to patients’ likelihood to recommend the hospital (LTR) in the positive domains, but increasingly sensitive to LTR in negative domain.

Examining the asymmetry and the nonlinear relationship can detect diminishing effect of certain drivers for patient satisfaction. An emphasis on patients’ spiritual needs can provide the hospital with a unique opportunity to differentiate itself from other health-care providers which usually compete within the ordinary domain of services. The absence of “Procedure efficiency”, “Compassionate care” and “Mutual communication” will result in extremely negative word-of-mouth.

This study has developed an algorithm to examine the asymmetry and the nonlinear relationship between perceived hospital performance and patient satisfaction. The insights generated should help providers determine specific sets of priorities for improving services and hence strategize for optimal deployment of limited resources.

With the dramatic transformation of China’s industrial landscape, since the late 1990s, adaptive reuse of industrial heritage for cultural purposes has become a widely occurring phenomenon in major Chinese cities. The existing literature mainly focusses on specific cases, yet sees heritage conservation similarly at both national and regional scale and rarely identifies the main factors behind the production of China’s industrial-heritage reuse. The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences in heritage reuse outcomes among three Chinese mega-cities and explore the driving factors influencing the differences.

This paper compares selected industrial-heritage cultural precincts in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, and explores the local intervening factors influencing differences in their reuse patterns, including the history of industrial development, the availability of the nineteenth and/or twentieth century industrial buildings, the existence of cultural capital and the prevalence of supportive regional government policy.

The industrial-heritage reuse in the three cities is highly regional. In Beijing, the adaptation of industrial heritage has resulted from the activities of large-scale artist communities and the local government’s promotion of the city’s cultural influence; while in Shanghai, successful and more commercially oriented “sea culture” artists, private developers in creative industries and the “creative industry cluster” policy make important contributions. Chongqing in contrast, is still at the early stage of heritage conservation, as demonstrated by its adaptive reuse outcomes. Considering its less-developed local cultural economy, Chongqing needs to adopt a broader range of development strategies.

The paper contributes to knowledge by revealing that the production of industrial-heritage cultural precincts in Chinese mega-cities is influenced by regional level factors, including the types of industrial heritage, the spontaneous participation of artist communities and the encouragement of cultural policy.