Tourism’s impacts on ethnic cultures have received much attention, but few studies have been done on its impacts on nomadic people, especially for Kazakh nomads in China. Many Kazakh households are experiencing a transition from pastoralism to tourism, with yurt tourism being the popular Kazakh tourism products. This study takes Narat in China as a case to understand the impact of yurt tourism on the gendered labor division of Kazakh families, and the status of Kazakh women. Observations and semi-structured interviews were adopted. We find that the division of labor in yurt tourism is an extension of traditional nomad labor division and that the traditional gender statuses have been reinforced. Women are required to not only work but also face additional social pressure since they are considered to be going against customary rules when greeting tourists. Despite this, women’s self-confidence, business skills, and income have improved since the development of tourism. We argue that the form of tourism product, ideology of gender roles, and position of ethnic families in the tourism market account for this change. Diverse results of tourism impacts on the gender relationships of ethnic communities can be derived from the interactions of these three factors.
BACKGROUND: Exploring the associations of air pollution and weather variables with blood leukocyte distribution is critical to understand the impacts of environmental exposures on the human immune system. OBJECTIVES: As previous analyses have been mainly based on data from cell counters, which might not be feasible in epidemiologic studies including large populations of long-stored blood samples, we aimed to expand the understanding of this topic by employing the leukocyte distribution estimated by DNA methylation profiles. METHODS: We measured DNA methylation profiles in blood samples using Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip from 1519 visits of 774 Caucasian males participating in the Normative Aging Study. Leukocyte distribution was estimated using Houseman's and Horvath's algorithms. Data on air pollution exposure, temperature, and relative humidity within 28days before each blood draw was obtained. RESULTS: After fully adjusting for potential covariates, PM2.5, black carbon, particle number, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, temperature, and relative humidity were associated with the proportions of at least one subtype of leukocytes. Particularly, an interquartile range-higher 28-day average exposure of PM2.5 was associated with 0.147-, 0.054- and 0.101-unit lower proportions (z-scored) of plasma cells, naive CD8+ T cells, and natural killers, respectively, and 0.059- and 0.161-unit higher proportions (z-scored) of naive CD4+ T cells and CD8+ T cells, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that short-term air pollution exposure, temperature, and relative humidity are associated with leukocyte distribution. Our study further provides a successful attempt to use epigenetic patterns to assess the influences of environmental exposures on human immune profiles.
Methanesulfonate, an important oxidation product of dimethyl sulfide, is abundant in marine aerosol particles. However, its impact on the cloud condensation nucleation (CCN) activity of marine aerosol is yet to be elucidated, largely because the CCN activity of methanesulfonate has been seldom investigated. In this work, we measured the CCN activities of three common methanesulfonates, and the single hygroscopicity parameters (κ) were determined to be 0.46 ± 0.02 for sodium methanesulfonate (NaMS), 0.37 ± 0.01 for calcium methanesulfonate, and 0.47 ± 0.02 for potassium methanesulfonate, respectively. In addition, we explored the effect of NaMS on the CCN activities of NaCl and synthetic sea salt. It was found that if presented with a mass ratio of 1:1, NaMS would significantly reduce the CCN activities of NaCl and sea salt, and the κ values of binary mixtures could be estimated using the simple mixing rule. Nevertheless, if only presented with a mass ratio of 1:10 (an environmentally relevant value), the effect of NaMS on the CCN activities of NaCl and sea salt was found to be small. Overall, we conclude that from our experimental data and its levels found in the troposphere, methanesulfonate may only have minor impacts on the CCN activity of marine aerosol.
Rice paddy fields pose a high risk of water pollutions for the surrounding waterbodies through surface runoff and subsurface fluxes. Compared to surface runoff, subsurface flux from rice paddy fields has received less attention and is still poorly quantified, mainly due to low-frequency measurements at field scale and limited modeling capability at regional scale. Here we proposed a simplified modeling approach to estimate the subsurface fluxes of water, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from rice paddy fields and examined their relative importance compared to surface runoff. This model was established based on the high-frequency field measurements over two rice growing seasons in central China and the extended datasets across the East Asia. Two-year site-based observations indicate the significance of subsurface fluxes of water (737–785 mm season−1), N (28.5–40.0 kg N ha−1) and P (0.7–4.3 kg P ha−1) compared to those of surface runoff (178–199 mm season−1, 4.5–12.9 kg N ha−1, 0.5–2.6 kg P ha−1). Our regional estimations in the East Asia reveal that subsurface fluxes from rice paddy fields were comparable with surface fluxes, primarily controlled by the magnitude of seasonal precipitation. Subsurface fluxes were the dominant pathway of nutrient losses in drier rice cropping areas, while surface runoff was the more important process in wetter areas. In the light of the regional differences, we suggest that a spatially flexible set of policies for mitigating nutrient losses from rice paddy fields would be beneficial for the future water-quality improvements in the surrounding waterbodies.
Current estimates of China’s ammonia (NH3) volatilization from paddy rice differ by more than twofold, mainly due to inappropriate application of chamber-based measurements and improper assumptions within process-based models. Here, we improved the Jayaweera-Mikkelsen (JM) model through multiplying the concentration of aqueous NH3 in ponded water by an activity coefficient that was determined based on high-frequency flux observations at Jingzhou station in Central China. We found that the improved JM model could reproduce the dynamics of observed NH3 flux (R2 = 0.83, n = 228, P < 0.001), while the original JM model without the consideration of activity of aqueous NH3 overstated NH3 flux by 54% during the periods of fertilization and pesticide application. The validity of the improved JM model was supported by a mass-balance-based indirect estimate at Jingzhou station and the independent flux observations from the other five stations across China. The NH3 volatilization losses that were further simulated by the improved JM model forced by actual wind speed were in general a half less than previous chamber-based estimates at six stations. Difference in wind speed between the inside and outside of the chamber and insufficient sampling frequency were identified as the primary and secondary causes for the overestimation in chamber-based estimations, respectively. Together, our findings suggest that an in-depth understanding of NH3 transfer process and its robust representation in models are critical for developing regional emission inventories and practical mitigation strategies of NH3.
Cs2AgBiBr6 having a double perovskite structure is expected to achieve non-lead and stable optoelectronic devices, and has received wide attention recently. A strategy for improving of perovskite films via Rubidium cation (Rb+) is for the first time reported. When Rb+ was incorporated into Cs2AgBiBr6 to form (Cs1-xRbx)(2)AgBiBr6, the absorption at long wavelength was enhanced and the density of defect state was reduced without changing the crystal lattice. Furthermore, the mechanism of Rb+ doping to improve double perovskites and the optimal doping ratio was studied in this report. The average power conversion efficiency of doped devices is nearly 15% higher than that of standard devices from 20 devices of each group. Moreover, in the champion device, the power conversion efficiency achieved 1.52% with a high fill factory of 0.788.
The Ambisonic technique has been widely used for soundfield recording and reproduction recently. However, the basicAmbisonic decoding method will break down when the play-back loudspeakers distribute unevenly. Various methods havebeen proposed to solve this problem. This paper introducesseveral improvements to a recently proposed Ambisonic de-coding method, the matching projection method, for unevenloudspeaker layouts. The first improvement is energy preserv-ing; the second is introducing the “in-phase” weight, and thethird is introducing partial projection coefficients. To eval-uate the improved method, we compared it with the origi-nal one and the all-round Ambisonic decoding method witha 2-dimension unevenly arranged loudspeaker array. The re-sult shows our method greatly improves the original methodwhere the loudspeaker arranges very sparsely or densely.
This paper analyzes the determinants of stock market participation decisions using officially compiled aggregate stock account opening data in China. Different from the literature that often focuses on one particular dimension, our paper systematically evaluates the relative importance of disposable income, demographic variables, macroeconomic factors, stock market conditions, and social communication on both the level and the change of the participation rate. We find that the level of the participation rate is predominately determined by the income factor, followed by various measures of social communication. Social communication plays the most important role in the change of the participation rate, acting as a multiplier to stimulate stock market participation. The effects are more pronounced in high income, high education, high population density groups, and during the bull market period.