Does china income FSDs follow Benford? A comparison between Chinese income first significant digit distribution with Benford distribution

Since Benford’s law is an empirical phenomenon that occurs in a range of data sets, this raises the question as to whether or not the same thing might be true in terms of the Chinese income distribution data. We focus on the first significant digit (FSD) distribution of Chinese micro income data from the 2005 Inter-Census sample, which corresponds to 1% of Chinese population and other micro income data from the China family panel studies (CFPS) and Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). We use information theoretic-entropy based methods to investigate the degree to which Benford’s FSD law is consistent with the FSD of Chinese income data and our findings suggest consistency between the Chinese FSD income distribution and Benford’s distribution. The close connection between the two distributions has implications for the quality of the sample of Chinese micro data.     

水生态系统服务供需视角下的水网乡村 适应性规划策略——以吴江张鸭荡片区为例

苏南乡村地区一直是中国乡村建设的先行区域，特殊的纵横交错的水网结构构成了一个错综复杂的系统，呈现出其他地区不具有的复杂性和生态特殊性。随着城镇的扩张，乡村的发展建设使其水网空间的平衡发展面临极大的挑战。传统单一静态的规划方法逐渐显示出无法适应经济、社会等发展要求的缺陷。苏南乡村地区以水为核心，从水生态系统服务供需关系的视角下探究水网乡村的适应性规划策略更加适应当前的乡村现状和需求。以传统水网乡村空间形态转译为基础，建立水生态系统供需服务评估体系，在评估水生态系统服务供需能力的基础上，分析供需分异模式及供需矛盾。从构建乡村水域空间生态格局、乡村水域空间功能分区规划，以及乡村水域空间多情景预判3个方面，提出苏南水网乡村的适应性规划策略，并为水网乡村的生态实践提出新思路。     

一种适用于强脉冲噪声下的对数型恒模盲均衡算法

针对脉冲噪声下恒模算法(Constant Modulus Algorithm,CMA)失败的问题，通过分析脉冲噪声的影响，提出了一种基于最小均方（Least Mean Square,LMS）准则的对数型恒模算法（Logarithmic-type CMA,LT-CMA）。LT-CMA利用对数函数的非线性变换特性自适应地抑制强脉冲噪声对误差函数的影响，并且利用l2-范数进行信号归一化处理以增强算法的稳健性。仿真结果表明，所提出的LT-CMA可以适应于高斯噪声环境和脉冲噪声环境；与经典自适应均衡算法相比，在收敛速度和稳健性两方面上，所提出的LT-CMA都有显著的提升。     

How shark conservation in the Maldives affects demand for dive tourism

Shark-diving tourism provides important economic benefits to the Maldives. We examine the link between shark conservation actions and economic returns from diving tourism. A combined travel cost and contingent behaviour approach is used to estimate the dive trip demand under different management scenarios. Our results show that increasing shark populations could increase dive-trip demand by 15%, raising dive tourists’ welfare by US$58 million annually. This could result in annual economic benefits for the dive-tourism industry of >US$6 million. Conversely, in scenarios where shark populations decline, where dive tourists observe illegal fishing, or if dive operators lack engagement in shark conservation, dive trip demand could decrease by up to 56%. This decline causes economic losses of more than US$24 million annually to the dive tourism industry. These results highlight the dependence of the shark-diving industry on the creation and enforcement of appropriate management regimes for shark conservation.     

Reconciling Alternative Theories for the Safety of Owner–Operators

Motor carrier safety is an important concern of shippers, carriers, policy makers, consignees, insurance providers, and the motoring public. One aspect of carrier safety that has garnered substantial attention is whether carriers making greater use of owner–operators are more or less safe vis‐à‐vis carriers making greater use of employee drivers. Currently, conflicting theoretical predictions exist regarding the direction of this relationship. In this article, we offer a reconciliation of the alternative theoretical predictions by developing a coherent theory that merges sociological rational choice theory and theory regarding motor carrier safety. We subject our theory to empirical testing by fitting a series of seemingly unrelated regression models to a vector of safety measures tracked as part of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Compliance, Safety, and Accountability program. Our results are consistent with our proposed theory of owner—operator safety and provide meaningful theoretical and managerial implications and directions for future research.     

Responses to COVID-19: The role of performance in the relationship between small hospitality enterprises’ resilience and sustainable tourism development

Tourism is one of the hardest-hit industries by the global pandemic of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Small tourism enterprises have been heavily affected and have had difficulty in business recovery. This research is an early attempt to explore the direct impact of small hospitality enterprises’ resilience on sustainable tourism development as well as indirect impact through performance. A pre-tested questionnaire survey was self-administered to owner-managers of small hospitality enterprises in Greater Cairo, Egypt. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS showed a positive, direct, and significant impact of resilience (planned and adaptive) on sustainable tourism development and indirect influence through performance. The results of the multi-group analysis showed that enterprise type has a significant effect on the results, where restaurant owner-managers expressed more resilience than their hotel counterparts. Several theoretical (for scholars) and practical implications for tourism policy-makers and owner-managers have been discussed and elaborated.     

实体零售业互联网创新演进机理--基于适应性营销能力的多案例研究

互联网创新已成为数字化时代实体零售业业态演进的主要目标。众多实体企业面临着从传统店铺零售转型为互联网零售方式的转型难题。本研究基于适应性营销能力理论,探讨了实体零售业从互联网转型战略到互联网转型项目实施过程,并构建了实体零售业互联网演进能力迁移的理论框架。研究发现:①适应性营销能力是解释实体零售业演进能力迁移的关键,实体零售企业互联网演进过程可以按照"互联网战略导向→适应性营销能力→组织政治策略→绩效"的关系进行表述;②实体零售业转型的主要战略是互联网市场导向和互联网技术导向,战略选择是基于企业自身资源基础和相对优势的分析;③实体零售业组织在互联网创新的角色具有双面性,即鼓励创新又适当妥协。研究结论进一步丰富了零售业演进理论和适应性营销理论的相关研究,对当前互联网环境下企业如何实施互联网战略转型具有实践指导意义。     

A Novel Compact Cat Swarm Optimization Based on Differential Method

ABSTRACT

A compact cat swarm optimization scheme (cCSO) is proposed in this paper, which is designed to solve application domains plagued with limited memory and less-computation power, as a member of cat swarm optimization algorithms (CSO), it composes of two sub-modes, i.e., tracing and seeking modes, so it keeps the same search logic of CSO. On the other hand, cCSO inherits the main feature of compact algorithms, a normal probabilistic model is used to represent the population of solutions instead of processing an actual population, which ensures the cCSO to have the modest memory requirement. The updating vector for the probabilistic model provides a clear moving direction for cats in next step. A cat without historical position and velocity is applied in the algorithm. When the cat is in seeking mode, it employs a differential operator to update the cat’s position, which makes it possible for the cat to have multiple searching directions. Experimental results show that cCSO has pretty performance compared with respect to some population-based testing benchmarks. And it also shows superior performance in convergence rate to some compact optimization algorithms. The case study of gray image segmentation proves that it suits for solving the optimization problem by limited hardware.     

Application of evidential reasoning approach and OWA operator weights in road safety evaluation considering the best and worst practice frontiers

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has recently become relatively popular with road safety experts. Therefore, various decision-making units (DMUs), such as EU countries, have been assessed in terms of road safety performance (RSP). However, the DEA has been criticized because it evaluates DMUs based only on the concept of self-assessment, and, therefore does not provide a unique ranking for DMUs. Therefore, cross efficiency method (CEM) was developed to overcome this shortcoming. Peer-evaluations in addition to self-evaluation have made the CEM to be recognized as an effective method for ranking DMUs. The traditional CEM is based only on the standard CCR (Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes) model, and it evaluates DMUs according to their position relative to the best practice frontier while neglecting the worst practice frontier. However, the DMUs can also be assessed based on their position relative to the worst practice frontier. In this regard, the present study aims to provide a double-frontier CEM for assessing RSP by taking into account the best and worst frontiers simultaneously. For this purpose, the cross efficiency and cross anti-efficiency matrices are generated.Even though a weighted average method (WAM) is most frequently used for cross efficiency aggregation, the decision maker's (DM) preference structure may not be reflected. For this reason, the present study mainly focuses on the evidential reasoning approach (ERA), as a nonlinear aggregation method, rather than the linear WAM. Equal weights are often used for cross efficiency aggregation; consequently, the effect of the DM's subjective judgments in obtaining the overall efficiency is ignored. In this respect, the minimax entropy approach (MEA) and the maximum disparity approach (MMDA) are applied for determining the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator weights for cross efficiency aggregation. The weighted cross efficiencies and cross anti-efficiencies are then aggregated using the ERA. Finally, the proposed method, called DF-CEM-ERA, is used to evaluate the RSP of EU countries as well as Serbian police departments (PDs).