<title>ABSTRACT</title> As part of a comprehensive research into PPP implementation, nine case studies were scrutinized to explore the critical risks influencing the success of PPP water projects in China. Eleven critical risks were identified from real-life risk events through the content analysis. They were...

The oxidation tests of electrospark deposited Ni-based coatings without and with 2.5 wt.% La2O3 were conducted at 960°C in air for 100 h. The oxidation kinetic of the coatings was studied by testing the weight gain. The phase structures and morphologies of the oxidized coatings were...

On a Virginia crop farm, alternative levels of information are evaluated for managing nitrogen applications based on soil properties and yield potential. Application of variable rates of nitrogen based on crop yield potential can increase profitability and reduce nitrogen pollution potential.

In this paper, authors analyze the influences of non-tradable share reform on cash dividends in Chinese listed companies and find that the distribution intensity of cash dividends has been weakened in listed companies after the non-tradable share reform. The research shows that the non-tradable...

The effects of cropland slope, distance to surface water, farmers' risk attitudes, and farmers' nitrogen (N) fertilizer applications on potential N delivery to streams and costs of reducing N delivery were evaluated for a representative Virginia peanut-cotton farm. Target MOTAD and generalized...

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI) have been successfully applied to document clustering recently. In this paper, we show that PLSI and NMF (with the I-divergence objective function) optimize the same objective function, although PLSI and...

This paper uses a 10 years monitoring data set of 100 counties to examine the process, implementation and impacts of China’s Conversion of Cropland to Forests Program (CCFP). A theoretical framework was constructed to explain the development of CCFG. We find that CCFG was originate from...

In this paper, lag synchronization for a class of delayed fuzzy cellular networks is investigated. By utilizing inequality technique, Lyapunov functional theory and the analysis method, some new and useful criteria of lag synchronization for the addressed networks are derived in terms of p-norm...