Preface -- Acknowledgment -- SME and SME Board of China’s Capital Market -- What Can Batteries Power? -- A Leading Miner in "Urban Mining" -- A Pioneer: Moving towards New Agriculture.- The King of Mobile Game -- You Only Need to Dial One Number -- The Bird of the First Light -- Has the Era of...

In-service teacher training aims to improve the supply of public education. A randomized experiment was conducted in Mexico to test whether teacher training could increase teacher efficiency in public secondary schools. After seven and a half months of exposure to a trained teacher, students...

This study explores sex differences in language and socio-emotional skills. It focuses on children 7 months old to 6 years old in Chile in 2012 and Nicaragua in 2013. A focus on young children allowed for ruling out a set of environmental and identity effects to explain the gap. Females had an...

This study explores sex differences in language and socio-emotional skills on children 7 months to 6 years old in Latin-America. Females had a significant advantage in both dimensions. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document sex differences in these dimensions at a very young age....

Land use and land cover change has a slow but prolonged impact on various aspects of environment on local, regional and global scales. In developing countries especially population pressure and food demand have compelled conversion of wetlands to built-up and agricultural lands. One such unique...

Purpose This paper aims to focus on supply chain quality (SCQ) in the hospitality industry in China, and to stress the importance of the synergy of quality management (QM) and supply chain management (SCM). The authors have investigated the relationship among QM practices, SCM practices, SCQ and...

A constrained cellular automata (CA) model based on 'grey cells' for the simulation of different types of urban forms and developments is developed within a raster GIS. Remote sensing and GIS are used to supply information on environmental constraints and locations of growth centers for the...

In this paper, we present a meta-heuristic base on improved shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) to tackle the multi-objective problem (MOP). The SFLA is suitable to solve the single objective problem. For the multi-objective problem, one main issue is that how to evaluate the quality of two...

Over the years, more attention has been focused on the implementation than on the preparation of the research budget in the agricultural institutes of China, resulting in the unscientific and unreasonable budgeting of research funds. The practical implementation of the research funds has also...