Producing mobility: visual narratives of the rural migrant worker in Chinese television

This paper employs literatures of mobility to explore the ways which rural migrant workers in China are represented publicly via television drama. Through an analysis of the popular serial Mingong, the paper examines the underlying politics of contemporary migration in China through three themes: the territorialisation of rural and urban spaces; the embodiment of boundaries via corporeal practices and subjectivities; and the politicisation of rural migrant desires. This analysis demonstrates the significance of television in crafting discursive understandings of mobility and migrants that are suffused with contemporary governmentalities of generating but also managing and excluding migration.     

Educational inequality across three generations in Australia

The transfer of advantage and disadvantage across multiple generations is receiving increasing attention in the international literature; however, transfers of resources across multiple generations in Australian families are less well understood. Using a longitudinal dataset of Australian children, we have the opportunity to not only investigate the transfer of educational resources across three generations in Australia, but also investigate the gendered nature of these transfers, which has been a limitation of other studies. We find no evidence of individual grandparent education effects on numeracy and reading scores for grandchildren in Year 3, independent of parent educational attainment and other covariates. However, significant effects on numeracy and reading scores were observed for children in families where both the grandmother and grandfather in maternal and paternal grandparent sets had high educational attainment (a diploma or university qualification), and where either or both the mother and father had a university qualification. These results suggest that the contribution of grandparents to the academic achievement of grandchildren cannot be fully explained by the parent generation and that the concentration of human capital in families contributes to educational inequalities across multiple generations that can be observed by eight years of age.     

Bounded information dissemination in multi-channel wireless networks

More and more wireless networks and devices now operate on multiple channels, which poses the question: How to use multiple channels to speed up communication? In this paper, we answer this question for the case of wireless ad-hoc networks where information dissemination is a primitive operation. Specifically, we propose a randomized distributed algorithm for information dissemination that is very near the optimal. The general information dissemination problem is to deliver \(k\) information packets, stored initially in \(k\) different nodes (the packet holders), to all the nodes in the network, and the objective is to minimize the time needed. With an eye toward the reality, we assume a model where the packet holders are determined by an adversary, and neither the number \(k\) nor the identities of packet holders are known to the nodes in advance. Not knowing the value of \(k\) sets this problem apart from broadcasting and all-to-all communication (gossiping). We study the information dissemination problem in single-hop networks with bounded-size messages. We present a randomized algorithm which can disseminate all packets in \(O(k(\frac{1}{\mathcal {F}}+\frac{1}{\mathcal {P}})+\log ^2n)\) rounds with high probability, where \(\mathcal {F}\) is the number of available channels and \(\mathcal {P}\) is the bound on the number of packets a message can carry. Compared with the lower bound \(\varOmega (k(\frac{1}{\mathcal {F}}+\frac{1}{\mathcal {P}}))\), the given algorithm is very close to the asymptotical optimal except for an additive factor. Our result provides the first solid evidence that multiple channels can indeed substantially speed up information dissemination, which also breaks the \(\varOmega (k)\) lower bound that holds for single-channel networks (even if \(\mathcal {P}\) is infinity).     

The marketing strategy worksheet—A practical planning tool

The Marketing Strategy Worksheet is a simple aid to strategic planners. It enables a coherent and integrated plan to be produced and communicated to others. It is a three-level flow chart comprising an analytical stage, formulation of some key primary decisions and subsequent settlement of strategic issues within the marketing mix. The analytical stage incorporates both external and internal analysis. The primary decisions concern company objectives, marketing objectives, demand management, target market and positioning. Using the conventional marketing mix format, decisions are made about product, promotion, distribution and price.     

Monte carlo evidence on the robustness of conditional moment tests in tobit and probit models

This paper numerically examines the size robustness of various conditional moment tests in misspecified tobit and probit models. The misspecifications considered include the incorrect exclusion of regressors, ignored heteroskedasticity and false distributional assumptions. An important feature of the experimental design is that it is based on an existing empirical study and is more realistic than many simulation studies. The tests are seen to have mixed performance depending on both the original null hypothesis being tested and type of misspecification encountered.