Evolution and geographic effects of high-speed rail in East Asia： An accessibility approach

The rapid development of high-speed rail（HSR） is influencing regional development, regional structure, commuting, and regional integration. East Asia is the region with the world＇s first and largest current operating and planned HSR network. In this paper, we examine the evolutionary mechanism and impacts on the transport circle and accessibility of HSR in East Asia. The results indicate that the HSR network first follows a ＂core-core＂ model and then forms a corridor in Japan, South Korea, and China Taiwan, but then forms a complete network in China Mainland. The current operating HSR lines are mostly distributed in regions with developed economies and dense populations, and more than half of the population and GDP in China can be served by HSR within 1 hour＇s travel time. The planned HSR network will expand to the western region of China and Japan and the southern region of South Korea. The development of the current operating and planned HSR network considerably enlarges the transport circle of core cities, especially cities along trunk HSR lines. This 1 h transport circle of core cities has formed continuous regions in the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, Tokyo, Seoul, and along trunk HSR lines. The HSR network will bring about substantial improvement in accessiblity, but also increase the inequality of nodal accessibility in China Mainland. Spatially, the spatial patterns of the weighted shortest travel time of cities in China Mainland, Japan, and South Korea all present the ＂core-peripheral structure＂, taking Zhengzhou, Tokyo, and Seoul, respectively, as core cities, and cities located along the trunk HSR lines gain large improvement in accessibility.

Why are There Indica Type and Japonica Type in Rice?——History of the Studies and a View for Origin of Two Types

On the bases of archaeological discoveries, the earliest domestication of rice has been confirmed in the middle and lower Changjiang River basin, while in the region wild rice populations are found in shallow swamps under a climate with freezing winter cold. These findings lead us to-examine the past ideas about domestication and differentiation of rice. Historically, in 1930s two sub-species, indica and japonica, were proposed on the basis of sterility in F1 hybrids between them. Soon after that, the two types were classified by the associations of a number of genetically independent traits. The characteristic associations of traits have been explained by the hybrid sterility or reproductive barriers which were assumed to comprise a set of duplicate recessive lethal genes and to be an inner genetic mechanism to lead to the varietal differentiations In 1980s, the hybrid sterility between Indica and Japonica types was analyzed, and Indica, Japonica, and wide-compatibility type which gives fertile hybrids when cross to Indica and Japonica types, are proved to contain an allele, S5＇, S5＇ and S5^n, respectively at a locus on chromosome 6. And those gametes having Sj allele are found to be partially aborted in the hybrid genotypes of S5＇/S5＇ while no gamete abortion occurs in S5＇/S5^n and S5＇/S5^n genotypes. Since then, the gene S5^n has been used in hybrid rice breeding to obtain fertile and vigorous hybrids between subspecies, and the long-disputed problem of hybrid sterility has been solved. Also in such studies the characteristic association of traits found in each of vadetal groups is better explained by founder effects. On the other hand, a large number of native cultivars of rice were surveyed with enzyme polymorphism in 1980s and later with molecular markers. As a result, profound genetic diversity is found in cultivated rice as well as in wild rice. These findings seem to lead us to the idea of multiple independent domestications of rice. However, before reaching such a conclusion, at least two factors, i.e., long-distance-dissemination of some genotypes and the possibilities of introgression by local wild rice to primitive cultivars need to be examined. Taking the two factors as well as the historical events into consideration, it is considered here that the perennial japonica cultivars which are close to wild rice in the Changjiang River basin were disseminated to East India through Assam or along the Bengal Bay, where they were transformed under the introgressions of local wild rice and formed a secondary center, from which some genotypes seem to be disseminated to colonies in Southeast Asia under the influence of Hinduism. Later some of the genotypes were introduced into China and constituted so called Indica type. This may be a reasonable picture for the varietal differentiation.

Joint model of user check-in activities for point-of-interest recommendation

With the rapid development of location-based networks, point-of-interest（POI） recommendation has become an important means to help people discover interesting and attractive locations, especially when users travel out of town. However, because users only check-in interaction is highly sparse, which creates a big challenge for POI recommendation. To tackle this challenge, we propose a joint probabilistic generative model called geographical temporal social content popularity（GTSCP） to imitate user check-in activities in a process of decision making, which effectively integrates the geographical influence, temporal effect, social correlation, content information and popularity impact factors to overcome the data sparsity, especially for out-of-town users. Our proposed the GTSCP supports two recommendation scenarios in a joint model, i.e., home-town recommendation and out-of-town recommendation. Experimental results show that GTSCP achieves significantly superior recommendation quality compared to other state-of-the-art POI recommendation techniques.