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Energy consumption is one of the most crucial issues in the table grapes supply chain. However, the potential for energy conservation assessment is still limited because of the complexity of the process. The aim of this paper is to propose an energy conservation potential assessment method in order to increase energy consumption transparency and help managers take appropriate energy conservation measures to reduce the energy consumption in the table grapes supply chain. The conservation potential assessment in three kinds of the supply chain modes (the normal chain, the cold insulation chain and the cold chain), were realized by integrating the actual energy consumption investigated with the unified energy consumption per unit energy factor that represents the energy consumption throughout the entire product lifecycle. According to the comprehensive analysis of the energy consumption compared with the energy conservation potential in actual supply chain of table grapes, the proposed energy conservation potential assessment method could provide a unified method for evaluating the energy conservation potential in different supply chain mode of table grapes. The energy conversation potential in cold insulation chain, which was about 0.985, was the highest and that in cold chain, which was about 0.935, was the smallest. However, the cold chain was still the optimal supply chain for the table grapes because of the characteristics of the longest storage shelf life and the lowest quality decay, and the cold chain energy consumption would be further reduced by adopting the more advanced refrigeration and preservation technologies. The proposed energy conservation potential assessment method could be extended for other supply chain applications to evaluate their own energy conservation potential, and thus, reduce their energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-carbon production is one of the dominating issues in the sustainable development of the food industry with high energy consumption, especially in the table grapes cold chain. The aim of this paper is to propose a profit maximization strategy of table grapes cold chain by integrating the carbon footprint to improve the low-carbon production and sustainability of the cold chain system. The carbon footprint was evaluated by life cycle assessment (LCA) in entire cold chain system of table grapes, and the economic order quantity (EOQ) model was used to develop the profit maximization model with minimal carbon footprint and to maintain the optimal balance between stock and cost. The profit optimization performance, the sensitivity performance and the influencing factors of the decay rate, the carbon emission price, and the distance and carbon emission coefficient in refrigerated transport were analyzed according to the profit maximization model and the inventory data in actual cold chain investigated. The sensitivity performance analysis illustrated that the selling price had the highest sensitivity, and the carbon emission coefficient in storage had the lowest sensitivity. The comprehensive analysis results indicated that there is an optimal combination point between the economy and environment in actual cold chain, which not only reduced the carbon emission, but also had minimal impact on the profit in cold chain. The enterprises should integrate the carbon footprint cost into the profit maximization once the carbon emission tax is levied. The proposed strategy of the profit maximization with carbon footprint constraint is also suitable for improving profit maximization of other low-carbon supply chain applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The paper aims to understand consumers' perception and cognition toward table grapes, which focuses on the most important attributes, consumption consequences and personal values of grape consumption and the relations among them. Design/methodology/approach – The study related grape consumption with consumers based on Means-end chain analysis. The data were gathered with both laddering interviews (n=37) and questionnaire survey returned by 843 individuals in 31 provinces of China. The data were firstly processed by SPSS software and descriptive statistics was adopted to evaluate consumers' awareness. Furthermore, MECanalyst software was opted for, to construct the hierarchical relations of table grape consumption. Findings – The findings are that consumers consume grapes based on their functional cognition and sensory perception. The quality-orientated characters are deemed to be the most important grape attributes, healthy and practical function are the main expected benefits and desired values in table grape consumption. Practical implications – The findings can provide some implications to producers, administers and operators in the grape industry and inspire them to design products that will better satisfy consumers. Stakeholders in grape industries should take measures to inform consumers of grape benefits so as to increase grape consumption and expand the market. Originality/value – The paper fulfils the combinations of laddering interview and structured questionnaire to conduct the large-scale samples survey about consumers' perception based on MEC analysis. Findings from this study reinforce the importance of research into the relationship between products and consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimated the risk posed by hydroxybenzene in farm-raised Crucian carps (Carassius carassius) from a pond on a fish farm in Beijing, China, by analyzing a time-series of observed hydroxybenzene concentrations in fish within a culturing season in year 2006. We used the basic linear regression to model the data and forecast the probability of hydroxybenzene concentration in pond fish exceeding selected health effect criteria (the risk) using Monte Carlo simulation. The risk is highly correlated with the time a fish stays in the pond. The results indicate that the risk-days in pond relationship resembles a sigmoid function with an inflection point around 150 days. The resulting model can be used to demonstrate the benefit of improving water quality in terms of increased fish production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports research findings from a project funded by the European Commission. The research used case studies and surveys to identify gaps between Europe and China in the level of Internet adoption in fresh-produce supply chains. The project reveals barriers to Internet adoption in China in this industry, and employs a transnational knowledge transfer approach to reduce these barriers. In a wider context, the paper analyses the features involved in this knowledge transfer from a knowledge management perspective. Specifically, it outlines the main activities, key actors and the transfer stages involved. The insights gained help further our understanding of knowledge transfer in transnational contexts. The implications of these findings for academia, managers and policy makers are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain concepts acquisition is a key step of knowledge acquisition. In this paper we propose a new method for computing the relationship of domain concepts of China's vegetable supply chain using WordNet and Locally Linear Embedding (LEE) Arithmetic. WordNet is used to construct the high dimension description of the domain concepts and LLE is used to compute the relationship of concepts in low dimension space. The concepts description in the high dimension is in accord with human cognition and the low dimension relationship can reflect the degree of correlation of domain concepts clearly. A computer can deal with domain concepts directly after dimensional transformation. The experiment proves the efficiency of this method. The method can be expanded to deal with other examples of domain concepts acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variable rate pesticide application holds great potential in precision agriculture where application efficiency depends mainly on plant recognition. The segmentation of the plant from the background is key to plant recognition. The work presented in this paper is a real-time segmentation algorithm that was developed to improve the quality of plant segmentation under natural outdoor light conditions. The plant images were greyed with the colour features H, a*, 13 and Cr respectively, and the plant was segmented from the grey images with a threshold that was computed by an iterative method. Experiments showed that segmentation was generally of good quality if the background was bare soil. The quality of segmentation declines if the images are greyed by H and Cr, and the quality remains stable if they are greyed by a* and 13 when the background is complicated, and, especially with heavy shadows. With respect to segmentation speed, that greyed by Cr was the fastest and that greyed by a* was slowest amongst the four. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the impacts of alteration of agricultural domestic supports on state welfare adopting partiaI equilibrium theory. In order to find out the appropriate levels of agricultural domestic supports in China, a nonlinear programming approach was utilised, based on constraints of the annual financial budget and the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, to build an optimisation model for levels of China agricultural domestic support was built to aim at the maximum welfare. The result shows that the maximum levels of China "amber box" support are 50 billion dollars from welfare maximisation in the international agricultural product trade. The amber box support is about 174 billion RMB yuan according to the de minimis levels of China with 8.5%. The national annual budgetary expenditure for agriculture was 175.445 billion RMB yuan approximately in 2003, the amber box support of which was only 55.143 billion RMB yuan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-learning, as an innovative and alternative way of distance learning, provides a strong challenge to traditional learning with its unique advantage. This paper, on the diffusion of e-learning adoption in China, investigates people's perceptions and attitudes toward adopting e-learning, and explores the factors affecting the e-learning adoption behaviour from an innovation adoption perspective. Based on the model of Rogers' innovation adoption theory, every factor of perceived innovative attributes influencing the individual adoption behaviour, namely perceived relative advantage, perceived compatibility, perceived trialability, and perceived observability, will be analysed to test the relationship between the perceived innovative attributes and adoption intention of e-learning. The result shows that the four perceived innovative attributes do have certain influences on people's adoption of e-learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]