Some Results for Periodic Solutions of a Kind of Liénard Equation

We investigate the following Liénard-type p-Laplacian equation with a deviating argument (φp(x′t))′+f(xt)x′t+βtgxt-τt=e(t). Some new criteria for guaranteeing the existence and uniqueness of periodic solutions of this equation are given by using the Manásevich-Mawhin continuation theorem and some analysis techniques. Our results hold under weaker conditions than some known results from the literature and are more effective. In the last section, an illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the applications of the theoretical results

Rethinking the Strategic Dimensions of Smart Cities in China’s Industrial Park Developments: the Experience of Suzhou Industrial Park, Suzhou, China

Although smart cities have been widely recognised as a new tool to transform the industrial parks in China, planners have faced the complex challenge of how to translate the concept of smart cities into reality. While great emphasis has been put on the applicability of information and communication technologies (ICT) to smart city projects, there has been little analysis or evaluation in such planning process of smart cities. This is mainly because smart cities employ rather unclear definition and work scope. This research draws attention to the ‘strategic dimensions’ of smart cities in planning practice, which need to be considered in the transformation of industrial parks in China. The research uses a case study of smart city development in Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), Suzhou, China, which is widely acknowledged as one of the successful industrial park developments in China. SIP is in transition, and accommodating manufacturing industries is no longer the primary function of SIP. The research found that it is necessary to redirect the smart city strategy of SIP by mirroring the needs of the workers and local residents in SIP. It requires a transformation of traditional compartmentalised planning practices and the engagement of a wider range of players including those who were not previously involved in traditional practice

Análise dos principais erros cometidos por alunos chineses no uso dos modos indicativo e conjuntivo em português

O presente trabalho tem como objetivos investigar a diferença entre dois modos verbais em português, o indicativo e o conjuntivo, e analisar os principais erros que os aprendentes de português chineses cometem quando tentam distingui-los. Através de uma síntese da principal bibliografia sobre as diferenças entre o modo indicativo e o modo conjuntivo e da realização de um inquérito que inclui exercícios relacionados com o tema, refletiremos, especificamente, sobre as razões que poderão explicar a confusão no uso de ambos os modos verbais entre os estudantes chineses. Além disso, também será tida em conta a influência da língua materna (chinês) na aprendizagem do português, em particular, na (in)capacidade de os estudantes chineses distinguirem os modos. Esperamos que este trabalho possa auxiliar e estimular a aprendizagem dos estudantes chineses, mas também que proporcione um conjunto de sugestões de melhoria no ensino-aprendizagem deste tópico gramatical, mostrando que a distinção entre indicativo e conjuntivo não é, afinal, um problema sem solução.The present paper aims to investigate the difference between two verbal modes in Portuguese language, the indicative and the subjunctive, and to analyze the main mistakes that Chinese students make when trying to distinguish between them. By summarizing the main literature on the differences between the indicative and the conjunctive modes and by conducting a survey that includes exercises related to the topic, we will reflect, specifically, on the reasons that might explain the confusion in the use of both verb modes among Chinese students. Moreover, the influence of the mother tongue (Chinese) on learning Portuguese will also be taken into account, in particular, on the (in)ability of Chinese students to distinguish modes. We hope that this paper will help and stimulate the learning of Chinese students, but also that it will provide a set of suggestions for improvement in the teaching-learning of this grammatical topic, showing that the distinction between indicative and conjunctive is not, after all, an unsolved problem.Mestrado em Português Língua Estrangeira/Língua Segund

The border effects and choices of competitive strategies of the provincial natural gas markets in China

The provincial government competition is regarded as a key variable in China’s market-oriented reform to explore whether natural gas market will be integrated from segmentation. A spatial price equilibrium model with two markets is advanced to theoretically explain the competitive policy tools of environmental regulation and pipelines investment will increase resource rent but decrease congestion rent, and lead to more segmentation and integration of gas market, respectively. However, it is difficult to quantify the price differences resulted from these two rents on gas trade network. Therefore, the price difference is selected as the dependent variable of the border effect model, and a model-based analytical framework is put forward to empirically study the mechanism of the border effects from provincial competition. Results indicate that: (i) Natural gas physical network builds a trade network for provincial competition, and government uses policy tools to redistribute these two rents to change the spatial allocation relationships of natural gas on the trade network. (ii) Market segmentation by these two rents generates the border effects which display heterogeneity on gas trade network after provincial competitions in different ways. (iii) Once the margins of the two rents are changed by a node in the node-centered niche gas market when gas trade network evolves from a small world to free-world, the government will selfadaptively migrate its competitive strategies to maximize its marginal revenue. Consequently, the migration helps the niche market and the whole market to be integrated from segmentation. Some suggestions are given for China’s natural gas market integration.The border effects and choices of competitive strategies of the provincial natural gas markets in ChinapublishedVersio

Neo-sex chromosomes in the black muntjac recapitulate incipient evolution of mammalian sex chromosomes

The nascent neo-sex chromosomes of black muntjacs show that regulatory mutations could accelerate the degeneration of the Y chromosome and contribute to the further evolution of dosage compensation

Identifying the critical factors of transmission efficiency loss in China’s natural gas network

China’s market-oriented reform supports the sustainable development of energy mix and the low-carbon target, and natural gas has bridged the transition from traditional fossil energy to clean and renewable energies. The third-party access policy, launched recently by China’s natural gas market, drives the decouple between gas trade and transport. The decouple might lead to the transmission resources of physical network not optimally used, which is caused by the contractual arrangement between entry and exit capacities in commercial network. Aiming at this issue, we established a mathematical programming with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) to integrate the allocations of commercial capacity and physical flows, based on a minimum cost maximum flow problem (MCMF) abstracted from China’s existing gas network. The MPEC model was then used to strategically evaluate the transmission efficiency, and identify the critical factors of its loss. Our results show that there is transmission efficiency loss of China’s gas network from the shortage of geospatial gas supply and the invisible segmentation of gas network due to interdicted cost of pipeline, bottleneck of pipeline capacity and economic radius of gas supply chains to transport gas. Therefore, the critical factor of the loss to be identified will be helpful for strategically reducing the cost of decoupling gas trade and transport.publishedVersio

Multi-task Learning-based CSI Feedback Design in Multiple Scenarios

For frequency division duplex systems, the essential downlink channel state information (CSI) feedback includes the links of compression, feedback, decompression and reconstruction to reduce the feedback overhead. One efficient CSI feedback method is the Auto-Encoder (AE) structure based on deep learning, yet facing problems in actual deployments, such as selecting the deployment mode when deploying in a cell with multiple complex scenarios. Rather than designing an AE network with huge complexity to deal with CSI of all scenarios, a more realistic mode is to divide the CSI dataset by region/scenario and use multiple relatively simple AE networks to handle subregions' CSI. However, both require high memory capacity for user equipment (UE) and are not suitable for low-level devices. In this paper, we propose a new user-friendly-designed framework based on the latter multi-tasking mode. Via Multi-Task Learning, our framework, Single-encoder-to-Multiple-decoders (S-to-M), designs the multiple independent AEs into a joint architecture: a shared encoder corresponds to multiple task-specific decoders. We also complete our framework with GateNet as a classifier to enable the base station autonomously select the right task-specific decoder corresponding to the subregion. Experiments on the simulating multi-scenario CSI dataset demonstrate our proposed S-to-M's advantages over the other benchmark modes, i.e., significantly reducing the model complexity and the UE's memory consumptionComment: 31 pages, 13 figures, 10 Table

PPT: token-Pruned Pose Transformer for monocular and multi-view human pose estimation

Recently, the vision transformer and its variants have played an increasingly important role in both monocular and multi-view human pose estimation. Considering image patches as tokens, transformers can model the global dependencies within the entire image or across images from other views. However, global attention is computationally expensive. As a consequence, it is difficult to scale up these transformer-based methods to high-resolution features and many views. In this paper, we propose the token-Pruned Pose Transformer (PPT) for 2D human pose estimation, which can locate a rough human mask and performs self-attention only within selected tokens. Furthermore, we extend our PPT to multi-view human pose estimation. Built upon PPT, we propose a new cross-view fusion strategy, called human area fusion, which considers all human foreground pixels as corresponding candidates. Experimental results on COCO and MPII demonstrate that our PPT can match the accuracy of previous pose transformer methods while reducing the computation. Moreover, experiments on Human 3.6M and Ski-Pose demonstrate that our Multi-view PPT can efficiently fuse cues from multiple views and achieve new state-of-the-art results.Comment: ECCV 2022. Code is available at https://github.com/HowieMa/PP

Dislocation behaviors in nanotwinned diamond

Experimental results (Huang et al.) indicated that nanotwinned diamond (nt-diamond) has unprecedented hardness, whose physical mechanism has remained elusive. In this report, we categorize interaction modes between dislocations and twin planes in nt-diamond and calculate the associated reaction heat, activation energies, and barrier strength using molecular dynamics. On the basis of the Sachs model, twin thickness dependence of nt-diamond hardness is evaluated, which is in good agreement with the experimental data. We show that two factors contribute to the unusually high hardness of nt-diamond: high lattice frictional stress by the nature of carbon bonding in diamond and high athermal stress due to the Hall-Petch effect. Both factors stem from the low activation volumes and high activation energy for dislocation nucleation and propagation in diamond twin planes. This work provides new insights into hardening mechanisms in nt-diamond and will be helpful for developing new superhard materials in the future