China's Wind-Power Generation Policy and Market Development

The Chinese government set its wind power generation capacity target at 5 million kW for 2010 and 30 million kW for 2020 in its Medium to Long-term Renewable Energy Development Plan released in September 2007. The 11th Five-Year Renewable Energy Development Plan, announced in March 2008, doubled the 2010 target to 10 million kW, attracting much attention from relevant parties. This report considers the challenges and future course of the Chinese wind power development policies and other background factoes behind the government's upward revision to the wind power genration capacity in the 11th Five-Year Renewable Energy Development Plan.China, wind-power, Energy, market developments

The Sadness and Hope of Wandering Chinese : Exploring Bai Xian Yong’s Literature Work Taipei People and New Yorker

departmental bulletin pape

Load-Embedment Response of Timber to Reversed Cyclic Load

One of the most important properties governing performance of timber joints containing dowel-type fasteners is the embedment response of wood under the action of a loaded fastener. Previous investigations on load-embedment behavior of wood focused almost exclusively on monotonic loading condit ons. This paper describes a program of work to investigate the influence of wood density, fastener diameter, and loading characteristics on stiffness properties, ultimate strength, and strength degradation of load-embedment response of wood-based material when subjected to reversed cyclic loads. Mathematical functions were developed to describe both the envelope and hysteresis loops of the load-embedment response. A comparison of the model parameters reveals that initial stiffness and ultimate load increase with loading rate, wood density, and fastener diameter. Strength degradation occurs under both monotonic and cyclic loading for solid wood. The degree of strength degradation increases with any increase in loading rate, wood density, and fastener diameter, and presence of preloading history. No strength degradation occurs in plywood under either monotonic or reversed cyclic load

Ricci Curvature of the Internet Topology

Analysis of Internet topologies has shown that the Internet topology has negative curvature, measured by Gromov's "thin triangle condition", which is tightly related to core congestion and route reliability. In this work we analyze the discrete Ricci curvature of the Internet, defined by Ollivier, Lin, etc. Ricci curvature measures whether local distances diverge or converge. It is a more local measure which allows us to understand the distribution of curvatures in the network. We show by various Internet data sets that the distribution of Ricci cuvature is spread out, suggesting the network topology to be non-homogenous. We also show that the Ricci curvature has interesting connections to both local measures such as node degree and clustering coefficient, global measures such as betweenness centrality and network connectivity, as well as auxilary attributes such as geographical distances. These observations add to the richness of geometric structures in complex network theory.Comment: 9 pages, 16 figures. To be appear on INFOCOM 201

Operational Modal Analysis of Super Tall Buildings by a Bayesian Approach

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has attracted increasing attention in the past few decades. It aims at monitoring the existing structures based on data acquired by different sensor networks. Modal identification is usually the first step in SHM, and it aims at identifying the modal parameters mainly including natural frequency, damping ratio and mode shape. Three different field tests can be used to collect data for modal identification, among which, ambient vibration test is the most convenient and economical one since it does not require to measure input information. This chapter will focus on the operational modal analysis (OMA), i.e. ambient modal identification of four super tall buildings by a Bayesian approach. A fast frequency domain Bayesian fast fourier transform (FFT) approach will be introduced for OMA. In addition to the most probable value (MPV) of modal parameters, the associated posterior uncertainty will be also investigated analytically. The field tests will be presented and the difficulties encountered will be discussed. Some basic dynamic characteristics will be investigated and discussed. The studies will provide baseline properties of these super tall buildings and provide a reference for future condition assessments

Do higher house prices indicate higher safety? Price volatility risk in major cities in Taiwan

This study investigates the housing market in Taiwan, an emerging market with relatively severe housing price inflation. Using data from the first quarter of 1991 to the second quarter of 2017 for four cities in Taiwan, this study compares the risk transmission and sources of their housing prices. The results reveal that Taipei−Taiwan’s main financial hub−has the highest house prices among the four cities but maintains the lowest risk. Thus, in terms of price volatility risk, Taipei has the safest housing market among the studied cities. Other studies have discussed the potential housing price bubbles in regions with high housing prices but have been unable to explain the continual overheating of the housing markets. The findings of this study reveal that despite having the highest housing prices and the greatest potential bubble, the Taipei housing market has the lowest fluctuation risk, making it the safest market in terms of housing investment. The results of this study imply that Taiwan’s economic development is excessively concentrated in Taipei, causing people to bear low returns and high risk when purchasing real estate in other areas, in turn increasing the continual imbalance between regional housing markets. First published online 12 March 202