China\u27s Judiciary: Current Issues

Since 1978, China has been engaged in a major reform program of economic modernization and growing openness to the outside world. The movement towards a market economy has resulted in impressive economic growth. It has also led to social change, including increasing pressure from segments of the population for greater participation in decision making and respect for human rights. The Chinese government is taking steps towards the rule of law. The legal reforms being carried out go beyond the economic sphere, and also gradually will affect the relationship between individuals and the state. Dialogue with the international community has broadened and deepened as well. In December 2001, China\u27s accession to the World Trade Organization further stimulated China\u27s reform of its legal systems and its interaction with international standards and norms. In this climate of prudent, cautious openness, China is beginning to build the platform for a better judicial system to protect lawful rights and to improve people\u27s confidence in social fairness and justice. Two elements are key to this objective: (l) movement toward a rule of law to codify and enforce rights, and (2) development of a civil society that provides checks and balances between citizens and government. There are still some shortcomings in the Chinese judicial system, however. The problems for China here are immense. The fundamental challenge is to establish a fair social order with an independent judiciary and support for human rights and economic development

Graphical user interface for interactive seismic ray tracing

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2005. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Eos 86 (2005): 90, doi:10.1029/2005EO090004.RayGUI 2.0 is a new version of RayGUI, a graphical user interface (GUI) to the seismic travel time modeling program of Zelt and Smith [1992]. It represents a significant improvement over the previous version of RayGUI (RayGUI 1.04; Loss et al.[1998a,1998b])

Effect of Processing Parameters and Temperature on Sliding Wear of H62 Copper Alloy Modified by Friction Stir Surface Processing

H62 copper alloy surface was modified by friction stir surface processing (FSSP) with different processing parameters including rotation rate, penetration depth and processing speed of the stirring tool under the room temperature (25 °C). Then friction and wear experiments of the surface were carried on at different temperatures. The experimental results show that (i) the specimens hardness initially increases with increasing the wear test temperature, then decreases with further increasing the temperature for fixed rotation rate and penetration depth, (ii) the wear resistances of the specimens decrease as the rotation rate of the stirring tool increases for fixed penetration depth and wear test temperature, (iii) the wear resistances of the specimens decrease as the penetration depth increases for constant rotation rate and wear test temperature. It is found that the optimal processing parameters are rotational speed 1200 rpm, temperature 100 ℃ and penetration depth 0.2 mm, respectively, which can greatly improve the wear performance of the H62 surface. Therefore, FSSP is a promising technique for modifying H62 copper alloy, which can be widely applied in ship manufacturing

CryptoMask : Privacy-preserving Face Recognition

Face recognition is a widely-used technique for identification or verification, where a verifier checks whether a face image matches anyone stored in a database. However, in scenarios where the database is held by a third party, such as a cloud server, both parties are concerned about data privacy. To address this concern, we propose CryptoMask, a privacy-preserving face recognition system that employs homomorphic encryption (HE) and secure multi-party computation (MPC). We design a new encoding strategy that leverages HE properties to reduce communication costs and enable efficient similarity checks between face images, without expensive homomorphic rotation. Additionally, CryptoMask leaks less information than existing state-of-the-art approaches. CryptoMask only reveals whether there is an image matching the query or not, whereas existing approaches additionally leak sensitive intermediate distance information. We conduct extensive experiments that demonstrate CryptoMask's superior performance in terms of computation and communication. For a database with 100 million 512-dimensional face vectors, CryptoMask offers ${\thicksim}5 \times$ and ${\thicksim}144 \times$ speed-ups in terms of computation and communication, respectively.Comment: 18 pages,3 figures, accepted by ICICS202

Quantitative Determination of the Critical Points of Mott Metal-Insulator Transition in Strongly Correlated Systems

The Mottness is at the heart of the essential physics in a strongly correlated system as many novel quantum phenomena occur at the metallic phase near the Mott metal-insulator transition. We investigate the Mott metal-insulator transition in a strongly-correlated electron system based on the Hubbard model. The on-site moment evaluated by the dynamical mean-field theory is employed to depict the Mott metal-insulator transition. Conveniently, the on-site moment is a more proper order parameter to quantitatively determine the Mott critical point, in comparison with the corresponding quasiparticle coherent weight. Moreover, this order parameter also gives a consistent description of two distinct forms of the critical points of the Mott metal-insulator transition.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Spray losses study of two pesticides by UASS in integrated rice–crayfish farming system and acute toxicity evaluation on Procambarus clarkii

IntroductionWhile the integrated rice-crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) farming system (IRCFS) is widely developing in China, the widespread use of Unmanned Aerial Spraying Systems (UASS) to protect rice from pests has led to potential pesticide risk for the crayfish in IRCFS. Therefore, it is crucial to examine UASS’s spray deposition and drift in IRCFS.MethodIn this study, we used the oligonucleotide sequence-tracking / dot-blotting (OSTDB) method to trace pesticide spraying. We collected detailed data not only on spray loss in the paddy fields, but also on spray drift in the breeding ditches caused by upwind and downwind spray areas. Additionally, pesticide residues in the breeding ditches were measured using LC-MS/MS by collecting water samples after pesticide application.ResultsThe data analysis indicated that the spray loss in the paddy field was significantly greater than that in the breeding ditches. The spray drift in the breeding ditches, caused by the upwind spray area, was seven times higher than that originating from the downwind spray area. Furthermore, the results also revealed that the bulk flow between the paddy fields and the breeding ditches contributed a substantial amount of pesticide residue to the water body in the breeding ditches. In addition, we investigated the acute toxicities of common insecticides using in paddy fields, including thiamethoxam (THI), chlorantraniliprole (CHI), THI·CHI-Mix and THI·CHI-WG.DiscussionThe results demonstrated that the spray losses and spray drift from UASS spray applications of these pesticides in IRCFS would not cause acute toxicity or death in crayfish. These findings provide important materials for establishing pesticide application standards and guiding the field testing of droplet deposition and drift in IRCFS

Secret-Shared Shuffle with Malicious Security

A secret-shared shuffle (SSS) protocol permutes a secret-shared vector using a random secret permutation. It has found numerous applications, however, it is also an expensive operation and often a performance bottleneck. Chase et al. (Asiacrypt\u2720) recently proposed a highly efficient semi-honest two-party SSS protocol known as the CGP protocol. It utilizes purposely designed pseudorandom correlations that facilitate a communication-efficient online shuffle phase. That said, semi-honest security is insufficient in many real-world application scenarios since shuffle is usually used for highly sensitive applications. Considering this, recent works (CANS\u2721, NDSS\u2722) attempted to enhance the CGP protocol with malicious security over authenticated secret sharings. However, we find that these attempts are flawed, and malicious adversaries can still learn private information via malicious deviations. This is demonstrated with concrete attacks proposed in this paper. Then the question is how to fill the gap and design a maliciously secure CGP shuffle protocol. We answer this question by introducing a set of lightweight correlation checks and a leakage reduction mechanism. Then we apply our techniques with authenticated secret sharings to achieve malicious security. Notably, our protocol, while increasing security, is also efficient. In the two-party setting, experiment results show that our maliciously secure protocol introduces an acceptable overhead compared to its semi-honest version and is more efficient than the state-of-the-art maliciously secure SSS protocol from the MP-SPDZ library

Experimental evaluation of UAV spraying for peach trees of different shapes: effects of operational parameters on droplet distribution

Small-scale plant protection Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are finding a wide range of applications in modern agriculture management (including aerial spraying) due to their high efficiency and flexibility, low labour/water requirement and no damage to crops and soils, which substantially increase agricultural productivity and sustainability. UAV operational parameters, however, have remarkable effects on droplet distribution in UAV spraying, which significantly affect pesticide utilization rate and treatment effectiveness. Therefore, this work aimed to evaluate the effects of UAV operational parameters on droplet distribution for orchard trees. In particular, peach, an important orchard tree worldwide, is investigated in this study, and two typical tree shapes were considered including Y-shape and Central Leader (CL)-shape. Specifically, UAV spraying experiments were performed in Shandong Institute of Pomology, Shandong Province, China, and gas powered helicopter 3WQF120-12 was chosen as the spraying platform. The UAV operational parameters under consideration include flight route (intra-row, inter-row), flight velocity (four levels: 2, 3, 4, 5 m/s), number of spray times (1 vs 2) and nozzle flow rate. Droplet coverage rate at different positions and layers, obtained by water sensitive papers, was chosen as the metric to evaluate spraying performance. Experimental results show that: (1) the spraying uniformity is different between Y-shape and CL-shape peach tree, where Y-shape exhibits uniformity for positions at inner or outer layers. CL-shape results in a higher droplet coverage at top layer while with uniformity at lower three layers; (2) for Y-shape peach, intra-row route obtained a higher droplet coverage rate; while for CL-shape peach inter-row not only saved spraying volume but also results in a higher droplet coverage rate; (3) for both tree shapes, the increase in flight velocity (2--5 m/s) significantly decreased the droplet coverage rate; (4) for Y-shape peach with doubling the number of spraying times decreased the spraying performance for unit area. (5) for CL-shape peach with intra-row route, increasing the nozzle flow rate from 1.8 to 2.2 $L\cdot min^{-1}$ can significantly improve the droplet coverage rate at top and bottom two layers. It is envisioned that this study can provide some fundamental guidance of the operation of small UAVs for the aerial spraying of peach trees and similar orchards

Analysis of the fine-mesh subgroup method and its feasible improvement

The fine-mesh subgroup method (FSM) is proposed to treat the significant resonance self-shielding effect both effectively and accurately. Similar to the ultra-fine group method, the fine-mesh subgroup method adopts a fine group structure on the resonance energy range to avoid the extra resonance interference effect correction. To improve the efficiency, on the one hand, the one-group micro-level optimization is adopted, so the subgroup fixed-source equations will be only calculated on a certain number of pre-determined subgroup levels, and an interpolation process is employed to obtain the actual subgroup flux. On the other hand, the slowing-down calculation is carried out for group condensation for multigroup transport calculation. The main theory and feasible improvements of the fine-mesh subgroup method are analyzed in this paper. Several pin cell and lattice problems are applied to test the performance of the fine-mesh subgroup method, and the particle swarm optimization method is adopted to find the better group structure. The numerical results indicate a good performance both for accuracy and efficiency

Reliability and validity of the Chinese post-discharge coping difficulty scale-parent form in parents of premature infants: a multicenter cross-sectional study

BackgroundThe measurement of the coping difficulties of parents of premature infants after discharge provides objective data for nurses to prepare infants for discharge. However, no Chinese scale has been developed to measure parents’ coping difficulties after their premature infants are discharged.AimTo translate the parent version of the Post-Discharge Coping Difficulty Scale (Ped-PDCDS) from English to Chinese and test the reliability and validity of the Chinese version in parents of premature infants.MethodsA multicenter cross-sectional study of 356 parents of premature infants was conducted. The scale was symmetrically translated. Validity was evaluated in terms of content, construct, discriminant, and convergent validities. Reliability was assessed in terms of internal consistency, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability.ResultsThe Chinese Ped-PDCDS finally contained 11 items. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses results showed that the Chinese Ped-PDCDS had three dimensions, and the convergent and discriminant validities of the scale was satisfactory. The overall reliability, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability of the scale was 0.85, 0.92, and 0.84, respectively.ConclusionThe Chinese Ped-PDCDS has adequate psychometric properties, and is an easy and appropriate instrument for measuring parents’ difficulty in coping with premature infants