Chinese in Georgia

In the two decades after independence, Georgia\u27s open economy and lax immigration policies have engendered, for the first time, immigration from far outside of the region. On the streets of Tbilisi, the most conspicuous of these migrants are from India, China, and the countries of Africa. Of those from India, a substantial number are students of medicine, or enrolled in other professional courses. Africans in Georgia are mostly driven by work opportunity with a few students in higher education institutions. Chinese immigrants, on the other hand, are almost entirely driven by economic opportunities. A modern Chinese presence in Georgia began in the 1990s with the beginning of Chinese state-owned investment ventures in the region, as well as a burgeoning restaurant scene. In 2000s, this expanded to encompass a trickle and then an influx of Chinese migrant shop owners and market vendors. The third wave of migration occurred in 2010 as a result of contract construction workers. As of today, there are around 1,000 Chinese now divided into five groups: specialists, businessmen, shopkeepers, contract workers, and those in the restaurant and catering sector. This paper will focus on the history of Chinese migrants in Georgia, driving causes, their level of integration (or lack thereof), vulnerabilities, and their status in Georgian society. It will also cover increasingly large-scale economic ventures in the country, the status of Chinese as a foreign language in Georgia, and the role of the PRC Embassy in the Chinese community

Experimental Investigation of Cavitation-Bubble-Induced Atomization

Improving the efficiency and lowering the emissions of internal combustion engines (ICE) has been drawing increased attention because climate change caused by greenhouse gases and the need to reduce emission harmful to human health, and stricter legislation on the emissions from liquid-fueled transportation is implemented. Design of the liquid fuel atomizer, which atomizes the fuel delivered into the combustion chamber by the fuel injection system, is important because a good atomization, which facilitates the evaporation of fuel and improves the fuel-air mixture, leads to higher efficiency and lower emissions of ICE. Cavitation which originates inside the atomizer nozzle, especially for the high injection pressure ones, has great influence on the liquid atomization. Aiming at providing validation data of cavitation bubble collapse induced spray break-up for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation, which is a powerful tool for understanding the mechanism of atomization and the design of fuel atomizers, a series of experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of individual cavitation bubbles generated by laser light.As a first step, to obtain information on laser-induced cavitation bubbles, an experiment was set up to investigate bubble formation in a glass cell (cuvette) filled with water. A pulsed Nd:YAG laser was used for bubble generation and for imaging, a schlieren set-up with an intensified CCD camera was used. Bubble generation, collapse, rebound, etc. was imaged, as well as the shock waves associated with these events. The relationship between bubble size and laser pulse energy was investigated.As the next step, bubbles were generated close to the free water surface in the cuvette. A dimensionless variable γ, which is the distance of the initial bubble centroid to the free surface divided by the maximum bubble radius, was implemented. The experimental cases covered a wide range of γ values (from 0.86 to 2.24). Time resolved shadowgrams of bubbles and free surface deformations were used to analyze the bubble and free surface dynamics in different cases. The results showed the typical surface deformations of a fast spike jet and a slower thick jet at low γ values (<1.0), merged spike and thick jets when the γ value was in certain higher range (~1.1-1.3), and just protrusions for even higher γ values.Finally, the effect of laser-induced cavitation bubbles on jet break-up was studied in a continuous flow rig, where the water exited from a transparent nozzle at various flow velocities. Shadow images of the jet or spray were recorded by a high-speed video camera. The break-ups induced by the bubble collapse, were measured, compared and analyzed under different injection pressures and bubble generating positions. The break-ups were categorized into small and massive breakups. The distance of the laser focus to the center axis of the nozzle was found to be the main factor that determined the type of break-up

An Investigation of ink usage in offset process printing

With the trend of sustainable printing in the print industry, reducing ink usage is considered a win-win solution for printers who are seeking sustainable printing strategies, and in the meantime, a way of cutting costs. This research focuses on ink-saving strategies for process printing using color management technology in the prepress stage. Two ink-saving methods are discussed in this research. First method is reducing the AIC (Average Ink Coverage) in graphic design. A case study is carried out and verifies the rule that high AIC requires more ink usage than low AIC does. However AIC and ink usage are not committed to a linear relationship; instead, AIC variance, as a result of different graphic designs, will be amplified in terms of ink usage variance during the printing. Graphic design significantly affects the ink usage. The second method is processing images that have same graphic designs, with optimized GCR (Gray Component Replacement). The result is high GCR results less AIC and ink usage; normal GCR results higher AIC and ink usage. AIC variance, as a result of different GCR levels, will be diminished in terms of the ink usage variance during the printing. GCR affects ink usage within a certain range. GCR does affect the ink usage, but not as significant and direct as graphic design does

Sino-Russian Geopolitical Rapprochement in Agri-Food Trade Relations

Food and agricultural trade has emerged as a battleground for geopolitics in recent years. Indeed, greater Sino-Russian trade cooperation in these sectors, amidst growing tensions with the West, raises the question of whether this sector is becoming a new focal point in their strategic partnership. But increased trade and market access belies the reality that the ties between the two powers in this sector are still marred by a range of tariff and non-tariff barriers and mismatched rather than complementary market profiles. Moreover, the sector replicates many of the asymmetric dynamics that mark the broader economic relationship. To the extent that the sector has increasingly been considered by authorities in strategic terms, however, Sino-Russian trade in this sector proves a useful indicator of both the possibilities and the limits of the broader bilateral rapprochement

Break-up induced by the collapse of laser-generated cavitation bubbles in a liquid jet

In this paper, the effect of artificially introduced cavitation bubble collapse on jet break-up was studied. Laser-induced cavitation bubbles were introduced into the jet at the exit of a scaled-up nozzle. Shadow images of the jet or spray were recorded by a high-speed video camera. The break-ups, which were induced by bubble collapse, were measured, compared and analyzed under different injection pressures and bubble generating positions. The study shows how the collapsing laser-induced cavitation bubbles outside of the nozzle affect jet break-up. The break-ups were categorized into two characteristic types. The distance of the laser focus to the center axis of the nozzle was found to be the main factor that determined the type of break-up

An analysis of surface breakup induced by laser-generated cavitation bubbles in a turbulent liquid jet

Abstract: The breakup of turbulent liquid jets by cavitation bubbles was investigated by artificially introducing them by focusing laser light into the jet. The induced surface deformations and ejected liquid structures were characterized using shadowgraphy with a high-speed video camera. The flow velocity of the liquid jets, which were ejected from a 6\ua0mm nozzle, was varied by adjusting the injection pressure from 1 to 5\ua0bar. Deionized water and a dipropylene glycol–water mixture were used to compare the breakup of liquid jets with different surface tension and viscosity. Surface deformation and breakup were found to occur in two stages. One was early breakup of liquid strings into tiny droplets. This was followed by the formation of a larger structure separating into ligaments and larger drops. Averaged time-resolved one-dimensional plots were introduced and implemented to analyze breakup statistically, to address the problem of shot-to-shot variations in the breakup due to the turbulent condition of the jets. Bubble-induced breakup could easily be distinguished from spontaneous breakup with this method. Both the position of bubble formation and the injection pressure had an influence on the scale of the breakup. The deformation of the jet surface was highly affected by shear. The structure of the deformation became less intact when the surface tension was lower. The sizes of the drops produced during the second stage of breakup were analyzed. The bubble-induced breakup produced smaller drops than the spontaneous breakup at lower injection pressure. As expected, lower surface tension favored droplet detachment and smaller sized drops. Graphic abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.

"Bilingual Expert" Can Find Translation Errors

Recent advances in statistical machine translation via the adoption of neural sequence-to-sequence models empower the end-to-end system to achieve state-of-the-art in many WMT benchmarks. The performance of such machine translation (MT) system is usually evaluated by automatic metric BLEU when the golden references are provided for validation. However, for model inference or production deployment, the golden references are prohibitively available or require expensive human annotation with bilingual expertise. In order to address the issue of quality evaluation (QE) without reference, we propose a general framework for automatic evaluation of translation output for most WMT quality evaluation tasks. We first build a conditional target language model with a novel bidirectional transformer, named neural bilingual expert model, which is pre-trained on large parallel corpora for feature extraction. For QE inference, the bilingual expert model can simultaneously produce the joint latent representation between the source and the translation, and real-valued measurements of possible erroneous tokens based on the prior knowledge learned from parallel data. Subsequently, the features will further be fed into a simple Bi-LSTM predictive model for quality evaluation. The experimental results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the quality estimation track of WMT 2017/2018.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

What causes Chinese listed firms to switch bank loan provider? Evidence from a survival analysis

This paper analyses the duration of firm-bank relationships and examines what drives firms in China to change from one bank loan provider to another. Matched data of firm-loan-duration to bank provides a unique panel data set of relationship between China's listed firms and their lending banks consisting of 2102 firms listed on both the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the period of 1996–2016. The Cox proportional hazard model is used to allow for a semiparametric hazard function after parametrically controlling for firm-specific financial factors, industry factors, ownership characteristics, internal management changes, and external macroeconomic changes. In addition, we explore the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, bank-financial and ownership characteristics. The main finding of this study is that in an environment of growing commercialisation of relationships the firm-bank relationship between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and state-owned banks (SOBs) in China remains super-stable. However, a change in the CEO of a firm even of a SOE increases the probability of the loan-provider being changed