Component Trade and China?s Global Economic Integration

China?s engagement in the so-called international fragmentation of production ? namely ?cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated manufacturing industries? ? has become an increasingly important form of its economic integration into the regional as well as the global economy. The paper presents the recent trend of trade in parts and components between China and its main trading partners. Applying an adjusted gravity modelling method, the paper explores how China?s pattern of trade in parts and components is being determined. The paper found that China?s rapid economic growth, increasing market size and economies of scale, foreign direct investment and infrastructure development including transportation and telecommunications are important factors in explaining China?s rapid increase of bilateral trade in parts and components with its trading partners. The paper also found that the spatial distance and transportation costs have significant negative impacts on China?s trade of parts and components suggesting that the reduction in transportation costs by technological innovation and investment could enhance trade in parts and components, and thereby deepen the process of international specialization involving China and its main trading partners. The paper argues that given the prospects of the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, its current and planned massive investments in R&D and in infrastructure, its continual policies in attracting FDI and its rapid move towards liberalizing its services sectors including its financial sectors, the scope for China and its trading partners to benefit from the process of international fragmentation of production is tremendous.component trade, international fragmentation of production, gravity model

Analyzing the impact of storage shortage on data availability in decentralized online social networks

Maintaining data availability is one of the biggest challenges in decentralized online social networks (DOSNs). The existing work often assumes that the friends of a user can always contribute to the sufficient storage capacity to store all data. However, this assumption is not always true in today’s online social networks (OSNs) due to the fact that nowadays the users often use the smart mobile devices to access the OSNs. The limitation of the storage capacity in mobile devices may jeopardize the data availability. Therefore, it is desired to know the relation between the storage capacity contributed by the OSN users and the level of data availability that the OSNs can achieve. This paper addresses this issue. In this paper, the data availability model over storage capacity is established. Further, a novel method is proposed to predict the data availability on the fly. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the data availability model and the on-the-fly prediction

BAG : Managing GPU as buffer cache in operating systems

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of BAG, a system that manages GPU as the buffer cache in operating systems. Unlike previous uses of GPUs, which have focused on the computational capabilities of GPUs, BAG is designed to explore a new dimension in managing GPUs in heterogeneous systems where the GPU memory is an exploitable but always ignored resource. With the carefully designed data structures and algorithms, such as concurrent hashtable, log-structured data store for the management of GPU memory, and highly-parallel GPU kernels for garbage collection, BAG achieves good performance under various workloads. In addition, leveraging the existing abstraction of the operating system not only makes the implementation of BAG non-intrusive, but also facilitates the system deployment

CofiFab: Coarse-to-fine fabrication of large 3D objects

This paper presents CofiFab, a coarse-to-fine 3D fabrication solution, which combines 3D printing and 2D laser cutting for cost-effective fabrication of large objects at lower cost and higher speed. Our key approach is to first build coarse internal base structures within the given 3D object using laser-cutting, and then attach thin 3D-printed parts, as an external shell, onto the base to recover the fine surface details. CofiFab achieves this with three novel algorithmic components. First, we formulate an optimization model to compute fabricatable polyhedrons of maximized volume, as the geometry of the internal base. Second, we devise a new interlocking scheme to tightly connect laser-cut parts into a strong internal base, by iteratively building a network of nonorthogonal interlocking joints and locking parts around polyhedral corners. Lastly, we also optimize the partitioning of the external object shell into 3D-printable parts, while saving support material and avoiding overhangs. These components also consider aesthetics, stability and balancing in addition to cost saving. As a result, CofiFab can efficiently produce large objects by assembly. To evaluate its effectiveness, we fabricate objects of varying shapes and sizes, where CofiFab significantly improves compared to previous methods

Research Paper No. 2008/101 Component Trade and China’s Global Economic Integration

China’s engagement in the so-called international fragmentation of production – namely ‘cross-border dispersion of component production/assembly within vertically integrated manufacturing industries ’ – has become an increasingly important form of its economic integration into the regional as well as the global economy. The paper presents the recent trend of trade in parts and components between China and its main trading partners. Applying an adjusted gravity modelling method, the paper explores how China’s pattern of trade in parts and components is being determined. The paper found that China’s rapid economic growth, increasing market size and economies of scale, foreign direct investment and infrastructure development including transportation and telecommunications are important factors in explaining China’s rapid increase of bilateral trade in parts and components with its trading partners. The paper also found that the spatial distance and transportation costs have significant negative impacts on China’s trade of parts and components suggesting that the reduction in transportation costs by technological innovation and investment could enhance trade in parts and components, and thereby deepen the process of international specialization involving China and its main trading partners. The paper argues that given the prospects of the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, its current and planned massive investments in R&D and in infrastructure, its continual policies in attracting FDI and its rapid move towards liberalizing its services sectors including its financial sectors, the scope for China and its trading partners to benefit from the process of international fragmentation of production is tremendous

Allocating Limited Resources to Protect a Massive Number of Targets using a Game Theoretic Model

Resource allocation is the process of optimizing the rare resources. In the area of security, how to allocate limited resources to protect a massive number of targets is especially challenging. This paper addresses this resource allocation issue by constructing a game theoretic model. A defender and an attacker are players and the interaction is formulated as a trade-off between protecting targets and consuming resources. The action cost which is a necessary role of consuming resource, is considered in the proposed model. Additionally, a bounded rational behavior model (Quantal Response, QR), which simulates a human attacker of the adversarial nature, is introduced to improve the proposed model. To validate the proposed model, we compare the different utility functions and resource allocation strategies. The comparison results suggest that the proposed resource allocation strategy performs better than others in the perspective of utility and resource effectiveness.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 41 reference

Countertraveling waves in rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection

Linear and nonlinear counter-traveling waves in a fluid-filled annular cylinder with realistic no-slip boundary conditions uniformly heated from below and rotating about a vertical axis are investigated. When the gap of the annular cylinder is moderate, there exist two three-dimensional traveling waves driven by convective instabilities: a retrograde mode localized near the outer sidewall and a prograde mode adjacent to the inner sidewall with a different wave number, frequency and critical Rayleigh number. It is found that the retrogradely propagating mode is always more unstable and is marked by a larger azimuthal wave number. When the Rayleigh number is sufficiently large, both the counter-traveling modes can be excited and nonlinearly interacting, leading to an unusual nonlinear phenomenon in rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection