Hopf Bifurcation and Chaos in a Single Inertial Neuron Model with Time Delay

A delayed differential equation modelling a single neuron with inertial term is considered in this paper. Hopf bifurcation is studied by using the normal form theory of retarded functional differential equations. When adopting a nonmonotonic activation function, chaotic behavior is observed. Phase plots, waveform plots, and power spectra are presented to confirm the chaoticity.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Virtual Goods Recommendations in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds (VWs) are computer-simulated environments which allow users to create their own virtual character as an avatar. With the rapidly growing user volume in VWs, platform providers launch virtual goods in haste and stampede users to increase sales revenue. However, the rapidity of development incurs virtual unrelated items which will be difficult to remarket. It not only wastes virtual global companies’ intelligence resources, but also makes it difficult for users to find suitable virtual goods fit for their virtual home in daily virtual life. In the VWs, users decorate their houses, visit others’ homes, create families, host parties, and so forth. Users establish their social life circles through these activities. This research proposes a novel virtual goods recommendation method based on these social interactions. The contact strength and contact influence result from interactions with social neighbors and influence users’ buying intention. Our research highlights the importance of social interactions in virtual goods recommendation. The experiment’s data were retrieved from an online VW platform, and the results show that the proposed method, considering social interactions and social life circle, has better performance than existing recommendation methods

Development of a compact DFB laser interferometer for high-speed inline displacement measurement

A compact fiber laser interferometer, capable of precise displacement measurements, was devised using a 1550 nm DFB laser for frequency modulation up to 300 kHz. The system comprises a fiber laser, a fiber-optic interferometer, and a wavelength modulation system. The presented method offers nanometer-scale precision and incorporates a hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas cell for monitoring the laser's central wavelength. A technique to compensate for modulation depth has been developed to maintain a consistent modulation depth over extensive measurement ranges. Preliminary trials reveal a measurement bias of less than 40 nm achieved over a 300 mm range at a speed of 100 mm/s compared to a calibrated interferometer. This approach proves beneficial for high-precision measurements for inline semiconductor manufacturing processes

Transitional Justice in Taiwan: Changes and Challenges

Taiwan’s experience with transitional justice over the past three decades suggests that dealing with historical injustice is a dynamic and fluid process that is fundamentally shaped and constrained by the balance of power and socio-political reality in a particular transitional society. This Article provides a contextualized legal-political analysis of the evolution of Taiwan’s transitional justice regime, with special attention to its limits and challenges. Since Taiwan’s democratization began, the transitional justice project developed by the former authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) has been rather disproportionately focused on restorative over retributive mechanisms, with the main emphasis placed on reparations and apology and little consideration of truth recovery and individual accountability. But since the Democratic Progressive Party began to control the government and legislature in 2016, its new transitional justice initiatives have introduced significant changes, including, among others, investigating the KMT’s “illicit party assets” and removing authoritarian symbols such as Chiang Kai-shek’s statues, eliciting various contentions and contestations along the way. In our view, Taiwan is now confronted with profound challenges in developing a holistic, thoughtful transitional justice regime: fierce partisan politics that could interrupt progress at any time, conflation of transitional justice and identity politics, pending legal complications and a general distrust of the judiciary, and limited public engagement in transitional justice issues. Whether Taiwan can continue to thrive depends on how it grapples with these challenges in pursuit of justice and reconciliation that will strengthen and sustain tomorrow’s democratic Taiwan

Color-complexity enabled exhaustive color-dots identification and spatial patterns testing in images

Targeted color-dots with varying shapes and sizes in images are first exhaustively identified, and then their multiscale 2D geometric patterns are extracted for testing spatial uniformness in a progressive fashion. Based on color theory in physics, we develop a new color-identification algorithm relying on highly associative relations among the three color-coordinates: RGB or HSV. Such high associations critically imply low color-complexity of a color image, and renders potentials of exhaustive identification of targeted color-dots of all shapes and sizes. Via heterogeneous shaded regions and lighting conditions, our algorithm is shown being robust, practical and efficient comparing with the popular Contour and OpenCV approaches. Upon all identified color-pixels, we form color-dots as individually connected networks with shapes and sizes. We construct minimum spanning trees (MST) as spatial geometries of dot-collectives of various size-scales. Given a size-scale, the distribution of distances between immediate neighbors in the observed MST is extracted, so do many simulated MSTs under the spatial uniformness assumption. We devise a new algorithm for testing 2D spatial uniformness based on a Hierarchical clustering tree upon all involving MSTs. Our developments are illustrated on images obtained by mimicking chemical spraying via drone in Precision Agriculture.Comment: 21 pages, 21 figure