De facto currency baskets of China and East Asian economies: The rising weights

We employ Bayesian method to estimate a time-varying coefficient version of the de facto currency basket model of Frankel and Wei (2007) for the RMB of China, using daily data from February 2005 to July 2011. We estimate jointly the implicit time-varying weights of all 11 currencies in the reference basket announced by the Chinese government. We find the dollar weight has been reduced and sometimes significantly smaller than one, but there is no evidence of systematic operation of a currency basket with discernable pattern of significant weights on other currencies. During specific periods, the reduced dollar weight has not been switched to other major international currencies, but to some East Asian currencies, which is hard to explain by trade importance to or trade competition with China. We examine currency baskets of these East Asian Economies, including major international currencies and the RMB in their baskets. We find an evident tendency of Malaysia and Singapore to increase the weights of RMB in their own currency baskets, and a steadily and significantly positive weight of RMB in the basket of Thailand. These evidences suggest that, the positive weights of some East Asian currencies in RMB currency basket during specific periods largely reflect the fact that these East Asia economies have been systematically placing greater weights on RMB under the new regime of RMB exchange rate.RMB currency basket; time-varying regressions; East Asia; China; US

Three-dimensional structure of the milky way dust: modeling of LAMOST data

We present a three-dimensional modeling of the Milky Way dust distribution by fitting the value-added star catalog of LAMOST spectral survey. The global dust distribution can be described by an exponential disk with scale-length of 3,192 pc and scale height of 103 pc. In this modeling, the Sun is located above the dust disk with a vertical distance of 23 pc. Besides the global smooth structure, two substructures around the solar position are also identified. The one located at $150^{\circ}<l<200^{\circ}$ and $-5^{\circ}<b<-30^{\circ}$ is consistent with the Gould Belt model of \citet{Gontcharov2009}, and the other one located at $140^{\circ}<l<165^{\circ}$ and $0^{\circ}<b<15^{\circ}$ is associated with the Camelopardalis molecular clouds.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure, accepted by Ap

A design visualization machine : an agile prototype for architectural plans on a finite grid

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-65).This thesis project proposes a rapid visualization machine that can produce agile prototypes of simple architectural plans on a finite grid system. While various visualization systems to demonstrate instantaneous three dimensional form generations have been implemented recently by automobile industries and artists, a small scale visualization machine for architectural planning purposes has not been tested. Through careful analysis of the minimalist architectural plans of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and research into the schematic plans of Palladian villas, it was determined that 1) fundamental structural components are the column and the wall, and 2) simple architectural plans can be well represented by a finite grid system on which those components are laid out. The proposed system is composed of repeatable, independent modular pieces; each houses one column unit and two wall units that can be extruded or restructured depending on the designs of the user. Those components are driven by servo motors which translate into agile movements to instantly reflect any change of layout a designer draws in the software. The current machine design with a 4 x 4 module grid can create a completely enclosed 3 x 3-grid plan and is able to visualize simple plans layouts. With the increased number of modules in the machine, a higher number of combinatorial plan schematics can be represented and more complex architectural plans can be visualized. The analysis of plans suggest a finite 12 x 12 module grid on the machine, or a 11 x 11-grid plan, is sufficient in the context of visualization for commonly practiced residential designs of architecture.by Yu Linlin Huang.S.B

High-Performance Fine Defect Detection in Artificial Leather Using Dual Feature Pool Object Detection

In this study, the structural problems of the YOLOv5 model were analyzed emphatically. Based on the characteristics of fine defects in artificial leather, four innovative structures, namely DFP, IFF, AMP, and EOS, were designed. These advancements led to the proposal of a high-performance artificial leather fine defect detection model named YOLOD. YOLOD demonstrated outstanding performance on the artificial leather defect dataset, achieving an impressive increase of 11.7% - 13.5% in AP_50 compared to YOLOv5, along with a significant reduction of 5.2% - 7.2% in the error detection rate. Moreover, YOLOD also exhibited remarkable performance on the general MS-COCO dataset, with an increase of 0.4% - 2.6% in AP compared to YOLOv5, and a rise of 2.5% - 4.1% in AP_S compared to YOLOv5. These results demonstrate the superiority of YOLOD in both artificial leather defect detection and general object detection tasks, making it a highly efficient and effective model for real-world applications

The Construction of a Community Long-term Care Model for Home-based Elderly Individuals

With rapidly aging populations, family care functions can become weakened, and community health services often lack unified standards. A standardized and professional community home-based long-term care model (CHLCM) for the elderly is urgently needed in many regions of China and in other countries. Here, we explored the indicators of the need for a CHLCM among elderly individuals, and we constructed a CHLCM. We created and distributed a questionnaire regarding the requirement of long-term care services, based on a literature review. The two-rounds Delphi method was used, involving 20 experts who were randomly selected from among the medical universities, community health service centers, and nursing homes in Nanning, Guangxi, China. The experts’ enthusiasm rates in the questionnaire’s two rounds were 95% and 100%, respectively. The authentic coefficient of the experts’ consulting was 0.857, and that of the experts’ academic level was 0.835; the judgement coefficient was 0.880 and the familiar coefficient was 0.855. The CHLCM includes service content and an evaluation. The coordination coefficients for the two primary, eight secondary, and 29 tertiary indicators were 0.200, 0.386, and 0.184, respectively (p<0.05). The experts’ enthusiasm and authority were high. The coordination of the experts’ agreement was sufficient, and the analysis results were reliable. The CHLCM includes 29 items that provide a foundation and references for the formulation of concrete indicators and subsequent research

The dominance of big teams in China's scientific output

Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams with both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country's scientific work is carried out by big/small teams. Here, using over 26 million publications from Web of Science, we find that China's research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers are done by big teams, China's drop in small team output is much steeper. As teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative works does not increase as much as that in other countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small team works than the National Science Foundation of U.S. (NSF) does, implying that big teams are more preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which urges a need to balance small and big teams

The dominance of big teams in china’s scientific output

Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams of both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country’s scientific work is carried out by big or small teams. Here, using over 26 million publications from Web of Science, we find that China’s research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers are written by big teams, China’s drop in small team output is much steeper. As teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative work does not increase as much as that in other countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small teams than the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States does, implying that big teams are preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which indicates a need to balance small and big teams. © 2020 Linlin Liu, Jianfei Yu, Junming Huang, Feng Xia, and Tao Jia. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license