Editorial

The present special feature focuses on utopian/dystopian literature in contemporary China. Why publish a special feature on literary representations of the utopian/dystopian in China Perspectives, a journal that focuses on Chinese political analysis? In the first place, utopia has always been a political issue, according to Fredric Jameson; or as Douwe Fokkema claims, “[u]topian fiction is arguably the most political of all literary genres and can be studied from a literary as well as a political point of view.” Utopia, named by Thomas More in the sixteenth century and repeatedly revived, reinvented, and reprogrammed by later reformers and revolutionaries, projects an ideal vision of human society that contrasts with the unsatisfying reality, and through literary imagination translates social criticism into a political and/or technological blueprint for a better world…

Slope stability analysis under seismic load by vector sum analysis method

AbstractThe vibration characteristics and dynamic responses of rock and soil under seismic load can be estimated with dynamic finite element method (DFEM). Combining with the DFEM, the vector sum analysis method (VSAM) is employed in seismic stability analysis of a slope in this paper. Different from other conventional methods, the VSAM is proposed based on the vector characteristic of force and current stress state of the slope. The dynamic stress state of the slope at any moment under seismic load can be obtained by the DFEM, thus the factor of safety of the slope at any moment during earthquake can be easily obtained with the VSAM in consideration of the DFEM. Then, the global stability of the slope can be estimated on the basis of time-history curve of factor of safety and reliability theory. The VSAM is applied to a homogeneous slope under seismic load. The factor of safety of the slope is 1.30 under gravity only and the dynamic factor of safety under seismic load is 1.21. The calculating results show that the dynamic characteristics and stability state of the slope with input ground motion can be actually analyzed. It is believed that the VSAM is a feasible and practical approach to estimate the dynamic stability of slopes under seismic load

Is I-Voting I-Llegal?

The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent racial discrimination in all voting booths. Does the existence of a racial digital divide make Internet elections for public office merely a computer geek\u27s pipe dream? Or can i-voting withstand scrutiny under the current state of the law? This i-Brief will consider the current state of the law, and whether disproportionate benefits will be enough to stop this extension of technology dead in its tracks

Receding Horizon Trajectory Optimization with Terminal Impact Specifications

The trajectory optimization problem subject to terminal impact time and angle specifications can be reformulated as a nonlinear programming problem using the Gauss pseudospectral method. The cost function of the trajectory optimization problem is modified to reduce the terminal control energy. A receding horizon optimization strategy is implemented to reject the errors caused by the motion of a surface target. Several simulations were performed to validate the proposed method via the C programming language. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and that the real-time requirement can be easily achieved if the C programming language is used to realize it

Does Internet use connect smallholder farmers to a healthy diet? Evidence from rural China

IntroductionUndernutrition and micronutrient malnutrition remain problems of significant magnitude among small-scale subsistence farmers, posing a serious threat to their health and well-being. Developing a healthy diet can effectively reduce this threat. Fortunately, the Internet can speed up the process.MethodsBased on survey data from 5,114 farm households in nine provinces in China, this study quantitatively assesses the impact of Internet use on the dietary quality of smallholder farmers using OLS regression models and PSM models.Results/Discussion(1) Internet use can significantly contribute to dietary diversity and dietary rationality among smallholder farmers, thus optimizing their dietary structure. (2) Internet use significantly increased the average consumption amounts of milk and its products (2.9 g), fruits (21.5 g), eggs (7.5 g), and vegetables (27.1 g), while also decreasing the intake of salts (1.5 g) and oil (3.8 g). (3) The pull of internet use to improve diet quality is more significant for smallholder households with lower levels of education, older heads of households, and higher household incomes. (4) A possible mechanism is that Internet use increases household income and information access skills of rural residents, thus improving their dietary quality. In summary, governments should further promote Internet penetration in rural areas for health purposes

Study on compressing principle of the fresh municipal solid waste

Compression garbage trucks mainly work on fresh municipal solid waste (MSW), while fresh MSW has complex composition, high compressibility, high water content. Less research has been done about fresh MSW. Its uncertain mechanical property limits the simulation of garbage compression process, thereby limits the compressor structure analysis and optimization for compression garbage trucks. In order to obtain the mechanical properties of fresh MSW, a special test device combining the direct shear test with the confined compression test was designed, manufactured and assembled. A total fifteen tests from four batches fresh MSW were conducted with the special test devices. And the Duncan-Chang constitutive model parameters by summarizing and organizing test data. Finally, the confined compression test was simulated with the constitutive model, and the constitutive model parameters was verified. The research provides a basis for the simulation of garbage compression process of the compression garbage truck

EViT: An Eagle Vision Transformer with Bi-Fovea Self-Attention

Thanks to the advancement of deep learning technology, vision transformer has demonstrated competitive performance in various computer vision tasks. Unfortunately, vision transformer still faces some challenges such as high computational complexity and absence of desirable inductive bias. To alleviate these problems, a novel Bi-Fovea Self-Attention (BFSA) is proposed, inspired by the physiological structure and characteristics of bi-fovea vision in eagle eyes. This BFSA can simulate the shallow fovea and deep fovea functions of eagle vision, enable the network to extract feature representations of targets from coarse to fine, facilitate the interaction of multi-scale feature representations. Additionally, a Bionic Eagle Vision (BEV) block based on BFSA is designed in this study. It combines the advantages of CNNs and Vision Transformers to enhance the ability of global and local feature representations of networks. Furthermore, a unified and efficient general pyramid backbone network family is developed by stacking the BEV blocks in this study, called Eagle Vision Transformers (EViTs). Experimental results on various computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation and other transfer learning tasks show that the proposed EViTs perform effectively by comparing with the baselines under same model size and exhibit higher speed on graphics processing unit than other models. Code is available at https://github.com/nkusyl/EViT.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Editorial

The present special feature focuses on utopian/dystopian literature in contemporary China. Why publish a special feature on literary representations of the utopian/dystopian in China Perspectives, a journal that focuses on Chinese political analysis? In the first place, utopia has always been a political issue, according to Fredric Jameson; or as Douwe Fokkema claims, “[u]topian fiction is arguably the most political of all literary genres and can be studied from a literary as well as a political point of view.” Utopia, named by Thomas More in the sixteenth century and repeatedly revived, reinvented, and reprogrammed by later reformers and revolutionaries, projects an ideal vision of human society that contrasts with the unsatisfying reality, and through literary imagination translates social criticism into a political and/or technological blueprint for a better world…

Box2Poly: Memory-Efficient Polygon Prediction of Arbitrarily Shaped and Rotated Text

Recently, Transformer-based text detection techniques have sought to predict polygons by encoding the coordinates of individual boundary vertices using distinct query features. However, this approach incurs a significant memory overhead and struggles to effectively capture the intricate relationships between vertices belonging to the same instance. Consequently, irregular text layouts often lead to the prediction of outlined vertices, diminishing the quality of results. To address these challenges, we present an innovative approach rooted in Sparse R-CNN: a cascade decoding pipeline for polygon prediction. Our method ensures precision by iteratively refining polygon predictions, considering both the scale and location of preceding results. Leveraging this stabilized regression pipeline, even employing just a single feature vector to guide polygon instance regression yields promising detection results. Simultaneously, the leverage of instance-level feature proposal substantially enhances memory efficiency (>50% less vs. the state-of-the-art method DPText-DETR) and reduces inference speed (>40% less vs. DPText-DETR) with minor performance drop on benchmarks