A Qualitative Comparative Analysis on Chinese Non-Profit Organizations’ Rationalization

Existing researches about Chinese non-profit organizations' rationalization tended to lay particular stress on specific or "net" effects explained by a particular theoretical perspective, thereby rarely considered from the interrelation of various theoretical perspectives or from the configuration perspective and hereby summarizing the effects of different mechanisms in specific environments as well as their connections or alternatives. As an important methodology and tool which emphasizes combined action of multiple mechanisms, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) provides a possibility for the study. Through the meticulous sorting and analysis of 14 cases from three areas in Z Province of China by utilizing qualitative comparative analysis, this paper finds two important new findings. First, in terms of facilitating the rationalization of non-profit organizations, the mechanisms of competition, resource, and system are not simply replaceable by each other but complementary in many cases; especially, accordingly configurations are formed between system-related mechanism and resource mechanism and between system-related mechanism and competition mechanism, which constructs the critical path of Chinese non-profit organizations' rationalization. Second, the relationship among the different sub-mechanisms of the same theory is relatively complicated

High Slew Rate High-efficiency Dc-dc Converter

Active transient voltage compensator (ATVC) has been proposed to improve VR transient response at high slew rate load, which engages in transient periods operating in MHZ to inject high slew rate current in step up load and recovers energy in step down load. Main VR operates in low switching frequency mainly providing DC current. Parallel ATVC has largely reduced conduction and switching losses. Parallel ATVC also reduces the number of VR bulk capacitors. Combined linear and adaptive nonlinear control has been proposed to reduce delay times in the actual controller, which injects one nonlinear signal in transient periods and simplifies the linear controller design. Switching mode current compensator with nonlinear control in secondary side is proposed to eliminate the effect of opotocoupler, which reduces response times and simplifies the linear controller design in isolated DC-DC converters. A novel control method has been carried out in two-stage isolated DC-DC converter to simplify the control scheme and improve the transient response, allowing for high duty cycle operation and large step-down voltage ratio with high efficiency. A balancing winding network composed of small power rating components is used to mitigate the double pole-zero effect in complementary-controlled isolated DC-DC converter, which simplifies the linear control design and improves the transient response without delay time. A parallel post regulator (PPR) is proposed for wide range input isolated DC-DC converter with secondary side control, which provides small part of output power and most of them are handled by unregulated rectifier with high efficiency. PPR is easy to achieve ZVS in primary side both in wide range input and full load range due to 0.5 duty cycle. PPR has reduced conduction loss and reduced voltage rating in the secondary side due to high turn ratio transformer, resulting in up to 8 percent efficiency improvement in the prototype compared to conventional methods

Improved Regret Bounds for Linear Adversarial MDPs via Linear Optimization

Learning Markov decision processes (MDP) in an adversarial environment has been a challenging problem. The problem becomes even more challenging with function approximation, since the underlying structure of the loss function and transition kernel are especially hard to estimate in a varying environment. In fact, the state-of-the-art results for linear adversarial MDP achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}(K^{6/7})$ ($K$ denotes the number of episodes), which admits a large room for improvement. In this paper, we investigate the problem with a new view, which reduces linear MDP into linear optimization by subtly setting the feature maps of the bandit arms of linear optimization. This new technique, under an exploratory assumption, yields an improved bound of $\tilde{O}(K^{4/5})$ for linear adversarial MDP without access to a transition simulator. The new view could be of independent interest for solving other MDP problems that possess a linear structure