Making sense of policy development of inclusive education for children with disabilities in China

Inclusion is integral to the education policy in countries across the world. In China, inclusion has been reaffirmed in recent policies as a priority in enhancing educational quality for disabled children. However, the growing scale of special schools and the increasing number of students enrolled seem to convey a conflicting message with inclusion. This paper critically examines the policy development from 1987 to 2023 concerning education for disabled children in China to make clearer sense of China’s inclusion agenda. The analysis highlights a policy vision where special schools are seen as key resources to enhance inclusive provisions and will continue to grow in scale in the short term as they transform to be an integral and inter-connected part within the wider education system rather than segregated settings, while Learning in Regular Classrooms and inclusion remain a primary objective and rationale underpinning the educational development for disabled children. This means a broader understanding of special education/schools in China is needed. The Chinese government has forged and embraced a unique, if not controversial approach that is adapted to suit the local contexts. This may set an example for the global community to explore localised strategies for inclusion to enhance education for all

Investigation of Voronoi diagram based Direction Choices Using Uni- and Bi-directional Trajectory Data

In a crowd, individuals make different motion choices such as "moving to destination", "following another pedestrian", and "making a detour". For the sake of convenience, the three direction choices are respectively called destination direction, following direction and detour direction in this paper. Here, it is found that the featured direction choices could be inspired by the shape characteristics of Voronoi diagram. To be specific, in the Voronoi cell of a pedestrian, the direction to a Voronoi node is regarded as a potential "detour" direction, and the direction perpendicular to a Voronoi link is regarded as a potential "following" direction. A pedestrian generally owns several alternative Voronoi nodes and Voronoi links in a Voronoi cell, and the optimal detour and following direction are determined by considering related factors such as deviation. Plus the destination direction which is directly pointing to the destination, the three basic direction choices are defined in a Voronoi cell. In order to evaluate the Voronoi diagram based basic directions, the empirical trajectory data in both uni- and bi-directional flow experiments are extracted. A time series method considering the step frequency is used to reduce the original trajectories' swaying phenomena which might disturb the recognition of actual forward direction. The deviations between the empirical velocity direction and the basic directions are investigated, and each velocity direction is classified into a basic direction or regarded as an inexplicable direction according to the deviations. The analysis results show that each basic direction could be a potential direction choice for a pedestrian. The combination of the three basic directions could cover most empirical velocity direction choices in both uni- and bi-directional flow experiments.Comment: 10pages, 12 figure

An Energy-aware Routing Mechanism for Latency-sensitive Traffics

With the rapid development of Internet technology and enhanced QoS requirements, network energy consumption has attracted more and more attentions due to the overprovision of network resources. Generally, energy saving can be achieved by sacrificed some performance. However, many popular applications require real-time or soft real-time QoS performance for attracting potential users, and existing technologies can hardly obtain satisfying tradeoffs between energy consumption and performance. In this paper, a novel energy-aware routing mechanism is presented with aiming at reducing the network energy consumption and maintaining satisfying QoS performance for these latency-sensitive applications. The proposed routing mechanism applies stochastic service model to calculate the latency-guarantee for any given network links. Based on such a quantitative latencyguarantee, we further propose a technique to decide whether a link should be powered down and how long it should be kept in power saving mode. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, and the results indicate that it can provide better QoS performance for those latency-sensitive traffics with improved energyefficiency