Thinking About Life: Being Balanced

My thesis work represents my thinking about life at present. It is influenced by Chinese culture and Chinese philosophy as well as my own experience. I was also inspired by the Yin Yang doctrine of Taosim. Everything is composed of a pair of contrary elements: positive and negative. Balance is the keyword of my life view currently. I believe that everyone\u27s life should be balanced. This means enjoying the positive parts and not resenting the negative parts because they are equally important in our lives. It is the negative element of life that enhances the positive element. I suggest experiencing both and trying to balance them, accept what life has to offer and follow the rules of nature. The mirror is the most appropriate material I found for expressing this concept. Outside the mirror, there is a positive world which is real and touchable, while inside it is a negative one that is unreal. It is the same as our lives. Each contains both positive and negative. In my thesis, I show my concept of both positive and negative in life through the positive and negative world in the mirror. I researched, developed and invented different methods of shaping and making mirrors for different purposes in my projects. In addition to mirror, I used materials such as steel, silver and wood to complete my pieces. I learned new techniques and invented new methods as they became needed in my projects. This allowed me to express my concept freely instead of being limited by the techniques that I had already learned. In my thesis show I used not only traditional art forms such as sculpture and jewelry, but also installations, videos and interactive pieces. Audiences can understand my view of life from my thesis work or come to their own comprehension from my pieces. Artwork should reflect the present and arouse people to experience deep thinking. This is my view of art as well as my hope for my thesis work

Chinese land reform:property rights and land use

Is China’s “property rights” legislation, which distinguishes transferable “property rights” and inalienable “land ownership”, a new concept that is unknown before, or a pragmatic reversion to the individual property rights system abolished by the communist revolution? This study claims that the latter is a better exposition. As part of a “socialist market economy”, such a reversion is manifested in the legal recognition of the leasehold tenure after the “responsibility system” in agricultural production had proved to be successful. As the development of private property rights is a prelude to market transactions, land use rights reform in China should be conducive to the success of China’s economic liberalization policies, provided that there is a contemporaneous advance in the development of the polices and technical know-how, such as new land use right policy and land surveying

Grandet: A Unified, Economical Object Store for Web Applications

Web applications are getting ubiquitous every day because they offer many useful services to consumers and businesses. Many of these web applications are quite storage-intensive. Cloud computing offers attractive and economical choices for meeting their storage needs. Unfortunately, it remains challenging for developers to best leverage them to minimize cost. This paper presents Grandet, a storage system that greatly reduces storage cost for web applications deployed in the cloud. Grandet provides both a key-value interface and a file system interface, supporting a broad spectrum of web applications. Under the hood, it supports multiple heterogeneous stores, and unifies them by placing each data object at the store deemed most economical. We implemented Grandet on Amazon Web Services and evaluated Grandet on a diverse set of four popular open-source web applications. Our results show that Grandet reduces their cost by an average of 42.4%, and it is fast, scalable, and easy to use. The source code of Grandet is at http://columbia.github.io/grandet

Congestion Control Based on Multiple Model Adaptive Control

The congestion controller based on the multiple model adaptive control is designed for the network congestion in TCP/AQM network. As the conventional congestion control is sensitive to the variable network condition, the adaptive control method is adopted in our congestion control. The multiple model adaptive control is introduced in this paper based on the weight calculation instead of the parameter estimation in past adaptive control. The model set is composed by the dynamic model based on the fluid flow. And three “local” congestion controllers are nonlinear output feedback controller based on variable RTT, H2 output feedback controller, and proportional-integral controller, respectively. Ns-2 simulation results in section 4 indicate that the proposed algorithm restrains the congestion in variable network condition and maintains a high throughput together with a low packet drop ratio

COMPARISON OF SOME BIOMECHANICS PARAMETERS OF BREASTSTROKE SWIMMERS IN FLUME AND SWIMMING POOL

The purpose of this study was to compare some parameters of breaststroke swimmers in a swimming pool with those for breaststroke swimming in the flume, to search whether there is some difference between two test circumstances of swimming pool and flume in technical parameters. Four male breaststroke swimmers aged between16 and 18 years were studied. Subjects were required to swim in a 25m pool for best or familiar stroke length and tried to decrease stroke rate, and performed at three minute intervals at speeds ranging from 70% to 100% of the best performance of individuals. Subjects were familiarized to flume swimming on the day prior to be tested, then swam at the same speed based upon conversion from pool in swimming flume. According to testing we found that stroke rate, stroke length and efficiency index for pool and swimming flume at corresponding speeds were similar. Of course, there was as expected significant difference in the stroke rate and stroke length used between subjects to swim at the various speeds

A CASE STUDY: EVALUATING THE DIFFERENCE OF TECHNIQUE BY USING EFFICIENCY INDEX IN ELITE MALE FREESTYLE SWIMMERS

The purpose of the study was to evaluating the difference of technique by using efficiency index in elite male freestyle swimmers during their training periods. Two swimmers were selected to take a 6 x 50 m freestyle descend set in a 50 m swimming pool. The mean velocity (MV), stroke length (SL), stroke cycle (Se), efficiency index (El) and concentration of blood lactate (BL) were measured and compared to illuminate the difference of swimming technique and its impact on the performance level. According to previous and present studies, efficiency index is a useful measurement to evaluate the efficiency of the technique of swimmers. From limited number of subjects in the study, we speculated that the most effective intensity of improving efficiency of swimming technique is a little bit higher than anaerobic threshold

Ground Plane Matters: Picking Up Ground Plane Prior in Monocular 3D Object Detection

The ground plane prior is a very informative geometry clue in monocular 3D object detection (M3OD). However, it has been neglected by most mainstream methods. In this paper, we identify two key factors that limit the applicability of ground plane prior: the projection point localization issue and the ground plane tilt issue. To pick up the ground plane prior for M3OD, we propose a Ground Plane Enhanced Network (GPENet) which resolves both issues at one go. For the projection point localization issue, instead of using the bottom vertices or bottom center of the 3D bounding box (BBox), we leverage the object's ground contact points, which are explicit pixels in the image and easy for the neural network to detect. For the ground plane tilt problem, our GPENet estimates the horizon line in the image and derives a novel mathematical expression to accurately estimate the ground plane equation. An unsupervised vertical edge mining algorithm is also proposed to address the occlusion of the horizon line. Furthermore, we design a novel 3D bounding box deduction method based on a dynamic back projection algorithm, which could take advantage of the accurate contact points and the ground plane equation. Additionally, using only M3OD labels, contact point and horizon line pseudo labels can be easily generated with NO extra data collection and label annotation cost. Extensive experiments on the popular KITTI benchmark show that our GPENet can outperform other methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance, well demonstrating the effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed approach. Moreover, our GPENet works better than other methods in cross-dataset evaluation on the nuScenes dataset. Our code and models will be published.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Making Lock-free Data Structures Verifiable with Artificial Transactions

Among all classes of parallel programming abstractions, lock-free data structures are considered one of the most scalable and efficient because of their fine-grained style of synchronization. However, they are also challenging for developers and tools to verify because of the huge number of possible interleavings that result from fine-grained synchronizations. This paper address this fundamental problem between performance and verifiability of lock-free data structures. We present TXIT, a system that greatly reduces the set of possible interleavings by inserting transactions into the implementation of a lock-free data structure. We leverage hardware transactional memory support from Intel Haswell processors to enforce these artificial transactions. Evaluation on six popular lock-free data structures shows that TXIT makes it easy to verify lock-free data structures while incurring acceptable runtime overhead. Further analysis shows that two inefficiencies in Haswell are the largest contributors to this overhead

Enhance audio generation controllability through representation similarity regularization

This paper presents an innovative approach to enhance control over audio generation by emphasizing the alignment between audio and text representations during model training. In the context of language model-based audio generation, the model leverages input from both textual and audio token representations to predict subsequent audio tokens. However, the current configuration lacks explicit regularization to ensure the alignment between the chosen text representation and the language model's predictions. Our proposal involves the incorporation of audio and text representation regularization, particularly during the classifier-free guidance (CFG) phase, where the text condition is excluded from cross attention during language model training. The aim of this proposed representation regularization is to minimize discrepancies in audio and text similarity compared to other samples within the same training batch. Experimental results on both music and audio generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods lead to improvements in objective metrics for both audio and music generation, as well as an enhancement in the human perception for audio generation.Comment: 5 page