Public Interest Litigation in China

Este artículo presenta algunos ejemplos de demandas de Litigación del Interés Público (LIP) que han tenido lugar en China en los últimos años. También analiza el impacto de dichas demandas sobre la sociedad y las estrategias adoptadas por parte de las personas que más activamente han interpuesto demandas de LIP. Finalmente, el artículo reflexiona sobre el vínculo entre LIP y el activismo político y sobre el futuro de estas demandas en China.This paper will first present some examples of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) lawsuits in China in recent years. This is followed by an assessment of the impact of such lawsuits. It then describes the people who have been active in filing PIL lawsuits and their strategies. Finally, it discusses the link between PIL and political activism and the future prospect of PIL in China

Chascript: A Chinese interactive typographic drawing application

Chinese characters have a complex beauty as well as individual meanings. People, like artists and designers, are often drawn to this. But it is not easy for non-Chinese people to use these characters to design. This work explores how interactive multimedia can be utilized as a tool for users in type drawing. Divided in to four main sections, this thesis will offer general information about Chinese characters, will explain what stroke and stroke order is, will offer a pictograph form, and will allow the user to try and play with Chinese characters interactively in order to get the art work they want

Litigación de interés público en China

This paper will first present some examples of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) lawsuits in China in recent years. This is followed by an assessment of the impact of such lawsuits. It then describes the people who have been active in filing PIL lawsuits and their strategies. Finally, it discusses the link between PIL and political activism and the future prospect of PIL in China.Este artículo presenta algunos ejemplos de demandas de Litigación de Interés Público (LIP) que han tenido lugar en China en los últimos años. También analiza el impacto de dichas demandas sobre la sociedad y las estrategias adoptadas por parte de las personas que más activamente han interpuesto demandas de LIP. Finalmente, el artículo reflexiona sobre el vínculo entre LIP y el activismo político y sobre el futuro de estas demandas en China

The functioning and dysfunctioning of NGOs in transitional China: Change and continuity in state-society relations.

Despite the rapid development of NGOs in China in the last two decades and the growing interest in them in both academic and policy circles, research on Chinese NGOs has suffered from a lack of both detailed qualitative data and sophisticated analytical frameworks. The present thesis is an attempt to address both gaps in existing research. It draws on a large amount of information generated by in-depth case studies of NGOs, and it replaces the state-versus-society dichotomous framework that has underpinned most existing studies of Chinese NGOs with a new approach that disaggregates both the "state" and "society" and emphasizes their inter-penetration. The thesis challenges a number of existing analyses of Chinese NGOs. Contrary to common belief that Chinese NGOs lack autonomy from the state, it argues that many of them have in fact enjoyed a remarkable degree of de facto autonomy. Whilst Chinese NGOs are widely perceived as lacking many basic skills that urgently need to be developed by means of organizational capacity building programmes, the thesis suggests that many NGOs already possess sophisticated skills which may be different from those taught by standard NGO training programmes but which are well suited to the specific institutional context of transitional China. The thesis looks at how Chinese NGOs operate in this context and examines the key factors that have limited their usefulness both as service providers and as advocates for vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society. It concludes with some reflections on the evolution of state-society relations in post-reform China as revealed by this study of NGOs. It summarizes change and continuity in state-society relations in the notion of dependent autonomy. This means that social forces have gained substantial autonomy from the state, but they continue to depend on the state for various vital support and resources

VeRi3D: Generative Vertex-based Radiance Fields for 3D Controllable Human Image Synthesis

Unsupervised learning of 3D-aware generative adversarial networks has lately made much progress. Some recent work demonstrates promising results of learning human generative models using neural articulated radiance fields, yet their generalization ability and controllability lag behind parametric human models, i.e., they do not perform well when generalizing to novel pose/shape and are not part controllable. To solve these problems, we propose VeRi3D, a generative human vertex-based radiance field parameterized by vertices of the parametric human template, SMPL. We map each 3D point to the local coordinate system defined on its neighboring vertices, and use the corresponding vertex feature and local coordinates for mapping it to color and density values. We demonstrate that our simple approach allows for generating photorealistic human images with free control over camera pose, human pose, shape, as well as enabling part-level editing

Adaptive Virtual Impedance Droop Control Based on Consensus Control of Reactive Current

It is difficult to achieve accurate distribution of reactive power based on conventional droop control due to the line impedance mismatch in an islanded microgrid. An adaptive virtual impendence method based on consensus control of reactive current is proposed in this paper. A distributed control structure without the central controller has been established. In this structure, each distributed generation unit (DG) is an independent agent, one-way communication is used between the adjacent DGs, and the reactive power sharing is equivalent to a problem of reactive power current consensus. It has been proven that the system is asymptotically stable under the proposed control strategy. When the adjacent DG’s reactive power is not proportionally distributed, the current weight error term will generate a virtual impedance correction term through the proportional-integral controller based on the reactive current consensus control strategy, thus introducing adaptive virtual impedance to eliminate mismatches in output impedance between DGs. Reactive power auto-proportional distribution can be achieved without knowing the line impedance. At the same time, the power control loop is simplified and the virtual impedance compensation angle is employed to compensate the decreased reference voltage magnitude and varied phase angle due to the introduction of the virtual impedance, so the stability of the system can be improved. Finally, the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed strategy are verified by modeling analysis and microgrid simulations. Abstract It is difficult to achieve accurate distribution of reactive power based on conventional droop control due to the line impedance mismatch in an islanded microgrid. An adaptive virtual impendence method based on consensus control of reactive current is proposed in this paper. A distributed control structure without the central controller has been established. In this structure, each distributed generation unit (DG) is an independent agent, one-way communication is used between the adjacent DGs, and the reactive power sharing is equivalent to a problem of reactive power current consensus. It has been proven that the system is asymptotically stable under the proposed control strategy. When the adjacent DG’s reactive power is not proportionally distributed, the current weight error term will generate a virtual impedance correction term through the proportional-integral controller based on the reactive current consensus control strategy, thus introducing adaptive virtual impedance to eliminate mismatches in output impedance between DGs. Reactive power auto-proportional distribution can be achieved without knowing the line impedance. At the same time, the power control loop is simplified and the virtual impedance compensation angle is employed to compensate the decreased reference voltage magnitude and varied phase angle due to the introduction of the virtual impedance, so the stability of the system can be improved. Finally, the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed strategy are verified by modeling analysis and microgrid simulations

PanopticNeRF-360: Panoramic 3D-to-2D Label Transfer in Urban Scenes

Training perception systems for self-driving cars requires substantial annotations. However, manual labeling in 2D images is highly labor-intensive. While existing datasets provide rich annotations for pre-recorded sequences, they fall short in labeling rarely encountered viewpoints, potentially hampering the generalization ability for perception models. In this paper, we present PanopticNeRF-360, a novel approach that combines coarse 3D annotations with noisy 2D semantic cues to generate consistent panoptic labels and high-quality images from any viewpoint. Our key insight lies in exploiting the complementarity of 3D and 2D priors to mutually enhance geometry and semantics. Specifically, we propose to leverage noisy semantic and instance labels in both 3D and 2D spaces to guide geometry optimization. Simultaneously, the improved geometry assists in filtering noise present in the 3D and 2D annotations by merging them in 3D space via a learned semantic field. To further enhance appearance, we combine MLP and hash grids to yield hybrid scene features, striking a balance between high-frequency appearance and predominantly contiguous semantics. Our experiments demonstrate PanopticNeRF-360's state-of-the-art performance over existing label transfer methods on the challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset. Moreover, PanopticNeRF-360 enables omnidirectional rendering of high-fidelity, multi-view and spatiotemporally consistent appearance, semantic and instance labels. We make our code and data available at https://github.com/fuxiao0719/PanopticNeRFComment: Project page: http://fuxiao0719.github.io/projects/panopticnerf360/. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.1522

Effect of beam web bolt arrangement on catenary behaviour of moment connections

In a column-removal scenario for a building structure, the catenary action will play an essential role for the frame in resisting a progressive collapse. This paper investigates the catenary behaviour of welded unreinforced flangebolted web connections (i.e. WUF-B connection) in plane frames by means of full-scale testing and numerical simulation. Two different layouts of bolts at the beam web were considered, with four bolts arranged in one row or two rows in the two specimens, respectively. The results demonstrate that both specimens of the WUFB moment connection were able to develop an effective catenary action via the boltedweb following the primary flexural phase. The failure modes of the bolted web vary with different bolt arrangements under the catenary action. When all (four) bolts were arranged in one row, the lowest bolt bearing area on the web tends to be compressed to fracture before bolt tear-out failure occurs near the weld access hole. When the bolts were arranged in two rows, however, the shear tab cracked at the section across the bolt holes. The former failure mode is deemed to be more robust than the latter under a column removal scenario

Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentation

Large-scale training data with high-quality annotations is critical for training semantic and instance segmentation models. Unfortunately, pixel-wise annotation is labor-intensive and costly, raising the demand for more efficient labeling strategies. In this work, we present a novel 3D-to-2D label transfer method, Panoptic NeRF, which aims for obtaining per-pixel 2D semantic and instance labels from easy-to-obtain coarse 3D bounding primitives. Our method utilizes NeRF as a differentiable tool to unify coarse 3D annotations and 2D semantic cues transferred from existing datasets. We demonstrate that this combination allows for improved geometry guided by semantic information, enabling rendering of accurate semantic maps across multiple views. Furthermore, this fusion process resolves label ambiguity of the coarse 3D annotations and filters noise in the 2D predictions. By inferring in 3D space and rendering to 2D labels, our 2D semantic and instance labels are multi-view consistent by design. Experimental results show that Panoptic NeRF outperforms existing semantic and instance label transfer methods in terms of accuracy and multi-view consistency on challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset.Comment: Project page: https://fuxiao0719.github.io/projects/panopticnerf