China's rural development challenges: land tenure reform and local institutional experimentation

Despite its unprecedented achievements in rural development, China remains a lower-middle income country. Unsound practices in farmland use and management have contributed to farmland loss, rising social conflicts and deprivation of the landless, which perpetuates rural poverty and land tenure insecurity of the weak and poor. The current hybrid land tenure systems characterized by collective ownership and individual use rights exert both positive and negative effects on land governance. China’s approach to land laws, policies and institutional reforms is characterized by inherent weaknesses which impede the strengthening of peasants’ rights and collective action in the process. With the simplistic assumption on the importance of land tenure to facilitate its transferability and scaled agricultural production, the current reform is undergoing a risky transformation that may backfire. In this sense, the Chinese approach bears resemblances with other countries whose experiences have failed the poor and have produced unintended consequences. In essence, the failure to take into account the livelihoods of the poor especially from sustainable land use perspectives exemplifies their pursuit of short-term gains rather than longer-term solutions to complex rural development issues. The challenges confronting China’s rural development require a renewed understanding of what constitutes an appropriate land tenure system that suits the local conditions of a given community. This needs a holistic study of what kind of land tenure systems exist in China, how they have worked in the past, what their problems are, and how they can be redressed to suit the needs of the poor. Zie: Summary

A lateral comb drive on PMMA by hot embossing technique

The objective of this work is to fabricate a laterally driven comb drive on low-cost poly-methyl-meth-acrylate (PMMA) by hot embossing technology. An electrostatic comb drive is one of the most important components in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). A comb drive can work as both a sensor and an actuator. Varieties of comb drives have been developed on silicon and poly-silicon materials. Hot embossing of polymers is a promising alternative to traditional silicon processes due to cost-reduction. It fulfills the demand for low-cost methods for high volume production of micro-components and micro-systems. The raw materials of polymer are relatively inexpensive. For the manufacturing, a complex micromachining step for the fabrication of mold insert is only necessary once. The desired microstructures can be batch-replicated using the master mold. In this work we used Finite Element Analysis software to design the structures. Several new process methods have been developed for achieving micro-mechanical structures with high aspect ratio on PMMA by hot embossing technique, forming mold insert by bonding a silicon-wafer mold onto a stainless steel disk, and releasing movable structures on PMMA material. The comb drive microstructure, consisting of 80 units of interdigitated parallel capacitors with the finger gap and width of both 10 μm, has been fabricated successfully under a typical condition of molding force of 35000 N at 135°C. The minimum feature size is 5 μm and the thickness of the structure is 60 μm, which makes the aspect ratio 12:1. The comb drive strokes 5 μm under a driven potential of 180 V. The natural frequency for the first mode of this comb drive is about 3 kHz. The testing results matched the simulation results very well. Several advantages of this technique are observed as follows: (1) the whole process is simple and low cost, (2) all the processes are performed under low temperature, below 140°C, (3) PMMA structure has less stress and higher flexibility compared with the counterpart on silicon or poly-silicon, and (4) the driven voltage is much lower compared with the silicon-based devices. The disadvantage of PMMA material is that it can not endure high temperature

Linearly Supporting Feature Extraction For Automated Estimation Of Stellar Atmospheric Parameters

We describe a scheme to extract linearly supporting (LSU) features from stellar spectra to automatically estimate the atmospheric parameters $T_{eff}$, log$~g$, and [Fe/H]. "Linearly supporting" means that the atmospheric parameters can be accurately estimated from the extracted features through a linear model. The successive steps of the process are as follow: first, decompose the spectrum using a wavelet packet (WP) and represent it by the derived decomposition coefficients; second, detect representative spectral features from the decomposition coefficients using the proposed method Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LARS)$_{bs}$; third, estimate the atmospheric parameters $T_{eff}$, log$~g$, and [Fe/H] from the detected features using a linear regression method. One prominent characteristic of this scheme is its ability to evaluate quantitatively the contribution of each detected feature to the atmospheric parameter estimate and also to trace back the physical significance of that feature. This work also shows that the usefulness of a component depends on both wavelength and frequency. The proposed scheme has been evaluated on both real spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)/SEGUE and synthetic spectra calculated from Kurucz's NEWODF models. On real spectra, we extracted 23 features to estimate $T_{eff}$, 62 features for log$~g$, and 68 features for [Fe/H]. Test consistencies between our estimates and those provided by the Spectroscopic Sarameter Pipeline of SDSS show that the mean absolute errors (MAEs) are 0.0062 dex for log$~T_{eff}$ (83 K for $T_{eff}$), 0.2345 dex for log$~g$, and 0.1564 dex for [Fe/H]. For the synthetic spectra, the MAE test accuracies are 0.0022 dex for log$~T_{eff}$ (32 K for $T_{eff}$), 0.0337 dex for log$~g$, and 0.0268 dex for [Fe/H].Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (accepted for publication

Polymer based tunneling sensor

A process for fabricating a polymer based circuit by the following steps. A mold of a design is formed through a lithography process. The design is transferred to a polymer substrate through a hot embossing process. A metal layer is then deposited over at least part of said design and at least one electrical lead is connected to said metal layer

Automatic emotion perception using eye movement information for E-Healthcare systems.

Facing the adolescents and detecting their emotional state is vital for promoting rehabilitation therapy within an E-Healthcare system. Focusing on a novel approach for a sensor-based E-Healthcare system, we propose an eye movement information-based emotion perception algorithm by collecting and analyzing electrooculography (EOG) signals and eye movement video synchronously. Specifically, we extract the time-frequency eye movement features by firstly applying the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) to raw multi-channel EOG signals. Subsequently, in order to integrate time domain eye movement features (i.e., saccade duration, fixation duration, and pupil diameter), we investigate two feature fusion strategies: feature level fusion (FLF) and decision level fusion (DLF). Recognition experiments have been also performed according to three emotional states: positive, neutral, and negative. The average accuracies are 88.64% (the FLF method) and 88.35% (the DLF with maximal rule method), respectively. Experimental results reveal that eye movement information can effectively reflect the emotional state of the adolescences, which provides a promising tool to improve the performance of the E-Healthcare system.Anhui Provincial Natural Science Research Project of Colleges and Universities Fund under Grant KJ2018A0008, Open Fund for Discipline Construction under Grant Institute of Physical Science and Information Technology in Anhui University, and National Natural Science Fund of China under Grant 61401002