A Primer on China’s Bribery Regulation: Status Quo, Development, Drawback, and Proposed Solution

Today, the People\u27s Republic of China (hereinafter China) has become one of the largest economic entities in the world. With the development of China, the problem of bribery has imposed more negative impacts on China’s government and market. This paper is on China’s current regulations on bribery. This paper is divided into six parts: (1) Introduction to China’s legal regulation on bribery; (2) Who can be bribed in China? (3) What constitutes bribery under China laws? (4) Defenses against bribery charges; (5) Punishment and Liability (Criminal Punishment, Administrative Punishment, and Private Action); and (6) Drawbacks and Proposals for China’s anti-bribery laws. I use a comparative-study methodology in this paper to compare China’s anti-bribery laws with International anti-bribery conventions (like United Nations Convention Against Corruption and other countries similar laws (like Foreign Corruption Practice Act, UK Anti-Bribery Act 2010, California Unfair Competition Law, etc.). Based the comparison, I identify China’s anti-bribery laws’ disadvantages in legal system and legal practice, and provide constructive advices

Two-dimensional atomic-scale ultrathin lateral heterostructures

Ultrathin lateral heterostructures of monolayer MoS2 and WS2 have successfully been realized with the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition method. Atomic-resolution HAADF-STEM observations have revealed that the junction widths of lateral heterostructures range from several nanometers to single-atom thickness, the thinnest heterojunction in theory. The interfaces are atomically flat with minimal mixing between MoS2 and WS2, originating from rapid and abrupt switching of the source supply. Due to one-dimensional interfaces and broken rotational symmetry, the resulting ultrathin lateral heterostructures, 1~2 mixed-dimensional structures, can show emergent optical/electronic properties. The MOCVD growth developed in this work allows us to access various ultrathin lateral heterostructures, leading to future exploration of their emergent properties absent in each component alone

Visual Navigation with Asynchronous Proximal Policy Optimization in Artificial Agents

Vanilla policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, leading to unstable policies during training, where the policy’s performance fluctuates drastically between iterations. To address this issue, we analyze the policy optimization process of the navigation method based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization. A variant navigation (asynchronous proximal policy optimization navigation, appoNav) is presented that can guarantee the policy monotonic improvement during the process of policy optimization. Our experiments are tested in DeepMind Lab, and the experimental results show that the artificial agents with appoNav perform better than the compared algorithm

Fatigue properties and S-N curve estimating of 316L stainless steel prepared by SLM

This paper investigates the fatigue properties of 316L stainless steel manufactured by selective laser melting technology (SLM) under hot-isostatic-pressing (HIP) heat-treatment. The fatigue tests of 316L specimens were carried out under pulse tensile cyclic loading to obtain the fatigue performance. To avoid falling into local optima and improve the convergence speed, the dynamic multiswarm particle swarm optimizer (DMS-PSO) algorithm was first introduced for parameter optimization of the three-parameter Weibull distribution model, and then the S-N curves based on the model were obtained. The S-N curves were highly consistent with the metallographic and fractographic phenomena. Besides, both the S-N curves and fractographic analysis show that the resistance of high-stress fatigue fracture is significantly improved by using HIP heat-treatment

Bending Properties of Mg Alloy Tailored Arc-Heat-Treated Blanks

Tailored heat-treated blank is a special kind of sheet, and the plastic forming ability can be improved. In this work, the poor room-temperature plasticity of a tailored magnesium alloy blank was address through arc heat treatment. The formability of the material was enhanced through local modification with arc pretreatment. The plasticity of the tailored arc-heat-treated blank was verified through the V-bending test. The microstructure and mechanical properties of the blank were tested, and the mechanisms underlying its improved deformability were analyzed. The bendability of the blank first increased and then decreased as heat input increased. The maximum V-bending ability of the arc-heat-treated blank increased by 88% relative to that of the untreated blank. Although springback decreased under increasing heat input, the local strength and elastic modulus of the alloy blank were equivalent to those of the base metal. This result indicated that the springback resistance of the material did not improve. The back of the blank treated under the optimal parameters comprised heat-affected zones with good plasticity. Recrystallization and grain growth occurred in the heat-affected zones. The blank exhibited reduced hardness and improved malleability. When the heat input was further increased, however, a semi-melting zone formed on the lower surface of the blank. The formation of this zone resulted in the precipitation of intermetallic compounds from the crystal phase and increased the hardness of the blank. It also decreased the plasticity and malleability of the blank

Fatigue properties and S-N curve estimating of 316L stainless steel prepared by SLM

This paper investigates the fatigue properties of 316L stainless steel manufactured by selective laser melting technology (SLM) under hot-isostatic-pressing (HIP) heat-treatment. The fatigue tests of 316L specimens were carried out under pulse tensile cyclic loading to obtain the fatigue performance. To avoid falling into local optima and improve the convergence speed, the dynamic multiswarm particle swarm optimizer (DMS-PSO) algorithm was first introduced for parameter optimization of the three-parameter Weibull distribution model, and then the S-N curves based on the model were obtained. The S-N curves were highly consistent with the metallographic and fractographic phenomena. Besides, both the S-N curves and fractographic analysis show that the resistance of high-stress fatigue fracture is significantly improved by using HIP heat-treatment

Characteristics of Breaking Wave Forces on Piles over a Permeable Seabed

Most offshore wind turbines are installed in shallow water and exposed to breaking waves. Previous numerical studies focusing on breaking wave forces generally ignored the seabed permeability. In this paper, a numerical model based on Volume-Averaged Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes equations (VARANS) is employed to reveal the process of a solitary wave interacting with a rigid pile over a permeable slope. Through applying the Forchheimer saturated drag equation, effects of seabed permeability on fluid motions are simulated. The reliability of the present model is verified by comparisons between experimentally obtained data and the numerical results. Further, 190 cases are simulated and the effects of different parameters on breaking wave forces on the pile are studied systematically. Results indicate that over a permeable seabed, the maximum breaking wave forces can occur not only when waves break just before the pile, but also when a “secondary wave wall” slams against the pile, after wave breaking. With the initial wave height increasing, breaking wave forces will increase, but the growth can decrease as the slope angle and permeability increase. For inclined piles around the wave breaking point, the maximum breaking wave force usually occurs with an inclination angle of α = −22.5° or 0°

Deep Transfer Learning for Wall Bulge Endpoints Regression for Autonomous Decoration Robots

Wall bulge maintenance and repairing is an essential task for autonomous decoration robots. The problem of the wall bulge endpoints regression refers to identifying the position of the wall bulge endpoints in spatial coordinates. This problem is of significant importance for autonomous decoration robots as these robots target automatic maintenance and repairing of wall bulges, they must automatically recognize where to start and stop the repairing process. Training deep convolutional neural networks for supervised computer vision tasks requires a large number of annotated images. Since gathering annotated images for this task is difficult, laborious, and time-consuming, we proposed a model for detecting the wall bulge endpoints position based on deep transfer learning. Our proposed model is capable of classifying the wall bulge into one of four classes according to its orientation. Deep transfer learning transfers the knowledge acquired by deep learning models trained for a specific task and domain to another different but related task and domain. Our proposed model is mainly based on deep convolutional neural networks pre-trained on large datasets for tasks of object classification and detection. We transfer the knowledge acquired by the model from these tasks to solve both problems in our new task

Friction Stir Welding of 5754 Aluminum Alloy with Cover Sheet

Friction stir welding can realize high-strength aluminum alloy joints. In this study, friction stir welding with cover sheet (CFSW) is proposed to solve the thinning caused by the tool shoulder and reduce the heat-affected zone. The microstructures and mechanical properties of CFWS were also studied. After the cover sheet was added, a reinforcement was formed on the weld surface, which compensated the thinning caused by the friction of the tool shoulder. As the cover absorbed heat from the shoulder, the width of the heat-affected zone of the welded sheet became smaller than the diameter of the shoulder. Without milling the cover sheet, the tensile strength of the 5754 aluminum alloy joint reached 94% of that of the base metal. The fracture position was the heat-affected zone of the forward-side weld joint. After the cover sheet was added, the stress concentration shifted from the thinning area of traditional friction stir welding to the outside of the welding seam