Building Disaster Resilience from the Perspective of Disaster Prevention in Mass Relocation Communities in China : Two Case Examples in Sichuan

Sichuan Province, located in Southwest China, is frequently aff ected by natural disasters. Earthquakes above magnitude 6.0 struck Sichuan four times between years 2008 and 2020. After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, China began promoting community disaster risk reduction (DRR) projects at the national, provincial and municipal levels. This study examines the role of community DRR in building resilience to disasters by employing a qualitative approach. The methodology includes a literature review and semi-structured interviews with local residents, community officers, and volunteers. The fieldwork was conducted in two typical disaster prevention model communities: Erma, a relocation recovery community built on the concept of Build Back Better (BBB) after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in a disaster-affected area, and Xinfeng, a relocation community resulting from land readjustment in Chengdu City. The results of this study can be summarized as follows: First, due to the expansion of public space, DRR activities have been diversifi ed. Second, women and the elderly are becoming key stakeholders in the DRR community. However, it is diffi cult for people who do not belong to any organization to access disaster prevention information. Third, an increasing number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are participating in community eff orts. Fourth, the disaster prevention experience was also used in the COVID-19 pandemic response. Finally, this paper explains the relationship between self-help, mutual-help, and public help in community DRR

Quantifying the entanglement of quantum states under the geometry method

Quantifying entanglement is an important issue in quantum information theory. A straightforward method to quantify entanglement is to measure the distance between the entangled state and the separable sets under the fidelity, distance norm and so on. However, there are few results on the entanglement measure in terms of trace norm. Here we consider the entanglement measures through the trace norm in terms of three methods, the standard measure, the modified measure and the way proposed in [Phys. Rev. A 102. 062401 (2020)]. Specifically, we present some properties of the entanglement measures under the three methods. We also present the analytical expressions for a class of mixed states on two-qubit systems for the standard measure, the pure states for the modified measure and the mixed states on two-qubit systems for the method generated under the third way. And we also generalize the bipartite entanglement measure to a measure for the tripartite states

Neural Representation of Costs and Rewards in Decision Making.

Decision making is crucial for animal survival because the choices they make based on their current situation could influence their future rewards and could have potential costs. This review summarises recent developments in decision making, discusses how rewards and costs could be encoded in the brain, and how different options are compared such that the most optimal one is chosen. The reward and cost are mainly encoded by the forebrain structures (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex), and their value is updated through learning. The recent development on dopamine and the lateral habenula's role in reporting prediction errors and instructing learning will be emphasised. The importance of dopamine in powering the choice and accounting for the internal state will also be discussed. While the orbitofrontal cortex is the place where the state values are stored, the anterior cingulate cortex is more important when the environment is volatile. All of these structures compare different attributes of the task simultaneously, and the local competition of different neuronal networks allows for the selection of the most appropriate one. Therefore, the total value of the task is not encoded as a scalar quantity in the brain but, instead, as an emergent phenomenon, arising from the computation at different brain regions

Teaching Chinese characters to non-native speakers: A scoping review

The complexity of Chinese characters and the differences in learners’ cultural backgrounds make the process of teaching Chinese characters to non-native speakers of Chinese challenging. This review provides a comprehensive examination of five key strategies used in this instructional context: individualized instruction, contextualized instruction, technology-assisted instruction, innovative materials and resource development, and interdisciplinary integration. The ultimate approach to teaching non-native speakers of Chinese may come from the effective integration of these five strategies, so future research should focus on developing integrated instructional models that effectively combine these strategies. Further empirical research is also needed to verify the effectiveness of these strategies and to refine their implementation in different educational contexts