International Hegemony in China\u27s Global Perspective: From Contradictory to Harmonious World

This paper will analyze the People Republic of China\u27s (PRC) position toward international hegemony in the context of the PRC\u27s global perspective since its establishment in 1949 until the end of 2018. The study aims to expose China\u27s attempts to oppose this hegemony throughout the Cold War by forming a united front against the two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, it aims to clarify why China has abandoned this strategy and has called for a harmonious world since 2005. The study is based on the premise that the more China benefits from the hegemony of the global economic system, the more it will call for a harmonious world and give up opposing international hegemony practiced by other powers.” The study is divided into four sections. The first examines China\u27s position toward American hegemony in the 1950s. The second explains China\u27s worldview of the Intermediate Zone to form a unified front against the hegemony of the superpowers through the 1960s. The third reveales China\u27s attempt to establish this united front through the Chinese Three Worlds strategy which dominated China\u27s Worldview from the 1970s until the end of the Cold War. The fourth section shows the shift in China\u27s attitude toward international hegemony after China has abandoned the idea of traditional provocation against the hegemony of international powers and began to call for a harmonious world , in which China could participate. The researcher uses both the historical and analytical descriptive method to explain this study. The study concluds that China has failed to oppose international hegemony practiced by the two superpowers during the Cold War, and its improved position in the global economic system as an economic and political power after the end of the Cold War has made Beijing seek to expand its network of peaceful relations with all international and regional powers in a hope to create a harmonious world that serves its economic success as well as its global rise

A Branch-and-Price Algorithm to Solve a Quay Crane Scheduling Problem

AbstractAs the maritime industry grows rapidly in size, more attention is being paid to to a wide range of aspects of problems faced at ports with respect to the efficient allocation of resources. A very important seaside planning problem that has received large attention in literature lately is the quay crane scheduling problem (QCSP). The problem involves the creation of a work schedule for the available quay cranes at the port to empty the containers from a vessel or given set of vessels. These optimization problems can be very complex and since they involve a large number of variables and constraints, the use of a commercial solver is impractical. In this paper, we reformulate a problem currently available in the literature to a Dantzig-Wolfe formulation that can be solved by column generation. We then develop a branch-and-price algorithm, which is an exact method, to effectively solve mixed integer programs with very large instances. The algorithm is first tested on a formulation currently available in literature with a small instance and will then be tested on large instances

Automatic Verification of Communicative Commitments using Reduction

In spite of the fact that modeling and verification of the Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) have been since long under study, there are several related challenges that should still be addressed. In effect, several frameworks have been established for modeling and verifying the MASs with regard to communicative commitments. A bulky volume of research has been conducted for defining semantics of these systems. Though, formal verification of these systems is still unresolved research problem. Within this context, this paper presents the CTLcom that reforms the CTLC, i.e., the temporal logic of the commitments, so as to enable reasoning about the commitments and fulfillment.  Moreover, the paper introduces a fully-automated method for verification of the logic by means of trimming down the problem of a model that checks the CTLcom to a problem of a model that checks the GCTL*, which is a generalized version of the CTL* with action formulae. By so doing, we take advantage of the CWB-NC automata-based model checker as a tool for verification. Lastly, this paper presents a case study drawn from the business field, that is, the NetBill protocol, illustrates its implementation, and discusses the associated experimental results in order to illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the suggested technique.   Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Model Checking, Communicative commitment's, Reduction

Petrology, Geochemistry, Petrogenesis and Reactivation of Volcanic Tuffs at Dair El-Kahif Area, NE-Jordan

The volcanism in the western Arabian plate extends from the Red Sea through the Harrat Ash-shaam system to western Syria. The aforementioned volcanic activity produced large quantities of alkali olivine basalts and tuffaceous materials. The stratovolcano (7km) NE of Dair El-Kahif, NE Jordan has been investigated. The results show that dominant mineral phases are olivine, augite, plagioclase, magnetite and ilmenite. Chemical analysis of the whole rock tuff samples confirms alkali olivine magma origin. Low concentrations of Li and Rb in tuff samples are used as an argument against the contamination of the basaltic magma during its journey to the surface. The MgO and Mg-values (Mg/Mg+Fe²+) in samples from volcanic tuff exhibit different degrees of fractionation, which are indicated by the varying concentrations of incompatible trace elements (Ba, Rb, Sr). The thermometric evaluation of tuff determined by using pyroxene thermometers revealed a temperature range between 1022-1083°C and a pressure of 5-10 kbars. The low Mg-ratio (Mg/Mg+Fe²+) is due to fractional crystallization of olivine and pyroxene in tuff samples. The variations of incompatible elements imply derivation from a peridotite source in the upper mantle with low degree of melting (<20%). The volcanic activity took place in phases corresponding to rifting associated with the sinistral movement along the Dead Sea Transform and the later reactivation processes

Developing a Land Suitability Index for Agricultural Uses in Dry Lands From Geologic Point of View Using GIS - a Case Study From Jordan

DOI:10.17014/ijog.2.2.63-76In the context of the study, a Multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) in GIS was used in developing suitability index to optimize suitable lands for agricultural uses and seasonal farming in dry lands from geologic point of view. This study was performed in the areas between Mafraq and Zarqa Cities in Jordan which are classified as arid lands. The study aims at protecting groundwater from pollution, reducing soil salting, reducing irrigation water loss caused by evaporation, and increasing crop productivity. The geo-environmental parameters of the named area including geology, groundwater depths, soil depths and textures, climatic conditions, topographic settings, and groundwater vulnerability conditions were mapped and converted into layers with special rates, given weights, and then modeled using the multi criteria evaluation (MCE) option, using Decision Making Modeling in IDRISI (GIS software) to reach at the best choice of lands for agricultural activities, and also to determine which of these lands are suitable for summer farming and which are suitable for winter farming

Developing a Geoinformatic-engineering Stability Modeling Method, Using Field Data and GIS Environment: a Case Study From Al Qarara Area in Wadi Musa, Jordan

DOI:10.17014/ijog.2.1.1-21By applying detailed geological field surveys, the spatial factors affecting geo-engineering stability were used to develop a geo-engineering stability modeling method to identify areas under potential threat of landsliding. The factors affecting geo-engineering stability in Al Qarara area in Petra-Jordan were studied and given assumed rates of importance, where optimization process was run by lag iterations; the produced spatial layers of the different factors were gathered and modeled using GIS; a final stability map was produced using an optimized equation. The produced map was validated qualitatively and quantitatively, where a comparison was made between the reality in the field and several maps of different equation. The modeling method which was developed in the context of this study proved to be suitable to produce micro-zonation maps of areas having landslide risk. Further applications on the method in other areas suffering landslides will further improve it

Paleostress Determination and Structural Analysis of the Area between Amman and Qasr Al-Hallabat, North Jordan

This research derives paleostress tensors for deformation affecting late Cretaceous rocks between Amman and Al-Hallabat, northern Jordan and reconstructs the region's tectonic history. Three distinct formations are exposed in the investigated area: Wadi As Sir (Turonian), Wadi Umm Ghudran (Santonin), and Amman silicified limestone (Campanian). The stress inversion is derived from data collected on the fault-slip at four different locations, revealing both extensional and compressive regimes. The research region is divided into two sectors based on these paleostress regimes: a SW sector dominated by extensional to transtensive stress regimes (with a stress index varying from 0.68 to 0.80) and a NE sector characterized by compression (with a stress index ranging from 2.60 to 2.65). Furthermore, the SE stress sector is found to be consistent with the NNW-SSE Neogene extension. In contrast, the NE stress sector was associated with a Syrian Arc Stress Field orientated E-W to ESE-WNW throughout the late Cretaceous. Fracture analysis identifies two types of fractures within the study area: shear and extensional. Both fractures correspond with fault-slip data and inferred stress direction

The Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm

Abstract This work proposes a new meta-heuristic method called Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm (AOA) that utilizes the distribution behavior of the main arithmetic operators in mathematics including (Multiplication ( ), Division (), Subtraction (), and Addition ()). AOA is mathematically modeled and implemented to perform the optimization processes in a wide range of search spaces. The performance of AOA is checked on twenty-nine benchmark functions and several real-world engineering design problems to showcase its applicability. The analysis of performance, convergence behaviors, and the computational complexity of the proposed AOA have been evaluated by different scenarios. Experimental results show that the AOA provides very promising results in solving challenging optimization problems compared with eleven other well-known optimization algorithms. Source codes of AOA are publicly available at and

A “Soft” Approach to Analysing Mobile Financial Services Sociotechnical Systems

Advances in mobile computing have presented a huge opportunity to provide Mobile Financial Services (MFS) to half of the world’s population who currently do not have access to financial services. However, cybersecurity concerns in the mobile computing ecosystem have slowed down the adoption of MFS. The adoption of MFS is further hampered by the lack of a clear understanding of the interaction between the complex infrastructures and human factors that exist in the ecosystem for Mobile Financial Services Socio-Technical Systems (MFSSTS). This paper presents the work in progress of investigating the problem of MFSSTS. It discusses the preliminary results and understanding obtained from using Human Factor approaches to build and analyse the model for MFSSTS