Lifestyle Change of Female Farmers through CPEC’s Coal Power Plant Project Initiative

This paper focuses on the impact to women engaged in agriculture specific to the construction of Sahiwal Coal Power Plant project in Qadirabad, Punjab, Pakistan. The power plant was developed in relation to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative. This plant was built on private [agricultural] lands. This study, relies on data collected via a field survey, judgmental sampling, and case study methods. Observations and data collected surface the changing occupational roles of women, who prior to the development of the coal plant had been employed primarily as agricultural workers. A noted adjustment of female labor to domestic service and tailoring surface not only the occupational impact of the development of the coal powered plant, but also the relationship between the plant’s construction and occupational opportunity, life style, status, and social power dynamics as it relates to women

On the Performance of Multi-tier Heterogeneous Cellular Networks with Idle Mode Capability

This paper studies the impact of the base station (BS) idle mode capability (IMC) on the network performance of multi-tier and dense heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). Different from most existing works that investigated network scenarios with an infinite number of user equipments (UEs), we consider a more practical setup with a finite number of UEs in our analysis. More specifically, we derive the probability of which BS tier a typical UE should associate to and the expression of the activated BS density in each tier. Based on such results, analytical expressions for the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency (ASE) in each tier are also obtained. The impact of the IMC on the performance of all BS tiers is shown to be significant. In particular, there will be a surplus of BSs when the BS density in each tier exceeds the UE density, and the overall coverage probability as well as the ASE continuously increase when the BS IMC is applied. Such finding is distinctively different from that in existing work. Thus, our result sheds new light on the design and deployment of the future 5G HCNs.Comment: conference submissio

社會人類學家伍銳麟先生逸事述略

伍銳麟是廣東省臺山市沖蔞鎮修齊荒村人，生於1904年 (農曆二月初三曰）。他在幼年時期是嬌生慣養的，而且由出生到十歲時，父親伍時昌僑居外國。家裏只有他一個孩子，母親對他特別溺愛，整個童年時期都在溫暖的家庭裏度過。祖父因經營菲律賓呂宋島上的茶園失敗，回鄉作私塾教師，伍銳麟就跟他唸書，所讀的課本是《論語》、《大學》、《中庸》之類。其中的內容小孩是不大瞭解的，但他時常記得這樣一句話：「天子重賢豪，文章教汝曹，萬般皆下品，唯有讀書高」。從那時起他就朦朧地具有「學而優則仕」的思想了。又因為他的叔父在前清科舉制度下得了「進士」後到福建做大官，母親時常用叔父作榜樣，要他向叔父看齊，勤力讀書，將來可以光宗耀祖，顯姓揚名

Context-aware and Scale-insensitive Temporal Repetition Counting

Temporal repetition counting aims to estimate the number of cycles of a given repetitive action. Existing deep learning methods assume repetitive actions are performed in a fixed time-scale, which is invalid for the complex repetitive actions in real life. In this paper, we tailor a context-aware and scale-insensitive framework, to tackle the challenges in repetition counting caused by the unknown and diverse cycle-lengths. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) Cycle lengths from different actions are unpredictable that require large-scale searching, but, once a coarse cycle length is determined, the variety between repetitions can be overcome by regression. (2) Determining the cycle length cannot only rely on a short fragment of video but a contextual understanding. The first point is implemented by a coarse-to-fine cycle refinement method. It avoids the heavy computation of exhaustively searching all the cycle lengths in the video, and, instead, it propagates the coarse prediction for further refinement in a hierarchical manner. We secondly propose a bidirectional cycle length estimation method for a context-aware prediction. It is a regression network that takes two consecutive coarse cycles as input, and predicts the locations of the previous and next repetitive cycles. To benefit the training and evaluation of temporal repetition counting area, we construct a new and largest benchmark, which contains 526 videos with diverse repetitive actions. Extensive experiments show that the proposed network trained on a single dataset outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks, indicating that the proposed framework is general enough to capture repetition patterns across domains.Comment: Accepted by CVPR202

Keratin/Polyvinyl Alcohol Blend Films Cross-Linked by Dialdehyde Starch and Their Potential Application for Drug Release

Feather keratin (FK) extracted from feathers represents a valuable source of biodegradable and biocompatible polymer. The aim of this study was the development and characterization of blended films based on FK and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) cross-linked by dialdehyde starch (DAS) for a potential drug release application. The compatibility of FK/PVA was improved when cross-linked by DAS: the relative crystallinity of the PVA/FK film slightly decreased, and the enthalpy value for the melting peak decreased by about 50% for the cross-linked films. The total soluble mass of all blend films in water was below 35% at 37 °C, indicating a good stability of the films in water. The results of the Rhodamine B dye (as a model drug) release tests showed that the release rates decreased with increasing DAS content. DAS-induced cross-linking improves several important properties of the FK/PVA films, such as the compactness, the compatibility, and the stability in water. These improvements offer the potential to expand the application of FK films in the biomaterial field