Effects of formal credit on pastoral household expense: Evidence from the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau of China

Formal credit is critical in agricultural production,allowing more expenditure and productive input,thereby improving farmers'welfare.In pastoral China,formal financial institutions are gradually increasing.However,a limited understanding remains of how formal credit affects herders'household expenses.Based on a survey of 544 herders from the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau of China,this study adopted the propensity score matching approach to identify the effect of formal credit on herders'total household expenses,daily expenses,and productive expenses.The results found that average age,grassland mortgage,and other variables significantly affected herders'participation in formal credit.Formal credit could significantly improve household expenses,especially productive expenses.A heterogeneity analysis showed that formal credit had a greater impact on the household total expense for those at higher levels of wealth;however,it significantly affected the productive expense of herders at lower wealth levels.Moreover,the mediating effect indicated that formal credit could affect herders'household income,thus influencing their household expenses.Finally,this study suggests that policies should improve herders'accessibility to formal credit.

A Formal Model for Analyzing Fair Exchange Protocols Based on Event Logic

Fair exchange protocols play a critical role in enabling two distrustful entities to conduct electronic data exchanges in a fair and secure manner.These protocols are widely used in electronic payment systems and electronic contract signing,ensuring the reliability and security of network transactions.In order to address the limitations of current research methods and enhance the analytical capabilities for fair exchange protocols,this paper proposes a formal model for analyzing such protocols.The proposed model begins with a thorough analysis of fair exchange protocols,followed by the formal definition of fairness.This definition accurately captures the inherent requirements of fair exchange protocols.Building upon event logic,the model incorporates the time factor into predicates and introduces knowledge set axioms.This enhancement empowers the improved logic to effectively describe the state and knowledge of protocol participants at different time points,facilitating reasoning about their acquired knowledge.To maximize the intruder’s capabilities,channel errors are translated into the behaviors of the intruder.The participants are further categorized into honest participants and malicious participants,enabling a comprehensive evaluation of the intruder’s potential impact.By employing a typical fair exchange protocol as an illustrative example,this paper demonstrates the detailed steps of utilizing the proposed model for protocol analysis.The entire process of protocol execution under attack scenarios is presented,shedding light on the underlying reasons for the attacks and proposing corresponding countermeasures.The developedmodel enhances the ability to reason about and evaluate the security properties of fair exchange protocols,thereby contributing to the advancement of secure network transactions.

Intensifying International Beauty Brands' Game against China

The way in which international beauty giants are laying out the Chinese market seems to be quietly changing.I have recently observed that the pace of foreign beauty giants launching self-developed patented ingredients and technologies is accelerating.In particular,a number of relevant achievements have been focused on the November 2023 China International Import Expo.Among them,new patented ingredients/technologies launched in the past year accounted for six cases.They include Shiseido’s Neomyone,Unilever’s Glutathione meta-technology,Amore Pacific's Fonoin,Estee Lauder's Sertiin Age Reversal Technology,Kose’s IPS cell research technology,and Procter&Gamble’s OLAY’s“Collagen Visualization”technology,etc..

Reflections on the Improvement of Rural Human Settlement Environment from the Perspective of Beauty and Livability

The construction of beautiful and livable villages is one of the important tasks of ruralrevitalization in the new era, and the development of rural areas attaches more and more importanceto the improvement of human settlement environment. By investigating the construction status andexisting problems of Zhaoba Village in Nanjing, it tries to take “beauty” and “livability” as the planningrequirements. The village positioning is planned accurately, and the functional layout is carried outreasonably. According to the characteristic industries, landscape features and infrastructure of ZhaobaVillage, humanized construction strategies are put forward, thus improving the quality of human settlementenvironment in Zhaoba Village.

Generativity of Self-Organizing Processes and Their Correlative Description in Terms of a Formal Language of Meta-Ordinal Generative Nature, in the Light of the Maximum Ordinality Principle and the Explicit Solution to the “Three-Body Problem”

The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the internal processes of Self-Organizing Systems represent a unique and singular process, characterized by their specific generativity. This process can be modeled using the Maximum Ordinality Principle and its associated formal language, known as the “Incipient” Differential Calculus (IDC).

Rice vs.Wheat:How Rice Farming Shaped Informal Finance in China

China’s financial system is characterized by the coexistence of both formal and informal finance,and informal finance appears to be more prevalent in the south of the country compared to the north.In this paper,we use the historical demarcation of rice-farming regions and the percentage area of rice sown to ascertain the regional distribution of rice farming in the south and wheat farming in the north in order to analyze the role of rice farming in the evolution of different types of financial institutions in China.We find that rice cultivation has a positive effect on informal financial development,though its impact on formal finance is insignificant.Unlike wheat farming,rice cultivation requires farmers to collaborate during busy farming seasons and necessitates the construction of irrigation systems.Such collaboration helped enhance an acquaintance society,in which both parties to transactions enforced the rules and contract terms of their own initiative,paving the way for informal finance.This paper not only demonstrates the cultural roots of the regional financial disparities in China but also expands the research on the ways in which farming practices from the past have shaped the development of China’s present financial markets.

Formal Modeling of Self-Adaptive Resource Scheduling in Cloud

A self-adaptive resource provisioning on demand is a critical factor in cloud computing.The selection of accurate amount of resources at run time is not easy due to dynamic nature of requests.Therefore,a self-adaptive strategy of resources is required to deal with dynamic nature of requests based on run time change in workload.In this paper we proposed a Cloud-based Adaptive Resource Scheduling Strategy(CARSS)Framework that formally addresses these issues and is more expressive than traditional approaches.The decision making in CARSS is based on more than one factors.TheMAPE-K based framework determines the state of the resources based on their current utilization.Timed-Arc Petri Net(TAPN)is used to model system formally and behaviour is expressed in TCTL,while TAPAAL model checker verifies the underline properties of the system.

Formal Verification Platform as a Service:WebAssembly Vulnerability Detection Application

In order to realize a general-purpose automatic formal verification platform based on WebAssembly technology as a web service(FVPS),which aims to provide an automated report of vulnerability detections,this work builds a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain runtime model.It proposes an optimized methodology of the functional equivalent translation from source program languages to formal languages.This methodology utilizes an external application programming interface(API)table to replace the source codes in compilation,thereby pruning the part of housekeeping codes to ease code inflation.Code inflation is a significant metric in formal language translation.Namely,minor code inflation enhances verification scale and performance efficiency.It determines the efficiency of formal verification,involving launching,running,and memory usage.For instance,path explosion increases exponentially,resulting in out-of-memory.The experimental results conclude that program languages like golang severely impact code inflation.FVPS reduces the wasm code size by over 90%,achieving two orders of optimization magnitude,from 2000 kilobyte(KB)to 90 KB.That means we can cope with golang applications up to 20 times larger than the original in scale.This work eliminates the gap between Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts and WebAssembly.Our approach is pragmatic,adaptable,extendable,and flexible.Nowadays,FVPS is successfully applied in a Railway-Port-Aviation blockchain transportation system.

MF2-DMTD: A Formalism and Game-Based Reasoning Framework for Optimized Drone-Type Moving Target Defense

Moving-target-defense(MTD)fundamentally avoids an illegal initial compromise by asymmetrically increasing the uncertainty as the attack surface of the observable defender changes depending on spatial-temporal mutations.However,the existing naive MTD studies were conducted focusing only on wired network mutations.And these cases have also been no formal research on wireless aircraft domains with attributes that are extremely unfavorable to embedded system operations,such as hostility,mobility,and dependency.Therefore,to solve these conceptual limitations,this study proposes normalized drone-type MTD that maximizes defender superiority by mutating the unique fingerprints of wireless drones and that optimizes the period-based mutation principle to adaptively secure the sustainability of drone operations.In addition,this study also specifies MF2-DMTD(model-checkingbased formal framework for drone-type MTD),a formal framework that adopts model-checking and zero-sum game,for attack-defense simulation and performance evaluation of drone-type MTD.Subsequently,by applying the proposed models,the optimization of deceptive defense performance of drone-type MTD for each mutation period also additionally achieves through mixed-integer quadratic constrained programming(MIQCP)and multiobjective optimization-based Pareto frontier.As a result,the optimal mutation cycles in drone-type MTD were derived as(65,120,85)for each control-mobility,telecommunication,and payload component configured inside the drone.And the optimal MTD cycles for each swarming cluster,ground control station(GCS),and zone service provider(ZSP)deployed outside the drone were also additionally calculated as(70,60,85),respectively.To the best of these authors’knowledge,this study is the first to calculate the deceptive efficiency and functional continuity of the MTD against drones and to normalize the trade-off according to a sensitivity analysis with the optimum.

Relative Ding Projective Modules over Formal Triangular Matrix Rings

Let U be a (B, A)-bimodule, A and B be rings, and be a formal triangular matrix ring. In this paper, we characterize the structure of relative Ding projective modules over T under some conditions. Furthermore, using the left global relative Ding projective dimensions of A and B, we estimate the relative Ding projective dimension of a left T-module.

Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory Formally Kicks Off

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory(LHAASO),a major project as part of China’s national scientific and technological infrastructure,passed the national acceptance assessment and formally went into operation on May 10.Dedicated to cosmic ray observation and research,the design of LHAASO was approved by the national authorities on December 31,2015.Jointly sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS)and the People’s Government of Sichuan Province,the construction of the principal part of the facility began in 2017 and was completed in 2021.

A Natural Language Generation Algorithm for Greek by Using Hole Semantics and a Systemic Grammatical Formalism

This work is about the progress of previous related work based on an experiment to improve the intelligence of robotic systems,with the aim of achieving more linguistic communication capabilities between humans and robots.In this paper,the authors attempt an algorithmic approach to natural language generation through hole semantics and by applying the OMAS-III computational model as a grammatical formalism.In the original work,a technical language is used,while in the later works,this has been replaced by a limited Greek natural language dictionary.This particular effort was made to give the evolving system the ability to ask questions,as well as the authors developed an initial dialogue system using these techniques.The results show that the use of these techniques the authors apply can give us a more sophisticated dialogue system in the future.

Formal Inferring the Law of Conservation of Energy from Assuming A-Priori-ness of Knowledge in a Formal Axiomatic Epistemology System Sigma

The research purpose is invention (construction) of a formal logical inference of the Law of Conservation of Energy within a logically formalized axiomatic epistemology-and-axiology theory Sigma from a precisely defined assumption of a-priori-ness of knowledge. For realizing this aim, the following work has been done: 1) a two-valued algebraic system of formal axiology has been defined precisely and applied to proper-philosophy of physics, namely, to an almost unknown (not-recognized) formal-axiological aspect of the physical law of conservation of energy;2) the formal axiomatic epistemology-and-axiology theory Sigma has been defined precisely and applied to proper-physics for realizing the above-indicated purpose. Thus, a discrete mathematical model of relationship between philosophy of physics and universal epistemology united with formal axiology has been constructed. Results: 1) By accurate computing relevant compositions of evaluation-functions within the discrete mathematical model, it is demonstrated that a formal-axiological analog of the great conservation law of proper physics is a formal-axiological law of two-valued algebra of metaphysics. (A precise algorithmic definition of the unhabitual (not-well-known) notion “formal-axiological law of algebra of metaphysics” is given.) 2) The hitherto never published significantly new nontrivial scientific result of investigation presented in this article is a formal logical inference of the law of conservation of energy within the formal axiomatic theory Sigma from conjunction of the formal-axiological analog of the law of conservation of energy and the assumption of a-priori-ness of knowledge.

范式的补充还是取代？——评塞西尔·巴尔蒙的informal

本文主要以informal书中库哈斯和巴尔蒙合作的两个作品为例,阐述informal思想中的若干重要概念。并引申出对结构技术进步的可能性,工程师和建筑师间的可能关系以及建筑学的可能发展方向等方面的反思,从而完成对informal这种以鼓励原创性为主的思想方式的批判性继承。

Formally Deriving the Third Newton’s Law from a Pair of Nontrivial Assumptions in a Formal Axiomatic Theory “Sigma-V”

The article is devoted to hitherto never undertaken applying an almost unknown logically formalized axiomatic epistemology-and-axiology system called “Sigma-V” to the Third Newton’s Law of mechanics. The author has continued investigating the extraordinary (paradigm-breaking) hypothesis of formal-axiological interpreting Newton’s mathematical principles of natural philosophy and, thus, has arrived to discrete mathematical modeling a system of formal axiology of nature by extracting and systematical studying its proper algebraic aspect. Along with the proper algebraic machinery, the axiomatic (hypothetic-deductive) method is exploited in this investigation systematically. The research results are the followings. 1) The Third Newton’s Law of mechanics has been modeled by a formal-axiological equation of two-valued algebraic system of metaphysics as formal axiology. (Precise defining the algebraic system is provided.) The formal-axiological equation has been established (and examined) in this algebraic system by accurate computing compositions of relevant evaluation-functions. Precise tabular definitions of the evaluation-functions are given. 2) The wonderful formula representing the Third Newton’s Law (in the relevant physical interpretation of the formal theory Sigma-V) has been derived logically in Sigma-V from the presumption of a-priori-ness of knowledge. A precise axiomatic definition of the nontrivial notion “a-priori-ness of knowledge” is given. The formal derivation is implemented in strict accordance with the rigor standard of D. Hilbert’s formalism;hence, checking the formal derivation submitted in this article is not a difficult task. With respect to proper theoretical physics, the formal inference is a nontrivial scientific novelty which has not been discussed and published elsewhere yet.

Aesthetic Evaluation of Commercial Rooftop Plants Based on Beauty Degree Evaluation Method: A Case Study of Chengdu City, China

Rooftop greening not only has ecological benefits such as energy savings, water conservation and air quality improvement but also has aesthetic and social benefits, especially for the rooftops of commercial complexes, which should meet people’s demand for beauty while satisfying sustainable urban development. In this paper, 80 samples of ten commercial rooftops in five old urban areas of Chengdu, China, were selected as the research objects, and the beauty values of different roof types and different plant community types were quantified by the aesthetic evaluation method, and the factors influencing the beauty values were investigated. The results showed that the highest average SBE value was for plant ornamental roofs (0.635), followed by recreational roofs (0.080), and the lowest average SBE value was for sports and fitness (-0.555);Mixed needle-broad communities had the greatest average SBE value (0.330), followed by mixed bamboo-broad communities (0.094), while pure bamboo forests had the lowest average SBE value (-0.716). The rooftop plant community’s aesthetic value was highly significant and correlated positively with the type of roof, the community’s growth type, its vertical structure, and the number of plants in the community.

‘Connecting China'Series of Cultural and Artistic Communication:Conveying the Spirit of China with the Beauty of Opera

In January 2023,the author was invited to carry out a series of online lecture courses titled"Where to Find Beauty:Exploring the Beauty of Chinese Opera"for Malaysian Chinese.The four lectures were hosted by China Cultural Center in Kuala Lumpur and the Network of International Cultural Entities,and organized by Beijing Liantong Wuzhou Culture&Tourism Co.,Ltd.and the Malaysian Belt and Road Committee.

Basking in Shaanxi Province’s Cultural Beauty

Twenty people from 15 countries enjoyed an unforgettable cultural exchange trip in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province.“Before I came to China,I read a lot of books about it and learned about its ancient history and rich cultural heritage.But when I came here,everything I saw was far beyond my imagination.It was broader,more beautiful,and more culturally diverse.You must witness it personally to understand this country.”

用Sleeping Beauty转座子筛选肺癌相关基因及功能研究

目的探讨睡美人(SB)转座子筛选肺癌相关基因的应用。方法采用Sleeping Beauty转座子插入T2/Onc盒子(T2/Onc cassette)诱变人支气管上皮细胞(HBEC)的模型,挑选阳性克隆,高通量测序筛选共同插入位点(CIS)及候选基因。在非小细胞肺癌(NSCLC)细胞系NCI⁃H1299中验证筛选出的COL11A1基因功能,采用CCK⁃8细胞增殖实验等检测NCI⁃H1299细胞系敲低COL11A1前后的增殖能力及其对顺铂的敏感性变化,采用Transwell细胞迁移、侵袭实验比较其迁移、侵袭能力变化。结果使用转座子筛选中通用的蒙特卡洛模拟法确定CIS,以P<0.05为界,共找到252个CIS,包括675个候选基因。结果显示,筛选出的COL11A1基因可以促进NCI⁃H1299细胞系增殖(P<0.01)、迁移(P<0.001)、侵袭(P<0.001)并介导其顺铂耐药(P<0.001)。结论本研究证明了使用SB转座子插入T2/Onc诱变HBEC的模型能够很好地筛选出肺癌相关基因,并证实了COL11A1可以促进NSCLC细胞增殖、迁移、侵袭并介导顺铂耐药及上皮间质转换。