A Cross-Cultural Study on Consumption of Luxury Goods in China and Western Countries

With the development of economy, China has become the world's second largest consumer of luxury goods surpassing U.S..This research is an attempt to examine the cultural factors that lie behind this phenomenon, and based on distinctions between Chinese and Western societies, explores how the people's practice of luxury consumption differs in these two different cultures.

Effects of electric-acoustic and acoustic-electric conversions of transducers on acoustic logging signal

Based on an acoustic logging transmission network and the engineering pattern of a sliding wave in acoustic logging, analysis and calculations have been performed in a study of the effects of the electric-acoustic and acoustic-electric conversions of the transducers on the acoustic logging signal. The results show that acoustic-electric conversion through the transducer can cause not only a serious disturbance in the signal amplitude, but also an apparent transmission delay. For engineering applications, the amplitude variation and transmission delay must be accounted for in a practical analysis of the acoustic logging signal in rocks. The results also show that with enhanced understanding and proper justification, the error caused by the acoustic-electric conversion can be significantly reduced in evaluation of the cement bond quality of a cased well, and the accuracy of rock porosity calculated using the measured acoustic velocity can be increased.

ON CONTRACTION AND SEMI-CONTRACTION FACTORS OF GSOR METHOD FOR AUGMENTED LINEAR SYSTEMS

The generalized successive overrelaxation （GSOR） method was presented and studied by Bai, Parlett and Wang [Numer. Math. 102（2005）, pp.1-38] for solving the augmented system of linear equations, and the optimal iteration parameters and the corresponding optimal convergence factor were exactly obtained. In this paper, we further estimate the contraction and the semi-contraction factors of the GSOR method. The motivation of the study is that the convergence speed of an iteration method is actually decided by the contraction factor but not by the spectral radius in finite-step iteration computations. For the nonsingular augmented linear system, under some restrictions we obtain the contraction domain of the parameters involved, which guarantees that the contraction factor of the GSOR method is less than one. For the singular but consistent augmented linear system, we also obtain the semi-contraction domain of the parameters in a similar fashion. Finally, we use two numerical examples to verify the theoretical results and the effectiveness of the GSOR method.

Parameters and performance analysis of quantum wireless sensor network for monitoring the activities of tibetan antelope in Hoh Xil

Hoh Xil is the national nature reserve in China, and Tibetan antelope is a research hotspot of wildlife protection in this area. In order to track the population and activity of Tibetan antelope in Hoh Xil, a quantum wireless sensor monitoring network(QWSMN) based on the quantum satellite wide-area communication networks was proposed. This network consists of quantum wireless sensors installed on the Tibetan antelope, small quantum base stations, quantum satellite signal transmitting stations, quantum satellite and quantum satellite signal receiving stations. The simulation results show that under the interference of the sandstorm, a quantum satellite signal transmitting station can cover the monitoring area of 20 106 km^2, and the network throughput reaches 40 KB/s. This network can realize large-scale monitoring of Tibetan antelope in Hoh Xil and provide theoretical basis for the construction of global wildlife monitoring network.