Suchergebnisse

Despite the differences in our cultural, economic, and political systems China and Australia are societies sharing rapidly urbanising futures. This presents significant challenges for urban planning, placemaking, and the sustainability of livable, urban communities. Using Chongqing as a case study, metaPLACE is an experimental project investigating how participatory urban media (large and small interactive screens, installations, façades, and devices) can act as a co-designed interface between diverse community, industry, and government stakeholders. The empirical data gathered from a co-design workshop held in Chongqing in 2019 indicates there are a range of opportunities and concerns related to equitable placemaking, the environment, the nature of interfaces and participation, ownership and management of data, large and small screens, and cultural and generational considerations. Our critical and comparative analysis of the research design and cultural factors influencing the co-design process, reveal deficiencies in widely accepted models of user experience design and design process used across industry and design research. This has significant implications for transcultural and interdisciplinary co-design and the establishment of a viable Sino-Australian design ecosystem.

Preliminary Material -- Chapter One Demographic Changes During the Period of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan and Predictions for Population Development /Ying Hu , Fang Cai and Yang Du -- Chapter Two Low Fertility and Related Theoretical Issues in China /Zhigang Guo -- Chapter Three How China Tackled the Global Financial Crisis /Fang Cai , Yang Du and Meiyan Wang -- Chapter Four Public Investment and Employment: An Empirical Analysis /Jie Cheng and Dewen Wang -- Chapter Five Growing Pains: What Employment Dilemma Does China Face at Its Lewis Turning Point? /Fang Cai -- Chapter Six The Impact of the Financial Crisis on Employment in Small and Medium Enterprises /Yaowu Wu and Yang Du -- Chapter Seven Changes in Industrial Location and Labor Flows in China /Fang Cai , Meiyan Wang and Yue Qu -- Chapter Eight Population, Industrial Development, and Employment in Chinese Urbanization /Yang Du and Meiyan Wang -- Chapter Nine Has Labor Migration Really Not Narrowed the Rural-Urban Income Gap? /Fang Cai and Meiyan Wang -- Chapter Ten Emission Reduction Compatible with Economic and Employment Growth /Fang Cai , Yang Du and Meiyan Wang -- Chapter Eleven The New Elements of China's Labor Market in the Post-Financial-Crisis Era /Fang Cai and Meiyan Wang -- Chapter Twelve Reform of the Hukou System and Unification of Rural-Urban Social Welfare /Fang Cai -- Index.

The study of Chinese labour politics has returned to the centre of scholarly interest as China has increasingly become involved in global production and trade. As the incidence of labour dispute and workers' strikes continued to soar, ubiquitous cases of labour rights abuse have been widely reported by international media and academics. The literature of Marxist international political economy has long predicted the insurgency of the Chinese working class resulting from rising inequality, global capital movement and labour division. In contrast, traditional Chinese labour studies are inconclusive as to whether the Chinese working class has gained enough class consciousness to become a cohesive agent for social and political change. This research examines how rising economic, social and political inequalities have impacted on the Chinese working class's agency. The research shifts the focus from top-down structural analysis to workers' agency itself, with an emphasis on their cognitive strength. The research was undertaken via a two-case comparative study of the Chinese working class in four megacities and four smaller cities. Data came mostly from statistics and field interviews. This two-case comparative study concludes that, overall, the Chinese working class had a weak behavioural strength, as manifested by inconsistent wildcat-style strikes, which had no clear political strategies. This research also concludes that the working class's cognitive agency is weak and conservative, as manifested by a weak class identification, their poor understanding of democracy, their low willingness to participate in collective action, and their weak sense of class solidarity. I argue that inequalities and capital movement do not have a simple and unidirectional relationship with the working class's collective agency. On the one hand, inequalities and capital movement can arouse the working class's behavioural strength quickly. On the other hand, workers' cognitive strength is more inert and does not correspond neatly to these two factors. The research findings show that the megacities are more economically developed, with higher inequalities, but with considerably weaker and more conservative working class agency; whereas the smaller cities are less economically developed, with lower inequalities, but with less weak and conservative working class agency. The addition of cognitive strength as a new dimension of working class study provides a pluralist analytical framework for the study of Chinese labour. The new Chinese working class are better educated and more individualised with three main characteristics - occupation-based, precarious, and conservative - which distinguish them from the older generations of workers who had a clear group identification, such as the SOE workers in the 1990s, and the rural migrant workers in the 2000s. These theoretical and empirical findings open up possibilities of new strategies for effective labour organisation that should be considered by labour NGOs, civil society and the government. These players not only need to manage the working class action carefully, but also need to better understand the workers' complex cognitive situations.

China's hyper-speed modernisation process generates complex problems demanding new approaches to designing equitable, integrated, liveable, urban and rural places. The Chinese hinterland city of Chongqing's vast urban and rural area provides rich opportunities for investigating how art and design can help address related liveability and place-making challenges. This research aims to use Sino-Australian co-design to test how participatory urban media (large and small interactive screens, installations, façades, and devices) can act as a dialogic interface between diverse community, industry, and government stakeholders to increase our capacity to manage regional urban place-making problems. Our paper presents three empirical perspectives critically reflecting on a two-day co-design workshop conducted in Chongqing during December 2019 prior to the COVID19 pandemic. Informed by our own observations, and insights contributed by participating urban planners, architects, artists, designers, local government, academics, and students, we take a multi-vocal approach to evaluating the workshop methods, outcomes, and interactions. The unfolding narrative illustrates how transcultural and interdisciplinary co-design processes are entangled in language, local knowledge and traditions, socio-cultural hierarchies, different disciplinary fields and levels of professional status, as well as assumed Western design histories and local understandings of the role of art and design in relation to society. We argue these factors also influence the presentation of knowledge in academic writing about design. This highlights the urgent need for pluriversal modes of co-design, research through design, and scholarship about design which can inclusively impact and respond to the diverse needs of the new international situation and our shared urban futures.

In the past 30 years, China's economic reforms have forced many state-owned factories (SOEs) to collapse, and both men and women workers were dismissed. In urban Northeast China many laid-off women were able to find employment in the service industry and small-scale private businesses, while their husbands had difficulty finding a satisfactory job. As such, the wives became breadwinners of the families. Based on fieldwork data collected through face-to-face interviews, focus group interviews and participant observation, this study examines resultant spousal relationships in the aspects of family finance, domestic division of labor, power relations, and foundation of marriage, as the husband and wife swapped their economic roles at home. This study finds that when women control more economic capital than men in the nuclear family, domestic division of labor, power relations and affection between couples all tend to be more egalitarian. However, the concept of a male-breadwinner family and the gender segregation of space are still popular on material and social levels. Thus without corresponding changes on the ideological level regarding gender, patriarchy will remain dominant on the community and national levels. Analysis on spousal relationships shows that the economic, political and emotional aspects of marriage are interconnected and interactive, and they work together to decide how spousal relationships may be altered in times of rapid social transformation. In the era of market economy, family and marriage values are diversified, and marriage tends to be less stable. However, this study finds that the integrity of family and marriage has been kept in the laid-off workers' families even when spousal relationships face serious challenges caused by unemployment. The reason is that these laid-off workers have formed their gender identities during the socialist era which emphasized the integrity of family and marriage. In the market era, laid off workers have maintained these values and upheld the integrity of ...

本論文使用世界銀行在2006年及2010年於六個拉丁美洲國家進行的企業調查所得之一組全新數據,重新在公司層面審視「金融發展--(公司)增長」的連結關係,發現即使控制了宏觀經濟的改變以及利用固定效應之縱橫計量模型進行估算,金融發展對公司銷售以及勞工生產力都有顯著的正面效果,支持以往相關的公司層面研究。 ; 然而,與過往的公司層面研究不同,金融發展對比較大型公司的正面影響,相對小型公司之影響為大。這結果與較近期的研究指在新興市場中,金融發展會不成比例地刺激本來因政治或其他因素與金融體系比較密切的公司相符。未來研究應注重這些市場的獨特性以求更透徹地了解箇中機制。 ; This thesis revisits the finance-growth nexus at the firm level. Using a new dataset based on the World Bank Enterprise Survey conducted in 2006 and 2010 covering six Latin American countries, financial development is found to have a positive effect on both the level of firm sales and labor productivity, after controlling for other macroeconomic changes and unobserved firm-specific effects in a panel-data estimation, reinforcing previous similar studies at the firm level, which relied only on cross-sectional data. ; However, in contrast to earlier firm level cross-sectional researches, it is discovered that financial development exerts a greater positive effect on larger firms relative to smaller ones. This is consistent with more recent studies that finance disproportionately spurs growth of firms that are originally more connected to the financial system for political or other reasons in the context of emerging markets. Future researches should point to the uniqueness of these markets to understand more thoroughly the mechanism behind. ; Detailed summary in vernacular field only. ; Detailed summary in vernacular field only. ; Tsang, Wai Him. ; Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. ; Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72). ; Abstracts also in Chinese. ; Abstract --- p.ii ; 擇要 --- p.iii ; Acknowledgements --- p.iv ; Table of Contents --- p.v ; Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 ; Chapter 2 --- Motivation --- p.6 ; Chapter 2.1 --- Revisiting the finance-growth connection at the firm-level with a new dataset --- p.13 ; Chapter 2.2 --- The distributional effects associated with financial development --- p.18 ; Chapter 3 --- Data Set and Methodology --- p.25 ; Chapter 3.1 --- The Data --- p.25 ; Chapter 3.2 ...

柔性臂機械人被廣泛應用於航天航空業,製造業,核電廠,軍事,醫療器材和農業等各方面的機械設備。其中一種柔性臂機械人 ── 連續體機器人更是廣泛被應用於微創或無創手術機械人作機械手之用。 ; 本文提出以小尺寸連續體機器人可用於手術機械人中以協助醫生完成各無創手術,並以我們研發的手術機械人為例以協助醫生完成內黏膜下剝離術。我們探討了小尺寸連續體機器人的模型並分析其運作。小尺寸連續體機器人是由一個推挽機構致動,推挽機構於連續體機器人後方拉動形狀記憶合金線,前方的連續結構會以對應的彎曲運動實現控制的指令。 ; 現今常用於簡化連續結構模型的假設是假設連續結構上每一小段的曲率皆是相同。雖然連續部分的運動學模型和靜態模型是可預測,但連續的機器人是一種柔性的結構,其基於運動學模型控制的精確度是低的。我們亦不能完全以數學方式模擬所有連續體機器人的動作。因此,本文提出了使用回饋實際彎曲角度和理想彎曲角度的差距以實現連續機器人的精確閉環控制。根據我們提出的閉環控制,小尺寸連續體機器人的平均誤差可大幅減少。 ; Flexible manipulator is extensively used in various robotic applications, for example, aerospace and outer space industries, manufacturing industries, nuclear plants, military, surgery and agriculture. Specifically, continuum structure is a type of flexible manipulators widely adopted in minimally invasive surgical (MIS) applications. This dissertation presents the modelling and analysis of a continuum robot, which has tendon-sheath mechanism at the front end and the continuum section at the distal end, in an assistive robotic system. One of the application of the assistive robotic system is supporting Endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD). The small size continuum section is actuated by a push-pull mechanism to effectuate a two degrees of freedom (DoF) bending motion. Simplified models of the continuum section based on extensions of previous theories assuming constant curvature are presented. The modeled-predicted kinematics and statics of the continuum section can be readily verified by motion trackingsystem. ; Since the continuum robot is a flexible structure, the accuracy is low when the control of continuum robot is solely based on the kinematics model. To reduce the reliance of the exact model that describes the motion of each part of the continuum robot, this dissertation presents an idea to use the position feedback to relax the reliance on the exact model to achieve an accurate closed-loop control of the continuum robot. The actual bending angle of the continuum robot is captured by the optical tracking system. The difference between the desired position and ...