Critical Political Economy and Material Transformation

The starting point for this paper is that critical political economy needs to take up the challenge that originates in Marx's seminal contributions of conceptualising the economy as both processes of value creation and processes of material transformations. This is because, inter alia, the successful production of commodities requires knowledge of their constituent materials and their potential transformations and the ways in which these can be managed through the production process to allow the creation of surplus value and profits. Using the steel and automobile industries as an example, I show how a wide range of materials can be produced with a variety of desirable properties through careful control of the production process. Sophisticated management of the production process depends upon the knowledge of the properties of the materials and of the ways in which these can be combined and transformed to give types of steels with particular desired combination of properties. Capitalist interests have increasingly shaped the processes of R&D through which knowledge about the materials, their properties and their transformations has been developed and deployed to produce profits via producing steel and – inter alia – automobiles.     

Automatic extraction of 1D barcodes from video scans for drone-assisted inventory management in warehousing applications

The widespread use of barcodes has significantly contributed to accurate, efficient and economic inventory management in warehouses and distribution centres. However, its efficiency has always been limited by the primary method of reading barcodes with a handheld laser scanner. Compared with this reading by line-of-sight at close proximity, vision-based barcode reading algorithms can further improve efficiency, particularly if accompanied by automated data collection platforms such as drones. This paper introduces algorithms that are able to automatically extract barcodes from video data, and verifies their feasibility and promise for inventory management in warehousing applications. Three key techniques corresponding to different recognition levels are proposed: For a known barcode region, a Harris corner detector and Hough transform-based algorithm is applied to quickly estimate the angle by which the frame area needs to rotate to orient the bars vertically for information extraction. Then, the idea of exploiting connectivity and geometry property of barcode areas is proposed to directly recognise multiple barcode regions in a single video frame to eliminate reading difficulties resulting from interactive influence of multiple juxtaposed barcodes, and to save computation time by only processing frame areas of interest for valid barcodes. In addition, a histogram difference-based fast extraction strategy is designed to further improve efficiency by reducing duplicate information processing. Finally, the performance of each technique is evaluated by analysing video data from a large logistics warehouse, demonstrating satisfactory performance in inventory management applications.     

关于全面实行政府采购审计的研究

实行政府采购审计制度存在认识不足,审计不全面,未形成独立审计项目,业务不熟悉等问题,需要完善有关法律、法规和制度,围绕其特点、目标、方式等确定审计对象,以政府采购资金的运动过程为审计主线进行全面审计,规范审计程序.提高审计质量,防范审计风险。     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

总量均衡区间与宏观调控应确立的若干新原则

现代市场经济条件下,供给方调整其生产规模所需的成本可称为调节成本。由于存在调节成本,传统分析中的“总量均衡中心点”两侧便分别存在着“低位临界点”与“高位临界点”,这两点界定了一个特殊的“总量均衡区间”。“总量均衡区间”的出现对宏观调控将产生诸多重要影响,使之面临一系列新问题、新挑战。为有效应对这种新情况,在宏观调控实践中有必要相应地确立“近似均衡原则”、“适度超前原则”、“临界点原则”、“供给方原则”。     

县域经济发展战略的"四点论"

县域经济就是以县域为基本单元进行资源配置的经济,其实质仍然是一种区域经济。虽然每个县发展条件差异很大,在实际工作中也各有高招,县域经济发展思路不断创新,但是从战略高度综合分析,县域经济发展需要抓好稳定、富县、富民、科学发展观四件大事。对此观点,我们称之为县域经济发展战略的“四点论”。     

隐喻认知与大学英语词汇教学

把隐喻认知理论应用于大学英语词汇教学,应优先重点学习基本范畴词汇,从认知的角度进行多义词汇教学,利用隐喻概念进行词汇总结,并在词汇教学中介绍词汇隐喻的文化内涵等,以帮助学生准确高效地学习英语词汇。     

人文学科“研讨型”课程教学的探索与实践

在专业课程体系中设置"研讨型"课程,引导和培养学生自主学习能力和初步研究能力,打破了"教师讲、学生听"的传统教学模式。通过学生分小组学习与研究并主持专题研讨活动,把研究性学习模式融入其中,使教师主讲的课堂成为师生共同探究问题的场所,培养了学生的独立思考精神和语言表达能力。     

商业银行危机与房地产泡沫破裂临界值的研究

本文从房地产泡沫破裂会对商业银行贷款产生风险的角度出发,首次提出了房地产泡沫破裂临界值的概念,并且用数理形式给出了定义,分析了影响临界值大小的因素,论述了临界值和贷款风险的关系;另外,参照其它国家和地区的房地产泡沫情况,对我国的房地产泡沫大小及可能的破裂速度给出了估计,计算了泡沫破裂临界值。     

完善我国别居制度若干问题研究

别居是介于正常的婚姻关系和离婚状态之间的、反映夫妻共同生活暂时中止的一种婚姻家庭关系。别居制度会引起婚姻、家庭关系发生一定的变化,但我国目前法律对别居制度规定存在欠缺,目前法律仅承认别居是一种事实,因此有必要对我国别居制度的设立和完善中存在的一些问题进行探讨。