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The purpose of this paper is to design and fabricate a three-dimensional (3D) bionic airflow sensing array made of two multi-electrode piezoelectric metal-core fibers (MPMFs), inspired by the structure of a cricket’s highly sensitive airflow receptor (consisting of two cerci).

A metal core was positioned at the center of an MPMF and surrounded by a hollow piezoceramic cylinder. Four thin metal films were spray-coated symmetrically on the surface of the fiber that could be used as two pairs of sensor electrodes.

In 3D space, four output signals of the two MPMFs arrays can form three “8”-shaped spheres. Similarly, the sensing signals for the same airflow are located on a spherical surface.

Two MPMF arrays are sufficient to detect the speed and direction of airflow in all three dimensions.

This paper proposes that if a political system is more like to facilitate a unified government, to establish a strong executive body and to respond to the needs of the majority, financial reforms are more likely to emerge from the policymaking process and produce positive results. On the contrary, political systems that discourage those governing features are less likely to produce reforms. This chapter compares financial reform processes in China, Taiwan and New Zealand. All of them performed low level of financial reforms in the early 1980s but resulted in different situations later. In the mid-2000s, New Zealand heralded the most efficient and stable financial system; while Taiwan lagged behind and China performed the worst. Evidence showed that China’s authoritarian system may be the most superior in forming a unified government with a strong executive, but the policy priority often responds more to the interests of a small group of power elites; therefore the result of financial reform can be limited. Taiwan’s presidential system can produce greater financial reform when the ruling party controls both executive and legislative bodies, but legislative obstructions may occur under a divided government. New Zealand's Westminster system produces the most effective and efficient financial reform due to its unified government and a strong executive branch with consistent and stable supports from the New Zealand Parliament.

This paper aims to understand the implication of night soil selling at the public toilets for the shared interests between colonial state and business in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. More specifically, this paper attempts to look at the ways the toilets were sustained by the sharing interests over night soil profits between state and business sector.

It is argued from the political economy perspective that the night soil profit determined the public toilet development.

The successful emergence of the modern state of colonies was generally attributed to colonial modernization, a force that was widely recognized for having introduced hygienic modernity. It was easily assumed that the public toilets would be provided by colonial government. Instead, sanitary problems during the early colonization of this colony were addressed by the privately-owned public pail toilets provided by big Chinese landowners through the selling of night soil. Based on this quasi-commercial mode, these toilets, which served as night soil collection points, were certainly inefficient; they however survived for half a century into the early twentieth century.

The paper challenges the long-established assumptions of binary relations and hierarchical public roles that put them into zero-sum competition of capacity. It rather argues that the interests aligned with each other.