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This paper aims to determine the status of the socialist market economy through a logical analysis of the evolution of economic systems in human society.

This paper presents an analysis of uncertainty and the functions performed by different economic systems in managing and resolving it, thereby explaining the evolutionary rationale behind economic system evolution.

Firstly, the socialist market economy empowers the market to play a decisive role in resource allocation, which serves as the foundation for activating individuals' motivation to engage in economic activities. Secondly, the socialist market economy adheres to the basic socialist economic system, which is the basis for the socialist market economy to stabilize the economy and society or to address the risk of economic uncertainty that may trigger macro-level inconsistencies in economic operations. Thirdly, the advantages of a socialist market economy in adapting to economic uncertainties do not arise spontaneously and must be exerted through continuous improvement of the socialist market economy.

The innovation of this paper lies in introducing uncertainty to clarify the logic behind the evolution of economic systems in human society and explaining the typical significance of the socialist market economy and its advantages in accommodating and resolving uncertainty.

This paper aims to investigate bank credit policies and uncover yacht building finance assessment factors from bank credit policies toward the yacht industry.

This study’s questionnaire attempts to identify survey respondents’ degrees of awareness through difference analysis, and then uses entropy weighting and gray relational analysis to discover priority ranking order of bank credit assessment considerations from the perspective of Taiwan’s banking sector.

The research findings show that yacht builders have to review their ship financing application methods and improve shortcomings to meet banks’ credit granting requirements.

Banks emphasize yacht builders’ repayment ability to protect their depositors and shareholders.

Spherical robot plays an essential role in the field of mobile robot because of its unique shape and omni-directional mobility, especially in the application of planet detection. Although spherical robot has many advantages over leg robot, its obstacle climbing performance is still not satisfactory, that is exactly the motivation of this paper. The purpose of this paper is to propose a high-performance hopping mechanism for spherical robot, which can adapt to different terrain and effectively cross obstacles.

The hopping system uses torque spring as part of the energy storage mechanism, and converts the kinetic energy of rotation into elastic potential energy with a particularly designed turntable. Moreover, the track of the turntable, based on the Archimedes spiral principle, has the attributes of equidistance and equivelocity that enable better stability of energy storage process.

Experiments show that the proposed hopping mechanism can make a 250 g spherical robot jump up to 58 cm with the take-off angle of 60°. Finally, the influence of friction and take-off angle on the hopping height and distance of the robot is also analyzed, which provides a prior guidance for optimizing its jumping process.

This paper shows how to easily design a lightweight, compact and embedded spring hopping structure so that a spherical hopping robot with detection ability can be developed.

The National People’s Congress (NPC) of People’s Republic of China, the highest organ of state power, is popularly seen as a rubber-stamp entity. However, it has been substantially evolving its roles to accommodate the governance discourses within China’s political system over the decades. This study aims to explore the changes of governance discourse of the NPC within China’s political system through which to offer a thorough understanding of the NPC’s evolving substantial role in current China.

This study deploys a historical approach to explore the changes of governance discourse of the NPC that has seen a growing importance in China’s political agenda, as argued by this study.

The authors find that the NPC has been substantially evolving its role within China’s political system in which the Chinese Communist Party has created different governance discourses. Besides, the NPC and its Standing Committee have asserted its authority as a substantial actor within China’s political system. The NPC is no longer functioned as a rubber-stamp institution, though it is still popularized as a rubber stamp by many scholars.

This study is a historical elaboration on the development of NPC under three governance discourses. It might be, to some extent, relatively descriptive in nature.

This study, therefore, sheds some light on a revisit on the governance discourses in current China.

This study aims to propose a novel lightweight tendon-driven musculoskeletal arm (LTDM-arm) robot with a flexible series–parallel mixed skeletal joint structure and modularized artificial muscle system (MAMS). The proposed LTDM-arm exhibits human-like flexibility, safety and operational accuracy. In addition, to improve the safety and stability of the LTDM-arm, a control method is proposed to solve local artificial muscle overload accidents.

The proposed LTDM-arm comprises seven degrees of freedom skeletons, 15 MAMSs and various sensor systems (joint sensing, muscle tension sensing, visual sensing, etc.). It retains the morphology of a human skeleton (humerus, ulna and radius) and a simplified muscle configuration. This study proposes an input saturation control with full-state constraints to reduce local artificial muscle overload accidents caused by redundant muscle tension calculations.

3D circular trajectory experiments were conducted to verify the stability of the control method and the flexibility of the LTDM-arm. The results showed that the average error of the muscle length was approximately 0.35 mm (0.38%), which indicates that the proposed control scheme can make the output follow the target trajectory while ensuring constraint satisfaction.

The human arm is capable of performing compliant operations rapidly, flexibly and robustly in unstructured environments. Existing musculoskeletal arm robots lack simulations of the full morphology of the human arm and are insufficient in dexterity. However, the flexibility and safety features of the proposed LTDM-arm were consistent with that of the human arm. Therefore, this study offers a new approach for investigating the advantages of the musculoskeletal system and the concepts of muscle control.

China represents around 20% of the world's population, and her economy is still performing well under economic crisis. Historical events have shaped different parts of China with different economic developments and cultural encounters. The most prominent difference is between Hong Kong and the Mainland. This chapter would like to examine the development and issues of fashion retailing in China. For better understanding, this chapter starts with a brief discussion on apparel industry development and fashion culture in Hong Kong and the Mainland, follows by historical development and then presents systems of fashion retailing in both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Desktop research and exploratory research techniques were employed. Stores of international fashion luxury brands in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing were visited. Comparison of branding issues, particularly for luxury market in Hong Kong and the Mainland are discussed, so are future directions of fashion retailing in these places.

A novel non-pneumatic safety tire, namely mechanical elastic wheel (ME-Wheel), has been developed recently to solve problems, including tire bursting and flat tire, of typical pneumatic tires. This paper aims to predict the life of the ME-Wheel accurately and settle the problem of lower lifespan.

This study proposes a new method to establish a novel model of virtual proving ground based on finite element analysis, and by combining with the random vibration damage analysis method, the life of an ME-Wheel is predicted precisely. Next, the weak parts and infinite life parts of the ME-Wheel are investigated from the perspective of constant life design, and an approximate response surface model is developed, which is suitable for the ME-Wheel. Then, the optimal results of the ME-Wheel are obtained, including tire modal, mass and its lifetime.

It is found that the proposed methods can provide a reliable theoretical basis for further improving the structural design and material selection of ME-Wheel parts. The results show that the improved ME-Wheel can reduce the weight and greatly improve the ability of anti-resonance, and the lifetime of ME-Wheel has significantly improved.

A new type of non-pneumatic tire (ME-Wheel) has been developed to avoid problems with traditional tires, such as tire leaking or puncture. A new method to establish a novel model of virtual proving ground based on finite element analysis has been proposed. The weakest key component of the ME-Wheel is determined. The life, mass and modal of the ME-Wheel are optimized.

As an important carrier of sustainable economy and social development, population is the foundation of the whole society. Scientific predictions of future population growth will bring great reference to macro-economic and social planning. For China, as a country of the biggest population, the research on its population policy is worthwhile.

Previous literatures on population growth prediction are generally based on time-series analysis. However, the new two-child policy in China provides us an opportunity to predict the population growth from the perspective of the welfare efficiency, since each family is able to determine whether to have the second child on account of the family’s utility. The welfare efficiency is calculated through the database of newborn babies, disposable income per capita, living resource per capita, and health expenditure pre capital. These are the main factors by which each family decides whether to bear additional babies. In this chapter, we perform the micro-economic analysis on a new policy and propose a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to predict the population growth. Under the condition of policy adjustment, we successfully predict the population growth with this method. We also propose some suggestions concerning the implementation of the new policy.

Indium tin oxide (ITO) is a material belonging to the group of transparent conductive oxides, which are widely used in many fields of technology including optoelectronics and photovoltaics. However, the properties of ITO thin films depend on many factors. Therefore, the aim of the study was thorough investigation of the properties of sputtered ITO thin films of various thicknesses.

ITO coatings were deposited by magnetron sputtering in pure argon atmosphere using ceramic ITO target. Various deposition times resulted in obtaining thin films with different thickness, which had significant influence on the optoelectronic properties of deposited coatings. In this work the results of investigation of structural, surface, optical and electrical properties were presented.

Increase of the coating thickness caused change of the microstructure from amorphous to nanocrystalline and occurrence of grains with a size of 40 to 60 nm on their surface. Moreover, the fundamental absorption edge was red-shifted, whereas the average transmission in the visible wavelength range remained similar. Increase of the thickness caused considerable decrease of the sheet resistance and resistivity. It was found that even thin films with a thickness of 10 nm had antistatic properties.

The novelty and originality of presented work consists in, among other, determination of antistatic properties of ITO thin films with various sheet resistances that are in the range typical for dielectric and semiconducting material. To date, there are no reports on such investigations in the literature. Reported findings might be very helpful in the case of, for example, construction of transparent antireflective and antistatic multilayers.