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After decades of rapid urban expansion, China's urban development has transitioned to focus on the quality improvement of existing spaces. Urban renewal is now a strategic measure crucial for advancing high-level territorial spatial planning and intensive land use. In coastal regions that have experienced rapid urbanization, redeveloping underutilized collective construction land is essential for achieving high-quality urban development. China has experienced a path-dependent institutional change in collective land property rights, typically village-based institutions created by rural collectives. When the government aims to grant legal status to collective construction land by redefining property rights and promoting redevelopment, these informal institutions inevitably pose constraints. This study conducts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the roles, behaviors, and outcomes of local governments in constructing a collective land redevelopment market. First, it explores the relationship between the government and the market under gradual institutional change and how this relationship manifests in the redevelopment of collective construction land. Then, it empirically examines the case of Nanhai District in Foshan City, using data from the "Three Olds Reconstruction" database and a redevelopment project with which the authors are deeply involved. The study investigates the formation mechanisms of collective construction land, changes in land development institutions, constraints on redevelopment, and measures taken by local governments to construct the land redevelopment market. Despite the government's efforts to legitimize collective construction land through titling and market initiation, issues such as land fragmentation, involution of collective land management, and ambiguity in property rights persist, constraining further redevelopment. Local governments play an entrepreneurial role characterized by a negotiated relationship of both cooperation and competition with village collectives, the property rights holders. Cooperation involves the government acting as a 'transaction broker' between village collectives and investors, reducing institutional constraints and transaction costs. Competition arises as village collectives seek to capture land rents. The appreciation in land value, mainly generated by public investment, should benefit the general public. However, village collectives leverage their possession of land rights to "hold-up" the government, forcing compromises in profit-sharing. This capture of public value by village collectives jeopardizes social equity. To enhance collective land redevelopment and balance development efficiency with social justice, the following policy recommendations are proposed: 1) formalizing the government's informal role as a "transaction broker" to lower transaction costs and mitigate negative impacts; and 2) establishing clear standards for profit-sharing among stakeholders and a system for transferring land development rights to ensure equitable profit distribution.

Ecological environmental protection is an important support for China to achieve ecological civilization, but it often encounters challenges in fairly distributing protection responsibilities and development rights between the wider society and local communities living in protected areas. Ecological protection planning is an instrument for reconstructing environmental protection responsibilities and development rights among different social groups: the communities within the protected areas bear the responsibility for ecological protection but may lose some development rights to some extent, whereas the communities outside the protected areas enjoy the benefits of environmental protection without having to fulfill related obligations. This asymmetry of rights and obligations triggers environmental injustice, and is a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of policy implementation. The changing patterns of environmental (in)justice are shaped by negotiations between governments at different scales and local stakeholders, and involve complex political processes. Therefore, this study introduces a theoretical framework that integrates scale politics and environmental justice to explore the distinctive-scale political processes involved in achieving environmental justice in ecological protection areas under China's segmented and hierarchical political system. First, the pattern of environmental justice is shaped by the highest-scale actors among relevant stakeholders. Second, intermediate-scale actors tend to prioritize compliance with policy directives from higher scales and may use methods such as scale retention or devolution to limit the interest demands of lower scales. Finally, lower-scale actors may seek to enhance their political discourse power through scale escalation when faced with unjust situations created by a top-down decision-making system. Empirically, this research selected a village yet to be reconstructed in an ecological protection zone in the central provincial capital city of China as a case study and analyzed the environmental injustice faced by the villagers and pathways to change the injustice. The empirical findings suggest that, without prior consideration of the development rights of local residents, strict top-down ecological environmental protection methods often aggravate tense relationships among actors at different scales. Specifically, this leads to environmental injustice, in which the development rights of local residents at lower scales are overshadowed by the protection requirements enforced by higher-scale government entities. Environmental (in)justice includes the allocation, institutional, and recognition dimensions. In response, scale reconstruction emerges as an informal strategy for lower-scale residents to seek justice. Through this strategy, lower-scale residents appeal to higher-scale governments to intervene in the development issues of ecological protection areas, and thus strive to achieve equality in development rights and protective responsibilities. This process opens a way to achieve environmental justice. Additionally, the reliance on informal mechanisms underscores the lack of formal mechanisms in China to ensure that lower-scale groups have fair rights to urban ecological environmental protection. To address the challenges, this article integrates theoretical insights with empirical evidence to propose the following policy measures:(1) strengthening the top-down transmission of policies to implement the principle of balancing ecological protection by improving people's livelihoods, (2) establishing mechanisms for achieving environmental justice through the balanced allocation of rights and responsibilities, and (3) enhancing the democratic participation of relevant stakeholders in planning.

The resilience of a production system is determined by its capability to respond to internal breakdowns and/or external disruptions and recover. In conventional production systems, internal disruptions such as machine breakdown are handled by parallel stations and storage buffers, which come at a cost. In this paper, we propose to use reconfigurable machines (RMs) and movable buffers (MBs) to increase the resilience of a production system. The production system is modelled using a modified Markov chain model. To reduce the computational effort, an iterative method is adopted for the production lines that have many RMs and MBs. The resilience of the production system is evaluated by a combination of production loss, steady production rate with threshold, work-in-process in Idle-area of MBs, process time of work-in-process in Idle-area of MB with threshold, and investment return. Two production systems are analysed, one with 3 operations and the other with 10 operations. The computer simulation results indicate that the resilience of a production system can be improved by more than 9% by RMs and MBs. Finally, a set of guidelines for design production systems with RMs and MBs are also given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiac substructure segmentation is a prerequisite for cardiac diagnosis and treatment, providing a basis for accurate calculation, modeling, and analysis of the entire cardiac structure. CT (computed tomography) imaging can be used for a noninvasive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the cardiac anatomy and function. Cardiac substructures have diverse grayscales, fuzzy boundaries, irregular shapes, and variable locations. We designed a deep learning-based framework to improve the accuracy of the automatic segmentation of cardiac substructures. This framework integrates cardiac anatomical knowledge; it uses prior knowledge of the location, shape, and scale of cardiac substructures and separately processes the structures of different scales. Through two successive segmentation steps with a coarse-to-fine cascaded network, the more easily segmented substructures were coarsely segmented first; then, the more difficult substructures were finely segmented. The coarse segmentation result was used as prior information and combined with the original image as the input for the model. Anatomical knowledge of the large-scale substructures was embedded into the fine segmentation network to guide and train the small-scale substructures, achieving efficient and accurate segmentation of ten cardiac substructures. Sixty cardiac CT images and ten substructures manually delineated by experienced radiologists were retrospectively collected; the model was evaluated using the DSC (Dice similarity coefficient), Recall, Precision, and the Hausdorff distance. Compared with current mainstream segmentation models, our approach demonstrated significantly higher segmentation accuracy, with accurate segmentation of ten substructures of different shapes and sizes, indicating that the segmentation framework fused with prior anatomical knowledge has superior segmentation performance and can better segment small targets in multi-target segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]