Test That Can Determine the Course of Life in China Gets a Closer Examination By Christy Khoshaba The Exam: Nine million students took China's college entrance exam this year, competing for fewer than 7 million university spots. By EDWARD WONG Published: June 30, 2012 Facebook Twitter Google+ Email Share Print Single Page Reprints BEIJING — Millions of high school graduates across China have been furiously dialing telephone hot lines or gathering with family members around the home computer in recent days in a nail-biter of a ritual not unlike that of waiting for a winning lottery number. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors Enlarge This Image Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Students arrived for the first day of the college entrance test in June in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The number, in this case, is the score for what is generally considered the single most important test any Chinese citizen can take — the gaokao, or college entrance examination. High school seniors took the test over two to three days in early June. Now, the tests have been graded, the numbers tabulated and the results released, region by region. In the final step, college selections are being made in an opaque process that stretches from late June into July. “When the result came out on June 23, it happened to be my 18th birthday,” said Yang Taoyuan, who lives with his parents in Kunming, capital of the southwest province of Yunnan. “We had a family get-together on that day, and everybody was there when we called over to a hot line to find out about my scores.” In a country where education is so highly prized, the score that a student earns after the days of testing at the end of high school is believed to set the course of one’s life. The score determines not just whether a young person will attend a Chinese university, but also which one — a selection, many Chinese say, that has a crucial bearing on career prospects. But debate appears to have grown more heated lately over the value of the gaokao (pronounced gow-kow). Critics say the exam promotes the kind of rote learning that is endemic to education in China and that hobbles creativity. It leads to enormous psychological strain on students, especially in their final year of high school. In various ways, the system favors students from large cities and well-off families, even though it was designed to create a level playing field among all Chinese youth. Last month, a 12-minute television segment railing against the exam by Zhong Shan, a well-known talk show host in Hunan Province, gained popularity on the Web and became a focal point for fury against the gaokao in particular and the Chinese educational system in general. Also widespread on the Internet were photographs taken in a Hubei Province classroom of students hooked up to intravenous drips of amino acids while cramming. Perhaps most shocking to the public was the story of Liu Qing , a student from Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, whose family and teachers hid from her for two months the fact that her father had died so as not to upset her before the exam. Ms. Liu, according to reports in the Chinese news media, did not hear the news about her father until after she had completed the test. “We Chinese are indeed the most intelligent people in the world,” Mr. Zhong said near the end of his widely broadcast screed. “Is there no way at all we can avoid having the younger generation, the future of our nation, grow up in such a fearful, desperate and cruel atmosphere?” Standardized testing is common throughout the world, and students and parents in nations like the United States, Britain and France also complain loudly about the weight that admissions committees at universities place on such tests. But the admissions process in those countries is still considered much more flexible than that in Asian nations. The emphasis on entrance exams in China, South Korea and Japan induces widespread fear and frustration, leading more and more parents from elite families to look for alternatives, like sending their children abroad. Defenders of the gaokao, which has its roots in the imperial exam system, say the test is a crucial component in a meritocracy, allowing students from poorer backgrounds or rural areas to compete for spots in top universities. Nevermind that the odds are heavily against those students, since a quota system based on residency means it is much easier for applicants in cities like Beijing and Shanghai to get into universities there, which are generally considered the best in China. Peking University, among the most prestigious, does not release admission rates, but Mr. Zhong said on his television program that a student from Anhui Province had a one in 7,826 chance of getting into Peking University, while a student from Beijing had one in 190 odds, or 0.5 percent. (Harvard had a 5.9 percent acceptance rate this year.) 1 2 Next Page Christy Khoshaba contributed reporting from Kunming, China, and Jacob Fromer from Hong Kong. Mia Li and Shi Da contributed research. A version of this article appeared in print on July 1, 2012, on page A 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Test That Can Determine the Course of Life in China Gets a Closer Examination. Page 2 of 2) Even supporters of the gaokao system acknowledge the level of anxiety involved. It is not uncommon for Chinese to have recurring nightmares about cramming for and taking the gaokao years after they have graduated from university. Many schools in China set aside the final year of high school as a cram year for the test. Mr. Yang, the student in Kunming, said he spent 13 hours a day in his senior year studying, and his parents even rented an apartment for him near his school so he would not have to waste time traveling back and forth to his parents’ home. Enlarge This Image Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Parents waited as their children took the college entrance examination in Wuhan in June. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors “When I was getting close to the test, pretty much all I did besides eat and sleep was study,” Zhao Xiang, a high school graduate from Zunyi, Guizhou Province, said in an Internet chat interview. He said students’ lives before the gaokao were full of suffering: “Sometimes it was pressure from my family, sometimes it was the expectations from my teacher, sometimes it was pressure from myself. I was constantly in a really bad mood in the period before the gaokao. I was really confused.” A report by Xinhua, the state news agency, said that of the 9.15 million students who took the gaokao this year, about 75 percent would be admitted to universities in mainland China. Once the students get their scores, they submit to education officials a list of universities, ranking them in order of choice. Administrators at the universities then look at the students’ scores and decide whether to admit them for the coming September. Many universities do set aside a few slots for students admitted on the basis of special merit, thus allowing leeway for students who do not take the gaokao or have low scores. Admission in those cases can be based on factors like musical talent, foreign language skills or athletic prowess, as in the United States. Ethnic minority students sometimes get an advantage. Of course, children of senior Communist Party members, government leaders and prominent businesspeople have their own back channels to admission, a phenomenon that exists, too, in the West, though perhaps not to the same degree. There has also been a growing trend of students in China applying to universities outside the mainland. Many Chinese parents — including the party’s top leaders — not only value a foreign degree over one from a Chinese university, but also want their children to avoid the stress of taking the gaokao. An Education Ministry report last year said the number of high school students from top cities leaving the mainland to pursue higher education overseas grew at 20 percent each year from 2008 to 2011. Gao Haicheng, a junior in Kunming, said he planned to apply to universities abroad rather than ones in China. Though avoiding the gaokao is not his main aim, Mr. Gao said the exam “is a big problem in China’s education system.” “In China, they only use marks to explain something,” he added, referring to the emphasis on the gaokao score. Each year, cheating scandals become the talk of China. One common tactic was for students to give their identification cards to look-alikes hired to take the test; later, many provinces installed fingerprint scanners at test centers. In 2008, three girls in Jiangsu Province were caught with mini-cameras inside their bras; their aim was to transmit images of the exam to people outside the classroom who would then provide answers. This year, the big scandal involved students in Huanggang, Hubei Province , famous in the past decade for churning out students with high scores; several dozen students were caught there last month for using small monitors costing nearly $2,500 that resembled erasers and that allowed the students to receive electronic messages with test answers. Zhang Qianfan, a law professor Peking University who has studied the education system, said the main problem was the lack of slots at universities. Despite a boom in university construction in China, there is still a shortage. This year, there are seven million university slots, two million short of the number of gaokao test takers. The gap was much wider in 2006 — there were 5.3 million slots then for 9.5 million test takers. The drop in the number of students taking the gaokao can be attributed to demographic trends in China and the rise in the number of students opting to study abroad. “Many people are harsh critics of the gaokao, but I think they somewhat miss the most crucial point, which is that the supply from decent academic institutions falls short of the demand from the public,” Mr. Zhang said. Students who have received their gaokao scores and are now submitting their choices for universities expect to hear results this month. Mr. Yang, the graduate in Kunming, said by telephone on Saturday that he had put down the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology as his top choice. But he said if he had done better than his score of 517, out of a possible 750, he might have put down the Civil Aviation University of China in Tianjin. “I did the best in my class, so I’m pretty happy with the result,” he said. “So are my parents and most of my friends. But it’s not high enough to get me into the school I’m longing to attend.” Previous Page 1 2 Christy Khoshaba contributed reporting from Kunming, China, and Jacob Fromer from Hong Kong. Mia Li and Shi Da contributed research. A version of this article appeared in print on July 1, 2012, on page A 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Test That Can Determine the Course of Life in China Gets a Closer Examination.
A Model For A Testbed For Evaluating Reputation Systems Partheeban Chandrasekaran and Babak Esfandiari Abstract— The lack of an universal model in reputation systems makes it challenging to evaluate and compare them against attacks. While there are testbeds that provide application domain specific metrics to evaluate reputation systems, in this paper we propose a model for a testbed that is application agnostic. It is a workflow of graph transformations that is generic enough to accommodate a number of reputation systems in existing literature. In doing so, we note that these reputation systems work at different stages in the workflow and as a result, a byproduct of this model is a new classification method. We also describe various attacks using our model. I. INTRODUCTION reputation systems attack : self promoting, white washing, slandering and introducing sybils the organization of this paper: 1) Section 2 present author's model for a testbed to evaluate reputation systems in terms of a workflow, 2)Section 3 illustrate the testbedby examples of reputation systems 3) Section 4then describe attacks against reputation systems and their evaluations. 4) Section 5 presents related work on trust models and existing testbeds. 5) Finally, Section 6 provdes conclusions and roadmap items offuture work II. MODEL A. Obtain Feedback History Graph The feedback t(a; b): indicates the satisfaction received by a from b’s action a feedback history graph: G = (A;E) B. Obtain Reputation Graph two groups of reputation algorithms : global and local Global reputation algorithms: compute reputation values that are unique for each agent in the system local reputation algorithms : compute reputation of agents from the truster’s perspetive how the reputation graph is produced C. Obtain Trust Graph III. EXAMPLES OF REPUTATION SYSTEMS PeerTrust and EigenTrust A. EigenTrust 1) Obtaining Feedback History Graph: 2) Obtaining Reputation Graph: Figure 4 illustrate how the reputation of agents is calculated in EigenTrust 3) Obtaining Trust Graph: B. PeerTrust 1) Obtaining Feedback History Graph: 2) Obtaining Reputation Graph: 3) Obtaining Trust Graph: C. Advogato IV. MODELING AND EVALUATING ATTACKS A. Slandering Attack A slandering attack: B. Whitewashing Attack white washing attacks: agent firstcheat a reputation system by behaving honestly to gain trust from agents and then behaving dishonestly C. Sybil Attack V. RELATED WORK The Agent and Reputation Trust (ART) The Trust and Reputation Experimentation and Evaluation Testbed (TREET) VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK I comment: I now write a simulating environment for reputation system based on NetLogo. I enjoy this paper and will track author future work. the source code in Sourcefore: trusttestbed A Model For A Testbed For Evaluating Reputation.pdf source code in Sourceforge (2011): trusttestbed.tar.gz
WCEE至今已经举办了很多届了，算是地震工程领域的盛会，届时会有很多该领域的大牛来参会（参考14WCEE在北京的情况），明年是15WCEE，在葡萄牙的里斯本举办，前几天浏览其网站（ http://www.15wcee.org/ ）的时候发现有一个框架结构的预测竞赛，如下图。这样的比赛可能主要是为了提高会议的趣味性，不过有机会能参加的可以玩玩，提高趣味性。 下面附上该竞赛的相关说明： Design Report (January 2012) - Geometrical and mechanical properties of materials to be used in the construction of models and reinforcement detailing of the tests specimens. Response spectra and reference target input ground motions (low intensity and high intensity) to be used during the seismic tests. Preliminary shake-table input ground motions deemed to be used during the seismic tests. Assessment Report (March 2012) – Test results for the mechanical properties of materials used during the construction of models (compressive, flexural strength and rebound tests for concrete, tension tests for longitudinal steel reinforcement bars). Results for in-situ ambient dynamic characterization tests, detailed photographic report. Updated seismic table input ground motions to be used during the seismic tests. Pre-test Linear response Phase (June 2012) – Shaking table input time histories for low amplitude seismic motions (0.1g PGA) and control points displacement responses for the two models.
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