Passengers head home at a railway station in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, on a smoggy day, Jan 17, 2017. [Photo/IC] To cope with the smog that has plagued North China for years, one man has come up with an innovative idea that might go beyond your imagination. Du Honglai, a resident of Beijing, has applied for a national patent for his idea, which proposes the mobilization of all the city's residents to fan away the smog, according to a report from the Legal Daily. Du said the approach requires 15 million people to wave a fan at the same time in the same direction, which can produce powerful winds. He said the new approach not only is low cost and effective, but also generates no secondary air pollution. According to his calculations, if 15 million people wave fans at the same time in the same direction for an hour, the air that occupies a space 40 meters high, 20 kilometers long and 20 km wide (roughly the area of downtown Beijing) will be expelled 68 km away. Du calls for government agencies to offer a fan to all able-bodied people in the city to expel the smog during breaks from class and work, according to a report of thepaper.cn. In his application, Du has also designed fans in a variety of sizes that fit people of different ages and physical conditions. But the man did not reveal whether he has done any experiments on his idea. The patent application Du submitted in March has not yet been approved for substantive examination by the State Intellectual Property Office. The website of the SIPO shows that Du has also applied for patents for his inventions including a timed mosquito killer and nose plug for swimming. In 2016, Beijing's density of PM2.5, hazardous airborne particles measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, was 74 milligrams per cubic meter, double the health maximum of 35 mg per cubic meter set by the government. children in need wristbandcustom rubber wristbandsadjustable wristbandscustom made rubber braceletscustom fidget spinners
The Boston Consulting Group and China's e-commerce giant Alibaba issued a joint report entitled "The New Retails: Lessons from China for the West" on the situation in the Chinese e-commerce market. The authors compared China's intensely growing digital marketplace with Times Square, as one of the busiest and most lively places in the world. The authors pointed that the core reason is not China's large population, but rather the essentially different conditions in which e-commerce developed in China and in Western markets. E-commerce emerged in the US in the 1990s and Western customers had to break away from their old habits, switching to the digital marketplace. By contrast, physical retail was less developed in China at the time and Chinese customers simply skipped this transition period, quickly finding themselves accustomed to online shopping. The same situation is characteristic for shopping via smartphones and other mobile devices." Many [Chinese] consumers skipped the PC era entirely, going right to smartphones. This may explain why Samsung phones with larger screens took hold in China well before they did in Western markets," the report read. The authors estimated that by 2020, online purchases made with mobile phones would reach 74 percent of e-commerce in China, against just 46 percent in the US market. Moreover, the pace of e-commerce does not show a sign of slowing down. The industry is expected to grow by 20 percent a year in China in the next five years, which is two times faster than that of in the US and the UK. The authors also expect this trend to result in millions of new customers and a growing number of e-commerce categories that "may be surprising for the West." The authors highlighted the main advantages of China's e-commerce market, differentiating it from Western digital marketplaces. All of the above, according to estimates, will further drive up online shopping in China, at a much faster pace than in the West. Analyzing the market's dynamics and consumer behavior both in China and in the West, the authors of the report concluded that in the future all online retailers will have to tackle almost the same set of issues, in order to keep profitable growth. Among the most crucial challenges is developing versatile offline retail channels that would combine the advantages of both physical retail and online shopping. According to the authors, such a model should deliver a "seamless and compelling customer experience, and increases efficiency in inventory management, product selection, and logistics."
