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Direct elections for village leaders have been conducted in China since 1988, but they remain little known or casually dismissed by urban Chinese and the international community. Those who are aware of China's village elections have sharply divergent views as to their genuineness or effectiveness. Some are sceptical that the Chinese Communist Party would ever permit a competitive election that could threaten its grip on power. Others see the elections as a first stage in the building of democracy in China. In many ways, village elections are a kind of Rorschach test, an ambiguous drawing that is interpreted by people according to their predisposition towards China rather than the quality of the elections.

Organización de los Estados Americanos (oea),RESUMEN: Tras 53 años desplegando misiones, el siguiente trabajo reflexiona en torno a tres ideas básicas que se han establecido en relación a la naturaleza de la observación de la Organización de los Estados Americanos: el papel de las misiones electorales, la invitación previa y el despliegue masivo de observadores el día de la elección. El documento propone elementos de juicio para una necesaria discusión sobre estas ideas básicas, especialmente uno que pudiera contemplar la invitación automática para la observación internacional.Palabras clave: observación electoral; misiones electorales; democracia; Organización de los Estados Americanos (oea).ABSTRACT: After 53 years deploying missions, this paper addresses on three common ideas on the nature of the electoral observation of the Organization of American States: the paper of electoral missions, the invitation required for the deployment and the deployment of large number of observers. The paper presents element for debating these consensuses, particularly focused on the possibility of an automatic invitation to deploy electoral observations missions in oas member states.

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There are several ubiquitous kinematic structures that are used in industrial robots, with the most prominent being a six-axis angular structure. However, researchers are experimenting with task-based mechanism synthesis that could provide higher efficiency with custom optimized manipulators. Many studies have focused on finding the most efficient optimization algorithm for task-based robot manipulators. These manipulators, however, are usually optimized from simple modular joints and links, without exploring more elaborate modules. Here, we show that link modules defined by small numbers of parameters have better performance than more complicated ones. We compare four different manipulator link types, namely basic predefined links with fixed dimensions, straight links that can be optimized for different lengths, rounded links, and links with a curvature defined by a Hermite spline. Manipulators are then built from these modules using a genetic algorithm and are optimized for three different tasks. The results demonstrate that manipulators built from simple links not only converge faster, which is expected given the fewer optimized parameters, but also converge on lower cost values.