Taking out a cane-shaped instrument, putting on earphones, and walking slowly along the cable duct
Chutian Metropolis Daily Jimu News reporters: Liu Chenchen, Chen Qian, Zhao Bei; Photography: Chutian Metropolis Daily Jimu News reporter Liu Zhongcan. The trade union set up the stage, and unique skills took the spotlight. On May 27, the first "Gongyou Cup" "e You Jue Huo" high-skilled talent competition, hosted by the Hubei Provincial Federation of Trade Unions and organized by the Provincial Workers' Science, Technology and Culture Center, came to a successful conclusion. During the one-and-a-half-day finals, 30 contestants stood out. Facing expert judges, each contestant remained calm and composed, showcasing their refined skills honed through countless trials. Starting from May 10, the Provincial Federation of Trade Unions, together with Jimu News, launched a 10-day online voting on the Jimu News WeChat official account. The finals adopted a combination of online voting and expert review to calculate the comprehensive score. The top ten in each of the three competition categories, totaling 30 contestants, will be reported to the Provincial Federation of Trade Unions for approval and included in the "Jingchu Craftsman" high-skilled talent cultivation plan. For cables buried deep underground, once a fault occurs, how can one determine the exact location of the damage for emergency repairs? Zou Song, a 49-year-old worker from the distribution network emergency repair team of State Grid Xiangyang Power Supply Company, demonstrated his unique skill. At the competition site, five connected cable segments, each several meters long, were placed inside opaque pipes and slowly pushed onto the stage. A judge representative randomly selected one cable segment and damaged it at an arbitrary position. Then, the opaque pipes around the cables were closed, making it impossible to see the damage point from outside. Throughout the process, Zou Song and his assistant's eyes were covered with opaque blindfolds, and they had to accurately locate the cable fault point within just a few minutes. Zou Song took out his equipment, fiddled with it for a while, then picked up a cane-shaped instrument, put on earphones, and walked slowly along the cable duct, as if listening to something. Exactly at the spot where the judge had damaged the cable, Zou Song stopped and signaled to the judge that the fault had been found. Zou Song told Jimu News reporters that after a cable fault occurs, to quickly repair it, one must quickly locate the fault point within a radius of several kilometers. The key to this unique skill lies in his ears. Because of his keen hearing, his colleagues call him "Zou Yi Ting" (Zou the Listener). In fact, when passing the fault point, he can hear a special sound through the equipment, a difficulty comparable to hearing a needle drop in the midst of noise. In 2008, Zou Song participated in a national competition as a Hubei contestant and won fourth place in the cable fault detection individual event. In this competition, he won the "Top Ten Unique Skills Award" in the basic industry category. Another contestant, Yi Xicheng, showcased his "extraordinary hands." He is 41 years old and has been working as a tile setter for 22 years. In the preliminary round, he used different colors of tiles, decomposed and reassembled them, performed high-precision cutting and fine tiling, and used 3D three-dimensional tile tiling techniques to create a Three Gorges Dam mural, successfully standing out. At the finals, he held a raw egg in one hand and a blade and other tools in the other, completely cutting off one end of the eggshell while keeping the egg membrane intact and the shell unbroken. "In the construction industry, there is a saying: 'Carpenters look at the tips, tilers look at the edges.' When cutting, you need accurate eyes and steady hands to make the edges of the tiles round where they should be round and straight where they should be straight," Yi Xicheng said. There is no special trick; only by calming down and practicing. Spreading a severely damaged painting on white paper, using the effects of paste and chemicals, and gently brushing over it, after some treatment, the audience can see its original appearance. This is the unique skill demonstrated by Zhao Xiaolong, a cultural relic restorer from the Hubei Provincial Museum. Born in 1988, Zhao Xiaolong entered the Hubei Provincial Museum and, after years of study and training, has become an independent cultural relic restoration expert. In 2018, he represented Hubei in the first National Cultural Relic Restoration Skills Competition held by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and won the first prize in the painting restoration project. An ancient porcelain vase shattered into pieces, after a series of processes, is presented to the audience as a perfectly restored cultural relic. This is the unique skill demonstrated by Zhang Jixia, a 34-year-old technician from the Hubei Provincial Cultural Relics Exchange and Information Center. Unlike Zhao Xiaolong, Zhang Jixia's entry into the field was more "traditional": he grew from an apprentice to a technical expert through the apprenticeship system. Today, he is one of the few cultural relic restorers in Hubei who can independently complete the restoration and repair of ceramic cultural relics. In 2021, he represented Hubei in the National Cultural Relic Skills Competition and won the second prize in the porcelain restoration project. In this "e You Jue Huo" finals, these two post-80s cultural relic restorers both entered the "Top Ten" in the new employment forms and traditional crafts category. A romantic white wedding dress, and one-person-tall puppets of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, are all made from ordinary balloons. When this unique skill was demonstrated, even the staff couldn't resist taking photos. This ordinary yet extraordinary skill comes from Xu Dengyong, a young man from Nanzhang County, Hubei Province. Cars, houses, animals, and even clothes are all within his capability; this is Xu Dengyong's "balloon handicraft art" unique skill. In 2004, at the age of 15, Xu Dengyong left school and went to Guangzhou, where he worked as a worker in an electronics factory. One day during a lunch break, he happened to watch a TV program where a guest wore a set of clothes made of balloons, which caught his eye. "Balloons have festive and bright colors, can be made into different shapes, bring joy to people, and everyone will surely like them." In May 2017, Xu Dengyong showcased his balloon creativity on the CCTV program "Chu Cai Zhong Guo Ren" (Outstanding Chinese). In the show, performers walked the runway in clothes made of balloons, and the host also wore a "Snow White" dress made of balloons on site, receiving approval from all four mentors. In 2019, he participated in the domestic balloon industry competition - the CBAC China Balloon Art Competition - and won the championship in the large group with his creative work "Divine Beast Dragon Horse," which combined science fiction and Chinese style. On the morning of the 27th, in the finals of the new generation information technology category of the "e You Jue Huo" competition, Meng Tao, who demonstrated the "intelligent shrimp peeling robot" unique skill, and Tao Guangming, who demonstrated the "passive cooling optical metamaterial fabric technology," stood out and won the "Top Ten Unique Skills Award" title. The new generation information technology category mainly focuses on "optical, chip, screen, terminal, and network," including high-skilled emerging industries such as optical fiber and cable manufacturing, semiconductor chip manufacturing, liquid crystal display device manufacturing, and optical fiber sensing technology. As Tao Guangming, the demonstrator of the "passive cooling optical metamaterial fabric technology," said, the purpose of technological development is to benefit society, and technological progress is to make life better. At the finals demonstration site, Tao Guangming decomposed a piece of "cloth" layer by layer and explained in simple terms the "passive cooling optical metamaterial fabric technology based on morphological hierarchical design and advanced industrial manufacturing methods." Ultimately, how this high-tech innovation beautifies life was vividly demonstrated in his presentation, and it was tangible and perceptible. "Wearing clothes made of this fabric can cool human skin by nearly 5 degrees Celsius under direct outdoor sunlight, reduce the temperature inside a car by nearly 30 degrees Celsius, and cool air conditioner outdoor units by about 24 degrees Celsius," Tao Guangming said. As summer arrives, the crayfish season has begun. On May 27, another contestant, Meng Tao, demonstrated his "intelligent shrimp peeling robot" unique skill: with a light press of a button, 18 robots work in tandem, separating the heads and bodies of about 1,100 crayfish per minute, and can replace 50 shrimp peeling workers in a day. Meng Tao introduced on site that the control system of the shrimp peeling robot adopts a neural network algorithm similar to the principle of Go, which, like the human brain, can issue commands after reading and computing, and through big data aggregation, can send the angle and position of the shrimp to the robot, achieving dynamic grabbing and tracking placement. "With it, Hubei's shrimp processing enterprises have truly transformed from labor-intensive to technology-intensive. According to the production plan of delivering 30 sets of crayfish food processing robots to the market each year, it can save 18 million yuan in labor costs annually and increase domestic and international sales of crayfish by 500 million yuan," Meng Tao said. This technology can also be further applied to the deep processing of fish, shrimp, crab, and other aquatic products, which is very meaningful for Hubei, a major aquatic province, and for Hubei people who love aquatic products, their quality of life is also gradually improved through technological means.
