Bridging Cultures and Traditions in the Reconceptualisation

Ph.D. thesisIn the first part of this century, the traditional common law jurisdiction of England and Wales and the civil law jurisdiction of Taiwan simultaneously gave increased legal recognition of the homemaker’s non-financial contributions to the marriage relationship, albeit using quite different mechanisms to achieve this. Family law in both jurisdictions has faced the issue of whether it should adapt to changed social norms by better reflecting the equal partnership discourse of marriage in the value that should be given to non-financial contributions typically made by women, such as housework and childcare, both during the marriage and on divorce. Yet, whether and how to do this has been the subject of much debate in both jurisdictions. This thesis therefore considers how the laws in these jurisdictions assess the value of non-financial contributions, before, during and after marriage (i.e. on divorce). It explores the extent to which they meet the aim of achieving substantive gender equality by weighing their achievements against the principles of gender mainstreaming. In order to evaluate this in the context of Taiwan where a gender mainstreaming approach was employed to frame the recent legislative reforms, a qualitative empirical research study was undertaken. The study also considers how social and cultural norms operate alongside or in opposition to the intended effects of legal developments in this field and argues that at the very least, stronger legal provisions going beyond gender neutral laws are needed to remove the traditional gendered assumptions about the low value of non-financial contributions. Therefore, this study intends to explore the problems which result from these socio-legal phenomena and, drawing on the strengths and weaknesses identified in the comparative study of Taiwan and England and Wales, put forward possible legal solutions. These, it is argued, involve a reconceptualisation of the value of non-financial contributions to marriage

Quantum phase transitions in attractive extended Bose-Hubbard Model with three-body constraint

The effect of nearest-neighbor repulsion on the ground-state phase diagrams of three-body constrained attractive Bose lattice gases is explored numerically. When the repulsion is turned on, in addition to the uniform Mott insulating state and two superfluid phases (the atomic and the dimer superfluids), a dimer checkerboard solid state appears at unit filling, where boson pairs form a solid with checkerboard structure. We find also that the first-order transitions between the uniform Mott insulating state and the atomic superfluid state can be turned into the continuous ones as the repulsion is increased. Moreover, the stability regions of the dimer superfluid phase can be extended to modest values of the hopping parameter by tuning the strength of the repulsion. Our conclusions hence shed light on the search of the dimer superfluid phase in real ultracold Bose gases in optical lattices.Comment: 4 + epsilon pages, 5 figures. Rewritten to emphasize the effect of nonzero nearest-neighbor repulsion. Conclusions unchanged. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

A Simplified Min-Sum Decoding Algorithm for Non-Binary LDPC Codes

Non-binary low-density parity-check codes are robust to various channel impairments. However, based on the existing decoding algorithms, the decoder implementations are expensive because of their excessive computational complexity and memory usage. Based on the combinatorial optimization, we present an approximation method for the check node processing. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme has small performance loss over the additive white Gaussian noise channel and independent Rayleigh fading channel. Furthermore, the proposed reduced-complexity realization provides significant savings on hardware, so it yields a good performance-complexity tradeoff and can be efficiently implemented.Comment: Partially presented in ICNC 2012, International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications. Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Communication

ON THE EQUIVALENCE OF IMPORT TARIFF AND QUOTA: THE CASE OF RICE IMPORT IN TAIWAN

This paper extends the existing theory on the equivalence of import tariff and quota. If the equivalence is defined on the domestic price level (weak equivalence), then either the zero conjectural variation for domestic country or a perfectly competitive market will be sufficient to support this equivalence. If the equivalence is defined both on the same domestic price level as well as tariff rate (strong equivalence), then the conditions are that either domestic country acts as a Cournot competitor and foreign country is a price taker, or both domestic and foreign country are price takers. An empirical spatial-equilibrium trade model is constructed to simulate the impacts of import tariff and quota. Using Taiwan¡¦s rice import as an example, the empirical results show that if Taiwan switches from the quota system to tariff system, the domestic rice price as well as total social welfare can be increased given the same import volume.International Relations/Trade,

The Association between Virus Prevalence and Intercolonial Aggression Levels in the Yellow Crazy Ant, Anoplolepis Gracilipes (Jerdon).

The recent discovery of multiple viruses in ants, along with the widespread infection of their hosts across geographic ranges, provides an excellent opportunity to test whether viral prevalence in the field is associated with the complexity of social interactions in the ant population. In this study, we examined whether the association exists between the field prevalence of a virus and the intercolonial aggression of its ant host, using the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes) and its natural viral pathogen (TR44839 virus) as a model system. We delimitated the colony boundary and composition of A. gracilipes in a total of 12 study sites in Japan (Okinawa), Taiwan, and Malaysia (Penang), through intercolonial aggression assay. The spatial distribution and prevalence level of the virus was then mapped for each site. The virus occurred at a high prevalence in the surveyed colonies of Okinawa and Taiwan (100% infection rate across all sites), whereas virus prevalence was variable (30%-100%) or none (0%) at the sites in Penang. Coincidentally, colonies in Okinawa and Taiwan displayed a weak intercolonial boundary, as aggression between colonies is generally low or moderate. Contrastingly, sites in Penang were found to harbor a high proportion of mutually aggressive colonies, a pattern potentially indicative of complex colony composition. Our statistical analyses further confirmed the observed correlation, implying that intercolonial interactions likely contribute as one of the effective facilitators of/barriers to virus prevalence in the field population of this ant species