Curbing Rent-Seeking and Inefficiency with Broad Takings Powers and Undercompensation: The Case of Singapore from a Givings Perspective

Conventional discourses on the perils of weak property rights vis-à-vis government takings have failed to account for and respond to the rent-seeking and inefficiency problems of government actions. Singapore, with its broad takings powers, coupled with express undercompensation, has not suffered from the predicted widespread rent-seeking and inefficiency. This case study of Singapore from a givings perspective demonstrates the importance of imposing a fair charge on the various kinds of givings in curbing rent-seeking and inefficiency. There are also additional benefits of having a healthy fiscal budget and more equitable taxation arising from Singapore’s givings regime. The key normative implication is that an equal, if not greater, emphasis has to be placed on the givings aspect of the equation, whether in dealing with the problems of rent-seeking and inefficiency or promoting better governance and fiscal policies

Lying about God (and Love?) to Get Laid: The Case Study of Criminalizing Sex Under Religious False Pretense in Hong Kong

Section 120 of the Hong Kong Crimes Ordinances— which traces its origin to the U.K. and which is replicated in several other English common law jurisdictions— criminalizes procurement of sexual acts through false representation. Recently, prosecutors used this provision to indict individuals who procured sexual acts on the pretext of performing luck-improving religious rituals. Beyond presenting the first-ever systematic examination of these intriguing fraudulent sex court cases, this Article makes two arguments. First, this Article explains how the strong skepticism, and at times, instinctive rejection by the judges of the purported religious proclamations not only confirm the scholarly concerns over the sincerity test in U.S. v. Ballard, but also demonstrates how the often-proposed solution of bench trials and other procedural safeguards is of limited efficacy to restrain religious bias. Second, by situating religious fraud with romantic fraud— both being frauds that raise serious conceptual difficulties in terms of objectively proving falsehood— this Article highlights that fraudulent sex criminalization is as much a regulation of fraud as it is a sexual offence. Thus, the inquiry should not only be sensitive to the different normative considerations that vary with the subject matter of the representations, but should also incorporate the economic literature regarding the impact of fraud on market dynamics in appreciating the unintended effects of the law and prosecutorial decisions

More Market-Oriented Than the United States and More Socialist Than China: A Comparative Public Property Story of Singapore

Compared to the more illustrious conceptualization of private property, the conceptualization of public property remains at a surprisingly infantile stage. The very definition of public property is ambiguous. This article utilizes a comparative case study of traffic congestion policies in the United States, China, and Singapore to highlight the conceptual pitfalls posed by the current confusion on public property. This article proposes a refined public property framework that offers greater conceptual clarity on the real issues at stake. In particular, this article argues that “property” in public property should include regulatory permits while “public” in public property should not be distracted by the requirement of public access. The allocation considerations of efficiency and fairness governing conventional public property are equally applicable to economically valuable regulatory permits. Similarly, public access is a mere form of allocation that should be changed upon alterations in use pattern arising from technological advancement and socioeconomic changes

Targeting Intrinsically Disordered Proteins through Dynamic Interactions

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are over-represented in major disease pathways and have attracted significant interest in understanding if and how they may be targeted using small molecules for therapeutic purposes. While most existing studies have focused on extending the traditional structure-centric drug design strategies and emphasized exploring pre-existing structure features of IDPs for specific binding, several examples have also emerged to suggest that small molecules could achieve specificity in binding IDPs and affect their function through dynamic and transient interactions. These dynamic interactions can modulate the disordered conformational ensemble and often lead to modest compaction to shield functionally important interaction sites. Much work remains to be done on further elucidation of the molecular basis of the dynamic small molecule–IDP interaction and determining how it can be exploited for targeting IDPs in practice. These efforts will rely critically on an integrated experimental and computational framework for disordered protein ensemble characterization. In particular, exciting advances have been made in recent years in enhanced sampling techniques, Graphic Processing Unit (GPU)-computing, and protein force field optimization, which have now allowed rigorous physics-based atomistic simulations to generate reliable structure ensembles for nontrivial IDPs of modest sizes. Such de novo atomistic simulations will play crucial roles in exploring the exciting opportunity of targeting IDPs through dynamic interactions

Atomistic Peptide Folding Simulations Reveal Interplay of Entropy and Long-Range Interactions in Folding Cooperativity

Understanding how proteins fold has remained a problem of great interest in biophysical research. Atomistic computer simulations using physics-based force fields can provide important insights on the interplay of different interactions and energetics and their roles in governing the folding thermodynamics and mechanism. In particular, generalized Born (GB)-based implicit solvent force fields can be optimized to provide an appropriate balance between solvation and intramolecular interactions and successfully recapitulate experimental conformational equilibria for a set of helical and β-hairpin peptides. Here, we further demonstrate that key thermodynamic properties and their temperature dependence obtained from replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations of these peptides are in quantitative agreement with experimental results. Useful lessons can be learned on how the interplay of entropy and sequentially long-range interactions governs the mechanism and cooperativity of folding. These results highlight the great potential of high-quality implicit solvent force fields for studying protein folding and large-scale conformational transitions

積分ジャイロスコープのための2軸縮退多重質量振動子

要約のみTohoku University塚本貴城課