‘Rule of Law’ as Anti-Colonial Discourse: Taiwanese Liberal Nationalists’ Imagination of Nation and World under Japanese Colonialism

Law is – and has long been – a crucial element of (post-) colonial orders. It is commonplace wisdom that the Western centre dominates the eastern periphery, not only through outright force but also via institutions and ideas. Europeans and Americans have a long history of bringing ‘civilisation,’ be it Christianity, ‘modernity’ or law, to peoples they perceive as less civilised. Despite the common practice of applying different rules to different peoples, colonisers often see the lack of uniformity of law in the colonies as a failure, if not a necessary evil, for the ‘uncivilised’ colonised native. For countries that narrowly escaped subjugation to Euro-American colonialism, such as China and Japan, the sentiment of the humiliation endured when being forced to ‘openup’ and adopt Western legal systems is still very much alive

The Development of Conductive Nanoporous Chitosan Polymer Membrane for Selective Transport of Charged Molecules

We present the development of conductive nanoporous CNT/chitosan membrane for charge-selective transport of charged molecules, carboxylfluorescein (CF), substance P, and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α). The membrane was made porous and conductive via gelatin nanoparticle leaching technique and addition of carbon nanotubes, respectively. These nanoporous membranes discriminate the diffusion of positive-charged molecules while inhibiting the passage of negative-charged molecules as positive potential was applied. The permeation selectivity of these membranes is reversed by converting the polarity of applied potential into negative. Based on this principle, charged molecules (carboxylfluorescein, substance P, and TNF-α) are successfully filtered through these membranes. This system shows 30 times more selective for CF than substance P as positive potential was applied, while 2.5 times more selective for substance P than CF as negative potential was applied

Maneuvering Modernity: Family Law as a Battle Field in Colonial Taiwan (1895-1945)

Twenty five years after launching its own legal modernization in response to Western imperialism, Japan imposed a modern legal system upon its first colony, Taiwan. In accordance with the “respecting old custom” colonial policy, the Japanese created a system called Taiwanese customary law, a mixture of imperial Chinese laws, local customs and European legal concepts, and gradually implemented its newly adopted European-style Meiji Civil Code (1898). However, even since the late 1910s when the colonial policy changed into “full-flag assimilation,” family law remained an exception to the transplantation of Japanese laws. That did not, however, mean that family law was insignificant in Japanese colonial governance. On the contrary, since family was deemed as the core of the national culture, Japanese colonizers regarded the extension of Japanese family law to Taiwan as crucial to both the cultural assimilation and the civilizing mission. For the same reason, Taiwanese family customs was regarded as the most “backward” aspect of Taiwanese culture. The newly-emerged Taiwanese new intelligentsia, represented by a lawyer/journalist named Lin Cheng-Lu (1885-1968), resisted to the whole-sale imposition of Japanese family law on Taiwanese. Unlike many anti-colonial nationalists in the colonies, they did not uphold neo-traditionalist native family values to argue against the Western-European family laws. On the contrary, the Taiwanese anti-colonial activists welcomed the modern family law but claimed that the modernization of Japanese family law was in fact incomplete. Feudal Japanese customs (e.g. primogeniture) preserved in Meiji Civil Code were attacked and rejected. By separating modernity from the Japanese colonizer, the Taiwanese developed a strategy of modernizing rather than single-mindedly preserving traditional culture, as part of an effort to resist the assimilation project and preserve its own identity

Order-Preserving Abstractive Summarization for Spoken Content Based on Connectionist Temporal Classification

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is a powerful approach for sequence-to-sequence learning, and has been popularly used in speech recognition. The central ideas of CTC include adding a label "blank" during training. With this mechanism, CTC eliminates the need of segment alignment, and hence has been applied to various sequence-to-sequence learning problems. In this work, we applied CTC to abstractive summarization for spoken content. The "blank" in this case implies the corresponding input data are less important or noisy; thus it can be ignored. This approach was shown to outperform the existing methods in term of ROUGE scores over Chinese Gigaword and MATBN corpora. This approach also has the nice property that the ordering of words or characters in the input documents can be better preserved in the generated summaries.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech 201

Chilling susceptibility in mungbean varieties is associated with their differentially expressed genes

Additional file 4: Table S3. Validation of microarray data by qRT-PCR in mungbean seedlings

Fragmentation and OB Star Formation in High-Mass Molecular Hub-Filament System

Filamentary structures are ubiquitously seen in the interstellar medium. The concentrated molecular mass in the filaments allows fragmentation to occur in a shorter timescale than the timescale of the global collapse. Such hierarchical fragmentation may further assist the dissipation of excessive angular momentum. It is crucial to resolve the morphology and the internal velocity structures of the molecular filaments observationally. We perform 0".5-2".5 angular resolution interferometric observations toward the nearly face-on OB cluster forming region G33.92+0.11. Observations of various spectral lines as well as the millimeter dust continuum emission, consistently trace several $\sim$1 pc scale, clumpy molecular arms. Some of the molecular arms geometrically merge to an inner 3.0$^{{\scriptsize{+2.8}}}_{{-\scriptsize{1.4}}}\cdot10^{3}$\,$M_{\odot}$, 0.6 pc scale central molecular clump, and may directly channel the molecular gas to the warm ($\sim$50 K) molecular gas immediately surrounding the centrally embedded OB stars. The NH$_{3}$ spectra suggest a medium turbulence line width of FWHM$\lesssim$2\,km\,s$^{-1}$ in the central molecular clump, implying a $\gtrsim$10 times larger molecular mass than the virial mass. Feedbacks from shocks and the centrally embedded OB stars and localized (proto)stellar clusters, likely play a key role in the heating of molecular gas and could lead to the observed chemical stratification. Although (proto)stellar feedbacks are already present, G33.92+0.11 chemically appears to be at an early evolutionary stage given by the low abundance limit of SO$_{2}$ observed in this region.Comment: 37 pages, 23 figure

AdapterBias: Parameter-efficient Token-dependent Representation Shift for Adapters in NLP Tasks

Transformer-based pre-trained models with millions of parameters require large storage. Recent approaches tackle this shortcoming by training adapters, but these approaches still require a relatively large number of parameters. In this study, AdapterBias, a surprisingly simple yet effective adapter architecture, is proposed. AdapterBias adds a token-dependent shift to the hidden output of transformer layers to adapt to downstream tasks with only a vector and a linear layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of AdapterBias. The experiments show that our proposed method can dramatically reduce the trainable parameters compared to the previous works with a minimal decrease in task performances compared with fine-tuned pre-trained models. We further find that AdapterBias automatically learns to assign more significant representation shifts to the tokens related to the task in consideration.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally. This paper was published in Findings of NAACL 202

Fabrication and Permeability Characteristics of Microdialysis Probe Using Chitosan Nanoporous Membrane

In this article, a nanoporous chitosan polymer membrane was successfully produced and applied as microdialysis membrane for in vitro sampling of biomolecules. With the use of nanoparticle leaching technique, porogenic gelatin nanoparticles formed nanopores in the chitosan-based membrane to create a secure implantable nanoporous membrane for biomolecule sampling. The gelatin nanoparticles size was in the range of 45 to 70 nm, and the pore size of the chitosan membrane was around 40 to 100 nm. The porosity of membrane was found to be dependent on the mixing ratio of chitosan solution and gelatin nanoparticles solution. The results of diffusion study showed that we can alter the mixing ratio of porogen to achieve size-selective molecular diffusion, which means that the porosity and cut-off size of porous membrane can be controlled. The recoveries of the probe fabricated from the chitosan-based membrane were examined for four different model compounds of different molecular weights: 2-NBDG, substance P, TNF-α, and FITC-BSA. The microdialysis probes showed linear responses and substantial recovery to various concentrations of biomolecules. These results indicated that the microdialysis probe constructed by chitosan nanoporous membrane could sample and monitor the biomolecules in vitro and has the potential for the application in vivo