One country, two systems in practice : an analysis of six cases

The resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was unique in the decolonization history of the United Kingdom. For the first time a piece of British colony was returned to another sovereign power without becoming an independent country. For the PRC, the resumption of sovereignty was a natural course of event because China had never admitted that Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom. After initial contacts between Britain and China in the late 1970s, Chinese government decided to take back Hong Kong in 1981. In 1982, the fourth constitution since the founding of the PRC promulgated the notion of Special Administrative Region. The principle of “one country, two systems” was devised to solve the issue of sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997. In recovering Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encountered a dilemma: on the one hand, it would like to resume sovereignty over Hong Kong; on the other hand, it would like to maintain the status quo as to preserve prosperity and stability of Hong Kong. Hopefully, the “one country, two systems” could solve the problem. Now fours years after the handover, people would ask the question whether the notion of “one country, two systems” has been successfully implemented. In fact, one could even ask; what is actually the principle of “one country，two systems”? Where is the line between “one country” and “two systems”? The paper attempts to answer these questions by exploring six cases that occurred after the handover. The paper starts with a general discussion on the concept, followed by a delineation of six cases and the implications of these cases for “one country, two systems” would be drawn. In fact, some scholars argued that under “one country, two systems” Hong Kong enjoys a higher degree of autonomy than the local/regional governments under Western federal systems. The paper tries to answer the question by referring to Australian and American federal systems

Mitigating Architectural Mismatch During the Evolutionary Synthesis of Deep Neural Networks

Evolutionary deep intelligence has recently shown great promise for producing small, powerful deep neural network models via the organic synthesis of increasingly efficient architectures over successive generations. Existing evolutionary synthesis processes, however, have allowed the mating of parent networks independent of architectural alignment, resulting in a mismatch of network structures. We present a preliminary study into the effects of architectural alignment during evolutionary synthesis using a gene tagging system. Surprisingly, the network architectures synthesized using the gene tagging approach resulted in slower decreases in performance accuracy and storage size; however, the resultant networks were comparable in size and performance accuracy to the non-gene tagging networks. Furthermore, we speculate that there is a noticeable decrease in network variability for networks synthesized with gene tagging, indicating that enforcing a like-with-like mating policy potentially restricts the exploration of the search space of possible network architectures.Comment: 5 page

Assessing Architectural Similarity in Populations of Deep Neural Networks

Evolutionary deep intelligence has recently shown great promise for producing small, powerful deep neural network models via the synthesis of increasingly efficient architectures over successive generations. Despite recent research showing the efficacy of multi-parent evolutionary synthesis, little has been done to directly assess architectural similarity between networks during the synthesis process for improved parent network selection. In this work, we present a preliminary study into quantifying architectural similarity via the percentage overlap of architectural clusters. Results show that networks synthesized using architectural alignment (via gene tagging) maintain higher architectural similarities within each generation, potentially restricting the search space of highly efficient network architectures.Comment: 3 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1811.0796

The housing ladder and Hong Kong housing market\u27s boom and bust cycle

This paper presents evidence, based on the recent Hong Kong experience, for the existence of a “housing ladder effect.” An increase of housing equity at the bottom of the ladder tends to translate into a trading up activity that will both increase housing market turnover and buoy up the entire housing market. Based on a natural experiment through the introduction of a public housing privatization scheme, this papers presents evidence supporting this story using a logit model and a price-volume causality test

Random Feature Maps via a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) Framework for Object Classification

The approximation of nonlinear kernels via linear feature maps has recently gained interest due to their applications in reducing the training and testing time of kernel-based learning algorithms. Current random projection methods avoid the curse of dimensionality by embedding the nonlinear feature space into a low dimensional Euclidean space to create nonlinear kernels. We introduce a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) framework, where we model the linear kernels and nonlinearity separately for increased training efficiency. The proposed LaRP framework was assessed using the MNIST hand-written digits database and the COIL-100 object database, and showed notable improvement in object classification performance relative to other state-of-the-art random projection methods.Comment: 5 page

A General Upper Bound on the Size of Constant-Weight Conflict-Avoiding Codes

Conflict-avoiding codes are used in the multiple-access collision channel without feedback. The number of codewords in a conflict-avoiding code is the number of potential users that can be supported in the system. In this paper, a new upper bound on the size of conflict-avoiding codes is proved. This upper bound is general in the sense that it is applicable to all code lengths and all Hamming weights. Several existing constructions for conflict-avoiding codes, which are known to be optimal for Hamming weights equal to four and five, are shown to be optimal for all Hamming weights in general.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur