The Changing Nature of Sino-Foreign Business Relationships, 1842-1941

During the second half of the nineteenth century, foreign business enterprises relied considerably upon the service of compradors to extend their economic interests in the Chinese economy. Utilised initially to overcome the barriers presented by language difficulties, compradors were employed by western firms to undertake a variety of tasks covering both supervisory and co-ordination functions. With the growth of industrial interest by foreign businesses during the twentieth century, however, the comprador system fell into disrepute and during the 1930s was largely abandoned.This paper employs research based on primary source materials to trace this institutional transition for two specific cases. The Kailan Mining Administration (KMA), whose origins are to be found as an Anglo-Belgian free-standing company, took control of both the Kaiping and Lanchow coal mines in 1912. In order to expand its sales, the company employed the services of the comprador Liu Hongsheng who successfully built up the company’s market around Shanghai. In doing so, however, Liu became an important force in coal distribution in his own right, leading to tensions that were resolved through the creation of a joint venture operation called the Kailan Sales Administration (KSA) in 1925.British-American Tobacco (BAT) was set up in 1902 to administer the foreign markets of the American Tobacco Company and Britain’s Imperial Tobacco Company. In China, a distribution system was created using many Chinese collaborators of whom two were of particular importance. Wu Ting Seng, a member of the Chinese gentry, played a crucial intermediating role for the western company in a variety of its dealings with the Chinese. Cheang Park Chew, on the other hand, was an influential Cantonese merchant whom BAT used to distribute its goods throughout the Shanghai region. In both cases, BAT chose to alter the institutional arrangements with these collaborators from the contractual form to joint venture partnerships, unsuccessfully in the case of Wu, but with phenomenal success in the case of Cheang’s mercantile enterprise, the Wing Tai Vo Tobacco Corporation

MPC for MPC: Secure Computation on a Massively Parallel Computing Architecture

Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) is a model of computation widely believed to best capture realistic parallel computing architectures such as large-scale MapReduce and Hadoop clusters. Motivated by the fact that many data analytics tasks performed on these platforms involve sensitive user data, we initiate the theoretical exploration of how to leverage MPC architectures to enable efficient, privacy-preserving computation over massive data. Clearly if a computation task does not lend itself to an efficient implementation on MPC even without security, then we cannot hope to compute it efficiently on MPC with security. We show, on the other hand, that any task that can be efficiently computed on MPC can also be securely computed with comparable efficiency. Specifically, we show the following results: - any MPC algorithm can be compiled to a communication-oblivious counterpart while asymptotically preserving its round and space complexity, where communication-obliviousness ensures that any network intermediary observing the communication patterns learn no information about the secret inputs; - assuming the existence of Fully Homomorphic Encryption with a suitable notion of compactness and other standard cryptographic assumptions, any MPC algorithm can be compiled to a secure counterpart that defends against an adversary who controls not only intermediate network routers but additionally up to 1/3 - ? fraction of machines (for an arbitrarily small constant ?) - moreover, this compilation preserves the round complexity tightly, and preserves the space complexity upto a multiplicative security parameter related blowup. As an initial exploration of this important direction, our work suggests new definitions and proposes novel protocols that blend algorithmic and cryptographic techniques

Resonant Tunneling through double-bended Graphene Nanoribbons

We investigate theoretically resonant tunneling through double-bended graphene nanoribbon structures, i.e., armchair-edged graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) in between two semi-infinite zigzag graphene nanoribbon (ZGNR) leads. Our numerical results demonstrate that the resonant tunneling can be tuned dramatically by the Fermi energy and the length and/or widths of the AGNR for both the metallic and semiconductor-like AGNRs. The structure can also be use to control the valley polarization of the tunneling currents and could be useful for potential application in valleytronics devices.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Asymptotic behavior of the steady Navier-Stokes equation on the hyperbolic plane

We develop the asymptotic behavior for the solutions to the stationary Navier-Stokes equation in the exterior domain of the 2D hyperbolic space. More precisely, given the finite Dirichlet norm of the velocity, we show the velocity decays to $0$ at infinity. We also address the decay rate for the vorticity and the behavior of the pressure.Comment: 29 page

Relational values and valuation: challenges, and possibilities

Although the ecological valuation literature has been focused largely on instrumental values, there is increasing recognition that relational values might play a crucial and related role in environmental policy and practice. For example, relational values—as preferences, principles and virtues about human relationships involving nature—are identified as central in the IPBES Conceptual Framework, and recent work has investigated the implications of these for conservation and ecosystem management. But what are the implications of relational values for ecosystem valuation? In this talk, I address this question in three points. First, whereas instrumental or economic values are values of a thing, relational values are values about things, but these too can be quantitatively assessed. Second, whereas economic values are useful in a cost-benefit framework for decision-making, by which valuation outputs are aggregated to inform independent ‘rational’ decisions, relational values are complementary in first assessing whether decisions foster sustainable relationships, which may have spillover benefits for other decisions. Third, whereas economic values presume that human beings are self-interested rational agents who might be incentivized to engage in conservation or restoration—which risks crowding out moral motivations—a relational values approach recognizes explicitly that humans are value-oriented efficient complexity managers whose moral motivations can be crowded in. I illustrate these points by reference to incentive programs like payments for ecosystem services, finance tools like social impact bonds, and a new initiative that links both while addressing the apparently unassailable escalation of consumption (CoSphere)

王文興小說研究 : 從寫實、現代到後現代

王文興的小說自出版以來經常備受爭議，其中以《家變》最厲害，批評者的褒貶很極端，這種情況就好像西方現代主義文學作品在二十世紀初面世時所受的批評相似。筆者不想參與輕率褒貶的行列，而欲借用西方文學理論，加上台灣的社會文化背景來分析王文興的小說特色和發展，並且嘗試以新的角度細讀及賞析他的小說。本論文把王文興的《十五篇小說》、《家變》、《背海的人》上、下兩部順序分成三個階段，頭兩部小說各代表一個階段，《背海的人》上、下兩部代表最後一個階段。每章寫到一個階段的開始會個別分析每部小說的特色，然後分析每剖小說在王文興的小說創作中扮演的角色，從而尋找王文興小說的發展軌跡。由於王文興常被批評者視為現代主義者，閃此本論文將會分析他的小說與現代主義的關係，並且以此作為論文的主要內容。最後，本論文會總結以上四本小說的共同特徵，然後借用詹明信(Fredric Jameson)的理論來看它們的發展模式，並且提出現代主義以外的看法

Metrology of IXO Mirror Segments

For future x-ray astrophysics mission that demands optics with large throughput and excellent angular resolution, many telescope concepts build around assembling thin mirror segments in a Wolter I geometry, such as that originally proposed for the International X-ray Observatory. The arc-second resolution requirement posts unique challenges not just for fabrication, mounting but also for metrology of these mirror segments. In this paper, we shall discuss the metrology of these segments using normal incidence metrological method with interferometers and null lenses. We present results of the calibration of the metrology systems we are currently using, discuss their accuracy and address the precision in measuring near-cylindrical mirror segments and the stability of the measurements