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

An improvement to multifold euclidean geometry codes

This paper presents an improvement to the multifold Euclidean geometry codes introduced by Lin (1973).The improved multifold EG codes are proved to be maximal, and therefore they are more efficient than the multifold EG codes. Relationships between the improved multifold EG codes and other known majority-logic decodable codes are proved

Continuous-time Mean-Variance Portfolio Selection with Stochastic Parameters

This paper studies a continuous-time market {under stochastic environment} where an agent, having specified an investment horizon and a target terminal mean return, seeks to minimize the variance of the return with multiple stocks and a bond. In the considered model firstly proposed by [3], the mean returns of individual assets are explicitly affected by underlying Gaussian economic factors. Using past and present information of the asset prices, a partial-information stochastic optimal control problem with random coefficients is formulated. Here, the partial information is due to the fact that the economic factors can not be directly observed. Via dynamic programming theory, the optimal portfolio strategy can be constructed by solving a deterministic forward Riccati-type ordinary differential equation and two linear deterministic backward ordinary differential equations

BiCMOS implementation of the hierarchy for pattern extraction artificial neural network.

This thesis presents the architecture and the algorithm of the Hierarchy for Pattern Extraction (HyPE) artificial neural network. The training algorithm and the recalling algorithm of the HyPE artificial neural network are rewritten into C based on a Smalltalk prototype. A switching tree minimization program is introduced that provides logic minimization capable of handling a higher transistor tree height and merges several transistor trees. The Northern Telecom 0.8$\mu$ Bipolar Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (BATMOS) technology is used to implement the designs in this thesis. There are two final dynamic neuron designs that have been verified and fabricated. One neuron uses the True Single Phase Clocking (TSPC) Latch and the other neuron uses the Ultra Fast Dynamic Current Steering (UCDCS) latch at the output of the dynamic functional block. The verification of the functional blocks for both neuron designs is done using SPICE simulation. The highest clocking speed applied to the TSPC neuron and the UCDCS neuron are 50MHz and 66MHz, respectively. Additionally, by isolating one of the transistor trees from the functional block, the clocking speed up to 333MHz can be achieved. Finally, a test chip including these two final dynamic neuron designs has been fabricated.Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1995 .H86. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 34-06, page: 2439. Adviser: G. A. Jullien. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1995