The Effect of Rules Shifting Supreme Court Jurisdiction from Mandatory to Discretionary - An Empirical Lesson from Taiwan

Theoretical works suggest that granting a supreme court discretion in choosing the cases to be decided on the merits could shift dockets away from traditional case-based adjudication and towards issue-based adjudication. According to this prediction, legislatures can recast supreme courts' roles in society by modifying jurisdictional rules. This study tests this prediction empirically. Using a newly assembled data set on appeals terminated by the Taiwan Supreme Court for the period 1996-2008, we study the effect of jurisdictional-source procedural reform, a switch from mandatory jurisdiction to discretionary jurisdiction in 2003, on the Taiwan Supreme Court's performance. Our study shows that the 2003 reform failed to transform the function of the Court from correcting error to a greater role in leading the development of legal doctrine as intended by the legislature. Our findings suggest that a supreme court can adjust the way it conducts business according to its own preference and the role it defines for itself, which are influenced both by the background against which it operates and the inertia of its members' working habits. Our study informs policy-makers that merely amending procedural rules, without more, is unlikely to change the function of a supreme court. Our findings also suggest that statutorily dictated mandatory jurisdiction may not be implemented by a high court faced with caseload pressure.

International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering: Session chair

The Thirtieth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2018) will be held at the Hotel Pullman, San Francisco Bay, USA, from July 1 to July 3, 2018. SEKE2018 will also be dedicated in memory of Professor Lofti Zadeh, a great scholar, pioneer and leader in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing. The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains. The theme this year is soft computing in software engineering & knowledge engineering. Submission of papers and demos are both welcome

Bistability in the Tunnelling Current through a Ring of NN Coupled Quantum Dots

We study bistability in the electron transport through a ring of N coupled quantum dots with two orbitals in each dot. One orbital is localized (called b orbital) and coupling of the b orbitals in any two dots is negligible; the other is delocalized in the plane of the ring (called d orbital), due to coupling of the d orbitals in the neighboring dots, as described by a tight-binding model. The d orbitals thereby form a band with finite width. The b and d orbitals are connected to the source and drain electrodes with a voltage bias V, allowing the electron tunnelling. Tunnelling current is calculated by using a nonequilibrium Green function method recently developed to treat nanostructures with multiple energy levels. We find a bistable effect in the tunnelling current as a function of bias V, when the size N>50; this effect scales with the size N and becomes sizable at N~100. The temperature effect on bistability is also discussed. In comparison, mean-field treatment tends to overestimate the bistable effect.Comment: Published in JPSJ; minor typos correcte

Cophasal Excitation of Circular Antenna Arrays

[From the Introduction]An antenna array consists of a set of individual radiating elements, each having a current of some amplitude and phase. If the each of the phases is chosen so that there is some direction in space for which the fields from the individual radiators add in phase, the array is said to be cophased, and the excitation is said to be cophasal. This thesis is concerned with some of the characteristics of cophased circular antenna arrays. By far the most common antenna array is the linear array, in which the elements are equally spaced along a straight line. Such arrays have been the subject of exhaustive studies, and their properties are well understood. Such arrays are usually cophased, and techniques are well known by which the amplitudes of the currents can be chosen to give precise control of side-lobe levels. The method of synthesis using Tchebyscheff polynomials assures an optimum pattern. It is also well known that current distributions can be found for linear arrays that result in extremely high gains. Such super-gain arrays are not cophased, and the high gain is accompanied by undesirable side effects; a very precise control of the currents is required to achieve the desired pattern, and the terminal impedances are highly reactive. These drawbacks are so serious in practice that many antenna engineers have come to be highly suspicious of any antenna array which is not cophased, reasoning in a fallacious manner that if some non-cophased arrays have undesired properties, all such arrays are to be avoided. All alternative geometry to the linear array is the circle. Stenzel¹ gave the first analysis of radiators equally spaced on the circumference of a circle. He considered only uniform, cophasal excitation, and his results were restricted to an even number of elements. Knudsen² extended this to any number of elements. The uniform, cophasal circular array does not have very desirable patterns, since the first side lobe is about 8 db below the main beam, regardless of the radius, which is intolerably high. DuHamel³ and Hickman⁴, Neff, and Tillman developed methods for exciting circular arrays which lead to the synthesis of any desired pattern, and in particular, these methods allow the use of the Tchebyscheff polynomial technique. With these methods the excitation is not cophasal. Hickman and Tillman⁵ have shown that the undesirable properties of super-gain arrays do not accompany these designs. It is, however, of considerable interest to determine if amplitude distributions can be found for cophasal excitations which will result in low side lobes, and it is with this problem that this thesis is concerned. The problem of the radiation pattern of the cophased circular array is approached from a different point of attack than used by Stenzel. Stenzel obtained a rather simple closed form, involving a Bessel function; the present approach gives a Fourier series. Examination of the coefficients indicates why the patterns are unsatisfactory, and suggests methods of improving the result. Finally a method using concentric, cophased rings is outlined, that allows the use of the Tchebyscheff polynomial method

Correlation between layer thickness and periodicity of long polytypes in silicon carbide

The layer widths and repeat spacing of long-period polytypes (LPPs) have been determined using synchrotron radiation source (SRS) X-ray diffraction topography (XRDT). This method has proved to be a powerful tool in investigating the spatial extent of one-dimensional disorder (1DD), long-period polytypes (LPPs) and the boundaries of polytype layers in silicon carbide (SiC). The resulting neighbourhood coalescence models have confirmed the validity of the sandwich rule even in the limit of two arbitrarily long LPPs, as well as the unique nature of the 6H polytype. A significant empirical trend is reported here that relates the thickness of LPP layers to the periodicity of the repeat stacking sequence measured on the topographs. A good correlation between the data suggests that this behaviour is governed by a simple mathematical expression t = kNn. Values for k and n have been determined that relate the polytype thickness (t in microns) to the number of hexagonal layers (N) in the polytype stacking repeat. These values can be used to prompt questions about the limits of polytypism and disorder in SiC

China’s influence on Taiwan’s media and politics

Taiwan’s democracy and freedom of the press provide the Chinese authorities with an opportunity to use Taiwanese businessmen to influence Taiwan’s media outlets and politics. China uses three inter-related strategies to influence Taiwan’s media in this way: persuading businessmen with pro-China views to purchase Taiwanese media outlets, pressuring existing media owners, and placing advertisements in Taiwan’s media in order to purchase political influence. In addition, the Chinese government also employs cyber-propaganda strategy to attack Taiwanese political parties and politicians