Contract Law in the People\u27s Republic of China

The emergence of the People\u27s Republic of China (PRC) as a market power and the reversion of Hong Kong to PRC sovereignty in 1997 have focused the attention of the international business community on the PRC\u27s willingness to enforce contractual obligations according to the rule of law. Some scholars have questioned whether the rule of law can ever be realized in China without a change in the basic system of governance. This Note attempts to answer that question, at least in the context of the Foreign Economic Contract Law (FECL), the law governing contractual disputes between Sino and foreign enterprises in the PRC. This Note first discusses the importance of the rule of law in autonomous business transactions and differentiates the rule of law from an instrumentalist perspective of the role of law. The Note then addresses contract law in the PRC, including the traditional reliance on the rule by law, the government\u27s attempt to move towards the rule of law, and the current status of the law governing contracts between Sino and foreign enterprises. The Note describes the characteristics of a society governed by the rule of law. Using these characteristics as a baseline, it assesses the possibility that Sino-foreign contractual disputes in the PRC may be adjudicated according to the rule of law. It includes a description of the obstacles facing the implementation of the rule of law, suggestions for overcoming them, and an assertion that it may be easier to overcome these obstacles in the limited context of the contract law governing foreign and domestic enterprises. The Note concludes that although the PRC could institute structural changes that would further the goal of achieving the rule of law without altering the current system of government, ultimately the true implementation of the rule of law in the context of the FECL will either be the result of political change or the cause of it

Planning Math Language in the United States, 1650 to 1945

Within mathematics education in the United States, educators and scholars have worked to identify ways of using language that students of mathematics must perform. I describe how mathematics educators from 1650–1945 have argued whether or how language is important for learning and doing mathematics. Framing these arguments as a form of language policy and planning, I apply intertextual research methods (Johnson, 2015) and the framework of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) to present explicit and implicit policy and planning for math language as intertextually linked models of linguistic behavior. I also summarize the gradual development of math language alongside wider shifts in the structure and philosophy of education in the United States. While early attention to language and mathematics learning did not produce expectations for student language use, student-regulating models of math language eventually solidified through the context of progressive education scholarship in the early 20th century

A new comparison between solid-state thermionics and thermoelectrics

It is shown that equations for electrical current in solid-state thermionic and thermoelectric devices converge for devices with a width equal to the mean free path of electrons, yielding a common expression for intensive electronic efficiency in the two types of devices. This result is used to demonstrate that the materials parameters for thermionic and thermoelectric devices are equal, rather than differing by a multiplicative factor as previously thought

Experiences with Scala Across the College-Level Curriculum

Various hybrid-functional languages, designed to balance compile-time error detection, conciseness, and performance, have emerged. Scala, e.g., is interoperable with Java and has become an early leader in adoption, especially in the start-up and open-source spaces. As educators, we have recognized Scala’s value as a teaching language across the CS curriculum. In CS1, the read-eval-print loop and simple, uniform syntax aid programming in the small. In CS2, higher-order methods allow concise, efficient manipulation of collections. In a programming languages course, advanced constructs facilitate the separation of concerns, program representation and interpretation, and concurrent programming. In advanced applied courses, language mechanisms and suitable libraries support the development of mobile apps, web apps, and web services. Based on our own experiences in the classroom, we discuss what works and what needs improvement, and hope to discuss the best ways for industry and higher education to partner in an effort to meet the growing demand for Scala talent

TPL-2 restricts Ccl24-dependent immunity to Heligmosomoides polygyrus

Funding: This work was supported by the Francis Crick Institute which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK (FC001220), the UK Medical Research Council (FC001220), and the Wellcome Trust (FC001200). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Acknowledgments We are indebted to The Francis Crick Institute Flow Cytometry facility, and in particular Bhavik Patel, Graham Preece, Wayne Turnbull and Phil Hobson. We would also like to thank The Francis Crick Institute Procedural Service Section for production of GA lines and Biological Services, especially Trisha Norton, Keith Williams and Adebambo Adekoya for animal husbandry and technical support; to Riccardo Guidi for constructive discussions and technical assistance. We would like to thank Gitta Stockinger and AhR Immunity Laboratory for providing technical support and reagents throughout this study. We also thank Richard Rance and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s 454 pyrosequencing team for generating 16S rRNA gene data.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Visualizing energy landscapes with metric disconnectivity graphs

The visualization of multidimensional energy landscapes is important, providing insight into the kinetics and thermodynamics of a system, as well the range of structures a system can adopt. It is, however, highly nontrivial, with the number of dimensions required for a faithful reproduction of the landscape far higher than can be represented in two or three dimensions. Metric disconnectivity graphs provide a possible solution, incorporating the landscape connectivity information present in disconnectivity graphs with structural information in the form of a metric. In this study, we present a new software package, PyConnect, which is capable of producing both disconnectivity graphs and metric disconnectivity graphs in two or three dimensions. We present as a test case the analysis of the 69-bead BLN coarse-grained model protein and show that, by choosing appropriate order parameters, metric disconnectivity graphs can resolve correlations between structural features on the energy landscape with the landscapes energetic and kinetic properties

Location of Pyridine Guest Molecules in an Electroneutral {^3_∞}[SiO_(4/2)] Host Framework: Single-Crystal Structures of the As-Synthesized and Calcined Forms of High-Silica Ferrierite

Single crystals (up to 580 × 480 × 20 μm) of highly silicious ferrierite (Si-FER, 1), suitable for single-crystal X-ray investigations, are synthesized under organothermal conditions. The structures of the as-synthesized (1a) and the calcined (1b) Si-FER are determined at room temperature. Both structures are refined in the orthorhombic space group Pnnm (No. 58, standard setting) with a = 743.0(1) pm, b = 1409.2(2) pm, c = 1882.0(2) pm, V = 1970.5(4) × 10^6 pm^3, Z = 1, R = 0.041 (1a) and a = 741.8(1) pm, b = 1407.0(2) pm, c = 1871.3(2) pm, V = 1953.1(4) × 10^6 pm^3, Z = 1, R = 0.037 (1b). The structure solution when combined with chemical analysis and ^1H and ^(13)C MAS NMR gives a unit cell content of [Si_(36)O_(72)]{py_(4-x) ap_x} (x = 0−1, py = pyridine, ap = 1-amino-n-propane) and [Si_(36)O_(72)] for 1a and 1b, respectively. The structure of 1a shows only weak host−guest interactions between the {^3_∞}[SiO_(4/2)] framework and the occluded, orientationally disordered pyridine molecules by means of relatively long organic-to-framework distances, d(C_(py)···O) ≥ 354(2) pm. ^(29)Si MAS NMR spectra from the organic-containing Si-FER 1a and the organic-free form 1b are in good agreement with the crystallographic results in that they conform to the well-known linear relationship between the cosine expression of the T−O−T angles and the chemical shift of the respective tetrahedral sites (T-sites). A new modification of this relationship is presented here and offers an improved linear correlation between the X-ray and NMR data for 1a and 1b, as well as for other high-silica microporous materials. Application of this new correlation to denser SiO_2 compounds is discussed