A law unto themselves: the Chinese government has acknowledged that corruption in the judiciary is a serious problem

There is a continuing struggle between the demand of a market economy for judicial efficiency, impartiality, and professional conduct on the one hand, and the resistance of the traditional ideology to judicial reform, on the other. The current discipline campaign, as a temporary movement, will undoubtedly reduce the incidence of corruption scandals and result in the punishment of violators over a short period. The tougher job, nevertheless, is to reform the current system by introducing a supervisory scheme thai will deter and deal with abuses effectively in the long run. This will improve the quality of the entire judiciary and further develop true judicial independence in China. In terms of the big picture, the upgrading of judicial performance will not be achieved in isolation, but to a large degree, depend on the progress of the rule of law in China.published_or_final_versio

Practical demands to update the company law

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A profession reborn: the enactment of the PRCs new lawyers law is a major step forward in the restoration of the Chinese legal profession

On 15 May 1996, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress enacted the first legislation specifically tailored for lawyers within the PRC, entitled the Law on Lawyers of the PRC (the Law). It will come into effect on the 1 January 1997 and replaces the outdated Interim Regulations on Lawyers of 1980. The enactment represents an ideological breakthrough after seven years of drafting and several serious discussions among the top leaders of China. In addition, it sets the stage for the further development of the legal profession in China.published_or_final_versio

The Keeneye Case: Rethinking the Content of Public Policy in Cross-border Arbitration between Hong Kong and Mainland China

A recent decision of the Hong Kong Court of Appeal in Gao Haiyan v. Keeneye Holdings Ltd considers public policy-based procedural objections in the context of enforcement of a mainland China arbitration award that was made following the hybrid process of mediation and arbitration (med-arb). This article attempts to decipher what this case means to Hong Kong and the cross-border arbitral relations. What has changed in the playing field of public policy in the enforcement of arbitral awards in Hong Kong and what can parties expect of Hong Kong courts on public policy issues in treating Mainland arbitral awards after the Keeneye case? In light of the rising use of med-arb procedures, this article studies particularly the novel issue of public policy of enforcing med-arb awards, and analyses how the different legal practices in Hong Kong and mainland China may cause much uncertainty in the cross-border enforcement arena. It is revealed that even after unification for more than 15 years there are legal as well as ideological conflicts between the two sides. Although the Keeneye case may have, on the one hand, lowered the predictability of outcome in cases which involve a cross-border clash in ideology in the enforcement of arbitral awards, it has simultaneously acted as a catalyst in reducing such differences, as seen from the rapid Mainland reform to the rules on med-arb. In the long run, a potentially more credible Chinese arbitration system is expected to be built upon and in the course of its improvement, understanding from the Hong Kong side will be helpful for the healthy development of a cross-border arbitration scheme.published_or_final_versio

Spin current in the Kondo lattice model

By using the projection operator technique it is observed that the strong Hund's rule coupling and s-d interaction in transition metal elements may lead to an effective coupling between the spin current and spin chirality. As a result, the spin chirality can be regarded as a driving force to produce a spin current. The spin current may give rise to a novel type of field acting on the spins. A spin battery is designed based on the interactions between the spin current and spin chirality.published_or_final_versio

Curvature scale space corner detector with adaptive threshold and dynamic region of support

Corners play an important role in object identification methods used in machine vision and image processing systems. Single-scale feature detection finds it hard to detect both fine and coarse features at the same time. On the other hand, multi-scale feature detection is inherently able to solve this problem. This paper proposes an improved multi-scale corner detector with dynamic region of support, which is based on Curvature Scale Space (CSS) technique. The proposed detector first uses an adaptive local curvature threshold instead of a single global threshold as in the original and enhanced CSS methods. Second, the angles of corner candidates are checked in a dynamic region of support for eliminating falsely detected corners. The proposed method has been evaluated over a number of images and compared with some popular corner detectors. The results showed that the proposed method offers a robust and effective solution to images containing widely different size features.published_or_final_versio

Summertime community structure of intertidal macrobenthos in Changdao Archipelago, Shandong Province, China

The community structure of intertidal macrobenthos in Changdao Archipelago (north of Shandong Peninsula, between Bohai Bay and the northern Yellow Sea) was examined based on samples collected from 14 stations in five transects in June 2007. Three stations corresponding to high, medium and low tidal areas were set up for each transect. A total of 68 macrobenthic species were found in the research region, most of which belonged to Mollusca and Crustacea. The average abundance and biomass of the macrobenthos was 1383 ind./m(2) and 372.41 g/m(2), respectively. The use of an arbitrary similarity level of 20% resulted in identification of five groups among the 14 stations in the research region. There were remarkable differences in the biomass, abundance and Shannon-Wiener diversity index of the different sediments. Specifically, the order of biomass was rocky shores &gt; gravel &gt; mud-sand &gt; coarse sand &gt; stiff mud, while the order of abundance was rocky shores &gt; coarse sand &gt; mud-sand &gt; gravel &gt; stiff mud, and that of the diversity index was mud-sand &gt; gravel &gt; stiff mud &gt; rocky shores &gt; coarse sand. The above results revealed that the sediment type was the most important factor affecting the structure of the macrobenthic community of the intertidal zone.</p

ASIC3 Channels Integrate Agmatine and Multiple Inflammatory Signals through the Nonproton Ligand Sensing Domain

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) have long been known to sense extracellular protons and contribute to sensory perception. Peripheral ASIC3 channels represent natural sensors of acidic and inflammatory pain. We recently reported the use of a synthetic compound, 2-guanidine-4-methylquinazoline (GMQ), to identify a novel nonproton sensing domain in the ASIC3 channel, and proposed that, based on its structural similarity with GMQ, the arginine metabolite agmatine (AGM) may be an endogenous nonproton ligand for ASIC3 channels.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here, we present further evidence for the physiological correlation between AGM and ASIC3. Among arginine metabolites, only AGM and its analog arcaine (ARC) activated ASIC3 channels at neutral pH in a sustained manner similar to GMQ. In addition to the homomeric ASIC3 channels, AGM also activated heteromeric ASIC3 plus ASIC1b channels, extending its potential physiological relevance. Importantly, the process of activation by AGM was highly sensitive to mild acidosis, hyperosmolarity, arachidonic acid (AA), lactic acid and reduced extracellular Ca²⁺. AGM-induced ASIC3 channel activation was not through the chelation of extracellular Ca²⁺as occurs with increased lactate, but rather through a direct interaction with the newly identified nonproton ligand sensing domain. Finally, AGM cooperated with the multiple inflammatory signals to cause pain-related behaviors in an ASIC3-dependent manner.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Nonproton ligand sensing domain might represent a novel mechanism for activation or sensitization of ASIC3 channels underlying inflammatory pain-sensing under <it>in vivo </it>conditions.</p

Quadtree based mouse trajectory analysis for efficacy evaluation of voice-enabled CAD

Voice-enabled applications have caught considerable research interest in recent years. It is generally believed that voice based interactions can improve the working efficiencies and the overall productivities. Quantitative evaluations on the performance boost by using such Human-Computer interactions (HCI) are therefore necessary to justify the claimed efficacies and the usefulness of the HCI system. In this paper, a quadtree based approach is proposed to analyze the mouse movement distributions in the proposed Voice-enabled Computer-Aided Design (VeCAD) system. The mouse tracker keeps a record of all the mouse movement during the solid modeling process, and a quadtree based approach is applied to analyze the mouse trajectory distributions in both the traditional CAD and the VeCAD system. Our experiments show that the mouse movement is significantly reduced when voice is used to activate CAD modeling commands. ©2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces, and Measurements Systems (VECIMS) 2009, Hong Kong, 11-13 May 2009. In Conference Proceedings, 2009, p. 196-20

A novel self-routing scheme for all-optical packet switched networks with arbitrary topology

Due to limited available photonic devices, optical networks in the near future will likely employ routing schemes that do not require sophisticated processing of optical packets. In this paper, we propose a novel self-routing scheme for all-optical packet networks that can be applied to networks with arbitrary topology. The proposed routing scheme requires only single bit processing and can be implemented with existing technologies.published_or_final_versio