Opening up public data should be an urgent priority for the government and could lead to considerable economic benefits

There is no longer a reasonable justification for keeping publicly funded data under lock and key. With the government ostensibly committed to transparency, Chris Yiu argues that opening up public data is a must, and could have solid economic and productive benefits

One country, two systems in practice : an analysis of six cases

The resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was unique in the decolonization history of the United Kingdom. For the first time a piece of British colony was returned to another sovereign power without becoming an independent country. For the PRC, the resumption of sovereignty was a natural course of event because China had never admitted that Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom. After initial contacts between Britain and China in the late 1970s, Chinese government decided to take back Hong Kong in 1981. In 1982, the fourth constitution since the founding of the PRC promulgated the notion of Special Administrative Region. The principle of “one country, two systems” was devised to solve the issue of sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997. In recovering Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encountered a dilemma: on the one hand, it would like to resume sovereignty over Hong Kong; on the other hand, it would like to maintain the status quo as to preserve prosperity and stability of Hong Kong. Hopefully, the “one country, two systems” could solve the problem. Now fours years after the handover, people would ask the question whether the notion of “one country, two systems” has been successfully implemented. In fact, one could even ask; what is actually the principle of “one country，two systems”? Where is the line between “one country” and “two systems”? The paper attempts to answer these questions by exploring six cases that occurred after the handover. The paper starts with a general discussion on the concept, followed by a delineation of six cases and the implications of these cases for “one country, two systems” would be drawn. In fact, some scholars argued that under “one country, two systems” Hong Kong enjoys a higher degree of autonomy than the local/regional governments under Western federal systems. The paper tries to answer the question by referring to Australian and American federal systems

The School Readiness of the Children of Immigrants in the United States: The Role of Families, Childcare and Neighborhoods

At present, little is known about the welfare of very young immigrant children, since the emphasis thus far has been on the integration of school-aged children and youths into host societies (e.g. Leventhal et al. 2006; Portes and Hao 2004; Zhou and Bankston 1994). However invaluable these studies are in understanding how well the children of immigrants fare, particularly at school, and in predicting their socioeconomic mobility as adults, they cannot ascertain how early the onset of these nativity differences is. Researchers across the disciplines are thus increasingly turning their attention to the early childhood period to better understand how learning gaps between the children of immigrant versus native-born parentage – that is, second- and third-plus generations, respectively – are formed and persist prior to school entry (Fuller et al. 2009; Johnson de Feyter and Winsler 2009; Takanishi, 2004). The recent availability of longitudinal and large-scale birth cohort studies, such as the Fragile Families Study of Child Well-being, facilitates analyses which address early childhood research with a focus on nativity.young immigrant children, integration, school-aged children and youths, host societies, Fragile Families Study of Child Well-being

Physical Match: Unique Fracture Patterns in Wooden Popsicle Sticks

Physical match (or physical fit) evidence was considered reliable in court for years, until the Daubert case, which required standardized scientific methodology on all forensic evidence. Physical matching faces the same criticism as other forms of physical evidence (specifically, that it lacks a scientific foundation). Physical matching is based on the idea that when an object is fractured, the shape of each fragment is unique and it is not possible to recreate a fragment that is identical to any other. In this study, fifty wooden popsicle sticks were broken in half, the pieces were mixed, and then reconstructed using physical match analysis. Results of the study show that each broken fragment of the one hundred popsicle stick pieces was unique, which allowed them to be recognized and reconstructed

An expert system based intelligent control scheme for space bioreactors

An expert system based intelligent control scheme is being developed for the effective control and full automation of bioreactor systems in space. The scheme developed will have the capability to capture information from various resources including heuristic information from process researchers and operators. The knowledge base of the expert system should contain enough expertise to perform on-line system identification and thus be able to adapt the controllers accordingly with minimal human supervision

Estimation and Testing for Partially Nonstationary Vector Autoregressive Models with GARCH: WLS versus QMLE

Macroeconomic or financial data are often modelled with cointegration and GARCH. Noticeable examples include those studies of price discovery, in which stock prices of the same underlying asset are cointegrated and they exhibit multivariate GARCH. Modifying the asymptotic theories developed in Li, Ling and Wong (2001) and Sin and Ling (2004), this paper proposes a WLS(weighted least squares) for the parameters of an ECM(error-correction model). Apart from its computational simplicity, by construction, the consistency of WLS is insensitive to possible misspecification in conditional variance. Further, asymmetrically distributed deflated error is allowed, at the expense of more involved asymptotic distributions of the statistics. Efficiency loss relative to QMLE(quasi-maximum likelihood estimator) is discussed within the class of LABF(locally asymptotically Brownian functional) models. The insensitivity and efficiency of WLS in finite samples are examined through Monte Carlo experiments. We also apply the WLS to an empirical example of HSI(Hang Seng Index), HSIF(Hang Seng Index Futures) and TraHK(Hong Kong Tracker Fund).Asymmetric distribution; Cointegration; LABF models; Multivariate GARCH; Price discovery; WLS