Can China Promote Electronic Commerce Through Law Reform? Some Preliminary Case Study Evidence

The government of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) has announced its intention to make China a global leader in innovation by 2020. Many Chinese business leaders share this goal. The primary focus of this national strategy is to transform China into an exporter of high-technology products based on Chinese designs rather than merely a low cost, high volume manufacturer of products based on technology developed in other countries. This paper will examine the implications for this strategy with regard to the use of computerized management information systems by Chinese businesses, and its relationship to recent law reform efforts intended to promote greater use of electronic commerce among Chinese businesses. This paper considers three case studies of recent reforms of P.R.C. commercial law in light of their contributions to this strategy, and finds that the results so far are quite mixed. The first case study looks at a domestic standard for accounting software issued in 1989 that successfully removed obstacles to the greater use of computerized accounting systems by local businesses and promoted the growth of the domestic accounting software industry. The second and third case studies involve P.R.C. legislation based on model laws developed by United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) developed to assist legislators in trading nations to harmonize their national commercial laws in order to eliminate barriers to international trade. The second case study looks at the inclusion of general electronic commerce enabling legislation in the 1999 Contract Law which in theory removed impediments to the use of electronic commerce by Chinese businesses but in reality appears to be too abstract and general to provide much certainty to parties wishing to form contracts using electronic media. The third case study looks at the 2004 Electronic Signature Law which promotes the use of a specific type of technology for authentication. While it is too soon to know whether this law will achieve its intended objectives in China, evidence from other countries with similar laws suggests that it may not

Pseudogap and weak multifractality in disordered Mott charge-density-wave insulator

The competition, coexistence and cooperation of various orders in low-dimensional materials like spin, charge, topological orders and charge-density-wave has been one of the most intriguing issues in condensed matter physics. In particular, layered transition metal dichalcogenides provide an ideal platform for studying such an interplay with a notable case of 1${T}$-TaS$_{2}$ featuring Mott-insulating ground state, charge-density-wave, spin frustration and emerging superconductivity together. We investigated local electronic states of Se-substituted 1${T}$-TaS$_{2}$ by scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS), where superconductivity emerges from the unique Mott-CDW state. Spatially resolved STS measurements reveal that an apparent V-shape pseudogap forms at the Fermi Level (E$_{F}$), with the origin of the electronic states splitting and transformation from the Mott states, and the CDW gaps are largely preserved. The formation of the pseudogap has little correlation to the variation of local Se concentration, but appears to be a global characteristics. Furthermore, the correlation length of local density of states (LDOS) diverges at the Fermi energy and decays rapidly at high energies. The spatial correlation shows a power-law decay close to the Fermi energy. Our statistics analysis of the LDOS indicates that our system exhibits weak multifractal behavior of the wave functions. These findings strongly support a correlated metallic state induced by disorder in our system, which provides an new insight into the novel mechanism of emerging superconductivity in the two-dimensional correlated electronic systems

Variational Learning for the Inverted Beta-Liouville Mixture Model and Its Application to Text Categorization

he finite invert Beta-Liouville mixture model (IBLMM) has recently gained some attention due to its positive data modeling capability. Under the conventional variational inference (VI) framework, the analytically tractable solution to the optimization of the variational posterior distribution cannot be obtained, since the variational object function involves evaluation of intractable moments. With the recently proposed extended variational inference (EVI) framework, a new function is proposed to replace the original variational object function in order to avoid intractable moment computation, so that the analytically tractable solution of the IBLMM can be derived in an effective way. The good performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated by experiments with both synthesized data and a real-world application namely text categorization