Professor Jeremiah Jenks of Cornell University and the 1903 Chinese Monetary Reform

The Boxer uprising in China (1900) killed quite a number of foreigners and missionaries, which induced the armies of eight Western powers to invade China and they imposed an indemnity of 400 million silver taels. The international silver price around the 1900s was slumping, and these indemnity-treaty powers (e.g. France, UK, Germany, and Belgium) strongly wished China to establish a silver monetary system that would be maintained at parity with gold. Professor Jeremiah Jenks (1856-1929) of Cornell University was mandated to establish a gold-exchange standard for China. This paper begins with Jenks's life and work and the background of his mission to China. Section 2 presents the basic principle of this reform project and its specific designs. Section 3 assesses reactions and criticisms on Jenks's proposal. Possible arbitrage activities between gold and silver are analyzed in Sections 4 in order to evaluate the sustainability of Jenks's system. We conclude that: (1) Jenks's new systemm ight have been stable in 1904-16 and 1928-30; (2) technically speaking, this was a remarkable design.Professor Jeremiah Jenks (1856-1929), Chinese monetary reform of 1903, gol-dexchange standard, silver standard

Theoretic Analysis and Extremely Easy Algorithms for Domain Adaptive Feature Learning

Domain adaptation problems arise in a variety of applications, where a training dataset from the \textit{source} domain and a test dataset from the \textit{target} domain typically follow different distributions. The primary difficulty in designing effective learning models to solve such problems lies in how to bridge the gap between the source and target distributions. In this paper, we provide comprehensive analysis of feature learning algorithms used in conjunction with linear classifiers for domain adaptation. Our analysis shows that in order to achieve good adaptation performance, the second moments of the source domain distribution and target domain distribution should be similar. Based on our new analysis, a novel extremely easy feature learning algorithm for domain adaptation is proposed. Furthermore, our algorithm is extended by leveraging multiple layers, leading to a deep linear model. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of domain adaptation tasks on the Amazon review dataset and the spam dataset from the ECML/PKDD 2006 discovery challenge.Comment: ijca

Market Structure and Inter-industry Profit Differences in Taiwan

A high degree of openness and labour-intensive production are the two main features of Taiwan's manufacturing sector. This study uses the export/sales ratio and the K/L ratio to divide the sector into two groups: (1) the export-oriented and domestic market-oriented industries, and (2) the capital-intensive and labour-intensive industries. The Chow test confirmed the two-regime hypothesis for both the groups, supporting the validity of our dualistic analysis. Using 1986 census data, the distribution of profit rates in the two groups are compared. The major determinants of inter-industry profit differences are the domestic sales ratio and the capital/output ratio; the other variables have either little impact or generate unsystematic effects.

Will Esports Result in a Higher Prevalence of Problematic Gaming? A Review of the Global Situation

Background and aims: Video gaming is highly prevalent in modern culture, particularly among young people, and a healthy hobby for the majority of users. However, in recent years, there has been increasing global recognition that excessive video gaming may lead to marked functional impairment and psychological distress for a significant minority of players. Esports is a variant of video gaming. It is a relatively new phenomenon but has attracted a considerable number of followers across the world and is a multimillion dollar industry. The aim of this briefing paper is to review the global situation on esports and related public health implications. Methods: A non-systematic review was conducted. Information obtained from the Internet and PubMed was collated and presented as genres of games, varieties and magnitudes of impacts, popularity, fiscal impact in monetary terms, government involvement, and public health implications. Results: There are several different kinds of esports but there was no clear categorization on the genre of games. Many tournaments have been organized by gaming companies across the world with huge prize pools, and some of these events have government support. Little information on the health effects associated with esports was identified. Discussion and conclusions: A majority of the sources of information were from commercial settings, and failed to declare conflicts of interest, which may result in a biased picture of the current situation. When gaming activity is being further promoted under the umbrella of esports, it seems reasonable to expect an increase in problematic gaming and thus increased prevalence of gaming disorder and hazardous gaming. With increasing demand for treatment services for gaming addition/disorder in different countries across the world, it is a significant public health concern. More empirically based research on this topic is needed

The impact of stock market policy announcement on commodity prices and share prices

It has been an important issue to analyze the possible impact of macroeconomic effects, such as: exchange rate or interest rate, on the commodity prices since 1970s because of the tremendous volatility of commodity prices on the US. Thereafter, there are a lot of literature in agricultural economics relative to the empirical study. But the results of these literature are ambiguous. On the other hand, Blandchard (1981) incorporated the stock market into the traditional IS-LM model and discussed the interaction between stock market and economy. The financial sector plays an important role to affect the time path of commodity prices it cannot be ignored since agricultural industry is just one of sector among the whole economy. The main purpose of this article is to add the stock market into the two-goods economy. One is commodity product and the other is nonagricultural product. According the model including commodity market, nonagricultural product market, monetary market and stock market and under the assumptions of perfect substitutes between stock and bond and perfect foresight expectation, the effect of stock market policies, such as financing interest rate, financing ratio, on dynamics of commodity and share prices will be analyzed. The result shows that in the long run the impact of stock policies on commodity prices depends on the relative magnitudes of price effect of commodity and interest rate effect. While in the short run, whether share price overshooting or not it depends on the length of time between announcement and implement of policies.commodity prices, share prices, financing interest rate, financing ratio, dynamics