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Over the last few decades, advances in transportation and production technology, in conjunction with economic globalization and the emergence of multinational corporations, have consolidated fragmented production processes into long and complex supply chains across jurisdictions. While there are benefits to such global supply chains (“GSCs”), the prevalence of human rights violations attributable to information asymmetry, as well as rule of law gaps between different jurisdictions, has been a constant challenge. Modern slavery, child abuse, harsh working conditions, low wages, and other problems have reoccurred in the factories of upstream suppliers in the global South and have been systemically ignored by buyers in the global North. As such, how to alleviate human rights abuses along GSCs is indeed a daunting problem. Today, various public, private, and hybrid approaches have been designed and implemented at different levels by different actors to address GSC human rights challenges, such as the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UNGPs”), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (“OECD”) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act, the United States’ Dodd-Frank Act, the Responsible Business Alliance Codes of Conduct, and the Social Accountability 8000 International Standard. However, these public, private, and hybrid governance mechanisms have grown more ineffective and inefficient due to—again—information asymmetry, and rule of law gaps. A stronger approach that is premised upon transparency and traceability in the GSC is urgently needed. To fill these gaps, the recent emergence of distributed ledger technologies (commonly referred to as blockchain) may offer a promising disintermediation step toward a “technological fix” to GSCs’ human rights challenges. To assess such a possibility from both a theoretical and a practical perspective, we first examine in Section II the characteristics, benefits, and cross-border spillover effects of GSCs, as well as human rights violations by multinational corporations and their power and responsibilities. Section III illuminates the ineffectiveness of existing governance models and regulatory measures, at both the international and national levels, and identifies information asymmetry and rule of law gaps as fundamental flaws. This finding leads us to examine the extent to which blockchain can serve as a governance tool along GSCs. Section IV discusses how the key features of blockchain—transparency, traceability, data consistency and security, authenticity, and completeness—can alleviate problems of information asymmetry, rule of law gaps, and corporate compliance along GSCs, further helping to ameliorate transnational human rights issues. Nevertheless, while “blockchainizing” GSCs seems to have the potential to overcome challenges of public and private governance, some normative and technical limits and risks remain to be addressed, such as adequate infrastructural support, scalability, cybersecurity, and the “garbage in, garbage out” conundrum.

Online supply-chain financing has been a relatively novel funding channel for suppliers as small- and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”) to obtain loans in that the revolution of financial technology (“FinTech”) transforms traditional supply-chain financing, which used to be administered only by official banks, to an online model also used by electronic commerce platforms (“e-commerce platform”). Endeavours towards financial inclusion of the underserved SMEs could rationalize why we should allow for or encourage FinTech innovations exemplified by the online supply-chain financing mentioned above. What would be an adaptive regulatory regime for such innovative FinTech-enabled financial services as the online supply-chain financing? Within our conceptual framework to regulate the FinTech industry at the early stage, rather than rigorous rules traditionally placed on large financial institutions, a principles-based strategy should be adopted to strike a balance between financial stability and access to financial services advanced by disruptive innovations. As a necessary complement, regulatory sandboxes would be needed to spur a shift in institutional philosophy to a principles-based regulatory regime. In other words, the regulatory attitude of FinTech regulation should be humble and light-touch to promote innovation for improving digital financial inclusion, albeit on the premise of containing potential systemic risk and protecting consumer interest in the meantime.

A three-step, single purification procedure has been developed for the concise synthesis of substituted furans from arylacyl bromides.

A simple method has been developed for synthesis of γ-halo-enones. The approach employs a sequence involving initial indium-mediated allenylation reactions of phenacyl halides with propargyl bromide. This process is followed by acid-promoted rearrangement reactions of the formed homoallenic halohydrins. The new method can be incorporated into routes for the efficient synthesis of various five-membered heterocyclic compounds.

A procedure has been developed for synthesis of 2-alkenyl-2H-indazoles starting from 2-(2-carbonylmethyl)-2H-indazoles, which are prepared by gallium/aluminium- and aluminium-mediated, direct, regioselective alkylation of indazoles with α-bromocarbonyl compounds. The structure of 3-(2H-indazol-2-yl)-2H-chromen-2-one was proven by X-ray crystallography. The styrene- and coumarin-2H-indazoles produced by using the new method were found to have interesting fluorescence properties.

Taiwan, whose financial market is closely linked to the international market, was seriously affected by the Global Financial Crisis. Among the affected retail investors, those who invested in financial products such as structured notes might have been unaware of the real risk these products posed. Investors left holding worthless products in the wake of the 2008 crash were quick to seek legal redress for their losses, but these disputes were difficult to address by properly using the civil remedies then available in Taiwan. Few of the possible causes of actions listed in the Taiwanese Civil Code (“CC”) or in other special laws were well adapted to address disputes over structured notes. The most applicable remedy available in the then legislation might be Article 227-2 of the CC, which governs the rule of changed circumstances, but it was referred to only rarely in these disputes. In order to put an end to this type of structured-note controversy, the Financial Consumer Protect Act (“FCPA”) was passed in 2011. Nevertheless, there is room for the FCPA to be improved and refined.

A synthesis of hexahydro-1H-isoindoles (IV) and (VIII) is achieved by a base promoted reaction of homoallenic bromohydrins (II) and (VII).

The new route for the synthesis of furane derivatives is based on indium promoted reaction of arylacyl bromides with propargyl bromides as the key step.

Crowdfunding has caused a worldwide revolution in early-stage startup financing during recent years. In the United States, the expansion of for-profit crowdfunding platforms to fund small businesses and startups prompted Congress to pass the game-changing law on equity crowdfunding, Title III of the JOBS Act in 2012 (“CROWDFUND Act”). While its specific rules and regulations as adopted by the SEC takes effect this year, the substance of the JOBS Act as a whole is geared more towards the goal of capital formation, over the historically promoted goal of investor protection. The use of equity crowdfunding has extended over to Taiwan as well. In 2014, the Taiwanese government created the “Go Incubation Board for Startup and Acceleration” (“GISA Board”), a government-sanctioned public equity crowdfunding platform run by the GreTai Securities Market (“GTSM”), a government-controlled foundation. It first promulgated the GISA Regulations and soon thereafter the Private Portal Regulations to govern the public and private platforms, respectively. Though transplanted from the CROWDFUND Act, Taiwan’s legal adaption or innovation reflects its path dependence on a high level of investor protection underlying local securities regulation, placing much more emphasis on investor protection than on capital formation, in theory. From a public choice perspective, the resultant features of Taiwan’s legal transplantation could be attributed to lobbying and influence by incumbent securities firms, as well as the GTSM’s own political incentives. This Article argues that a comparative and qualitative study of Taiwan’s equity crowdfunding regulatory patterns reveals that the transplantation of the U.S. model tends to be more of form than of substance, that is, of copying the text rather than pursuing the goal of capital formation in practice.

A simple method has been developed for synthesis of γ-halo-enones. The approach employs a sequence involving initial indium-mediated allenylation reactions of phenacyl halides with propargyl bromide. This process is followed by acid-promoted rearrangement reactions of the formed homoallenic halohydrins. The new method can be incorporated into routes for the efficient synthesis of various five-membered heterocyclic compounds.

The fabrication and modification of metal zeolite catalysts for the conversion of heavy aromatics were investigated. The catalytic performances for various metal-free 12-MR zeolites were evaluated in terms of conversion, product yields, benzene purity and reaction network analyses using transalkylation of toluene and 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene as the test reaction. The effects of metal content, feed impurity, and steaming treatment on the catalytic performances of Pt/mordenite zeolites prepared by different metal incorporation methods were also examined. A sulfuration technique for fine tuning the catalytic activity of the metal catalyst while sustaining desirable stability and performance was developed and its application for transalkylation of heavy aromatics was illustrated by Pt/ZSM-12 catalyst.

Crash implies that a software is unstable and possibly vulnerable. Stack overflow is one of many causes of crashes. This kind of bug is often hard to debug because of the corrupted stack, so that debuggers cannot trace the control flow of the programs. A control-type crash caused by stack overflow is easy to be developed as a control interception attack. We develop a method to locate this attack and implement it as a plug-in of Valgrind [1]. This tool can be used in the honeypot to detect and diagnose zero-day exploits. We use it to detect several vulnerabilities and automatically locate the bugs.

Software vulnerabilities can be attributed to inherent bugs in the system. Several types of bugs introduce faults for not conforming to system specifications and failures, including crash, hang, and panic. In our work, we exploit security faults due to crash-type failures. It is difficult to reconstruct system failures after a program has crashed. Much research work has been focused on detecting program errors and identifying their root causes either by static analysis or observing their running behavior through dynamic program instrument. Our goal is to design a tool that helps isolate bugs. This tool is called BEAGLE (Bug-tracking by Execution Auditing from Generated Logs and Errors). BEAGLE periodically makes stack checkpoints of program in execution. If the software crashes, we can approximate to the latest checkpoint and infer the precise corrupt site. After identifying the site of control state corruption, tainted input analysis will determine system exploitability if untouched passed through the corrupt site. Several case studies of corrupt site detections and tainted input analysis prove the applicability of our tool.