The following article is based on a lecture the author gave at Gachon University College of Law on April 3, 2012. It mainly provides an overview on the central provisions against misleading advertising in German competition law, i.e. the law against unfair business practises. The form of the lecture manuscript has been retained. The references of the scientific literature were restricted to a necessary minimum in favour of the relevant case law of the German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof – BGH), the German Higher Regional Courts (Oberlandesgerichte – OLG) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

The countries in East Asia continue to have problems in maritime boundary delimitation. The collision on September 7, 2010 between a Chinese fishing vessel (Minjinyu) and a Japanese patrol boat in the waters near Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands is interesting to observe as a step in dispute settlement process. The differences between the PRC and Japan on maritime boundary delimitation for the East China Sea and the legal status of Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands are demonstrated by this incident. To see things in their context, it is necessary to observe the practices of East Asian countries in handling their maritime boundary delimitations, especially those involving islands with disputed legal status. The rules of international law relating to the pacific settlement of dispute and maritime delimitation dispute resolution, which involve a preliminary sovereignty dispute over islands, are also relevant as a much broader background. The author will examine why certain maritime delimitation cases are particularly hard to handle. The lessons drawn from this paper is inspiring for Taiwan, a long-time marginalized player in East Asian regional affairs. The author will examine the difficulties and opportunities for Taiwan in maritime boundary delimitation and offer a suggestion on how to accomplish such task with neighboring countries.

The spectroscopic properties of bright extragalactic planetary nebulae are reviewed, considering primarily their chemical abundances and their internal kinematics. Low-resolution spectroscopy is used to investigate how the precursor stars of bright planetary nebulae modify their original composition through nucleosynthesis and dredge up. At present, the evidence indicates that oxygen and neon abundances usually remain unchanged, helium abundances are typically enhanced by less than 50%, while nitrogen enhancements span a very wide range. Interpreting these changes in terms of the masses of their progenitor stars implies that the progenitor stars typically have masses or order 1.5M⊙ or less, though no models satisfactorily explain the nitrogen enrichment. High-resolution spectroscopy is used to study the internal kinematics of bright planetary nebulae in Local Group galaxies. At first sight, the expansion velocities are remarkably uniform, with a typical expansion velocity of 18 km/s and a range of 8-28 km/s, independent of the progenitor stellar population. Upon closer examination, bright planetary nebulae in the bulge of M31 expand slightly faster than their counterparts in M31's disk, a result that may extend generally to the planetary nebulae arising from old and young stellar populations. There are no very strong correlations between expansion velocity and global nebular properties, except that there are no large expansion velocities at the highest Hβ luminosities (i.e., the youngest objects never expand rapidly). These results independently suggest that bright planetary nebulae arise from a similar mass range in all galaxies. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to believe that bright planetary nebulae do not arise from identical progenitor stars in all galaxies.

In anticipation of starting a new online journal in the field of educational technology, we conducted a review of existing journals, dividing them into two categories-online-only and online +print. The 30 journals in the review were analyzed with respect t frequency of publication; their content emphases, goals, and audiences; policies on subscription and copyright,· and technical functions, such as search and discussion. We were looking for the features that made the online journals distinctive from the others, which were based in the print paradigm. The aspects that yielded significant differences were subscription policy, redistribution policy, and search function. The online-only journals were more liberal in their subscription and redistribution policies, but the online + print journals had more extensive search capabilities. In addition, we identified gaps in the topical coverage of the existing journals, in the areas of educational technology management, educational systems design/reform, policy issues, and cultural issues.

The purpose of this research is to review historical development of Islamic finance in individual East Asian economies, including China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, and examine the success factors of the Hong Kong Sukuk issuances in 2014-2017. The research is a qualitative study applying case study method. It is found that the East Asian economies do play efforts to develop their Islamic capital markets although they have very limited size of Muslim population. Their progress on this development generally remains to be slow. The Hong Kong Sukuk is a breakthrough, carrying a total issuance value of US$3 billion. The Sukuk issuances, treated as a kind of asset-backed securities with restrictions on financing purposes, are distributed to international investors by investment banks from Hong Kong, Middle East and Malaysia. Success factors of these issuances include involvement of an issuer with high credit quality, recognition by central bank for using the Sukuk in its discount facility for commercial banks, centralized clearing services for the Sukuk and global banking network for underwriting the Sukuk. The lessons from the Hong Kong Sukuk are good references for other economies to develop their regional Islamic capital markets and to integrate the markets into the global capital market.

We are currently developing a high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping service at IRRI to accelerate progress in rice breeding by providing rapid and cost-effective marker services. SNP marker development and validation is being performed based on cloned genes and QTLs, GWAS hits, and whole genome sequence data to identify predictive SNP markers at important genes for key traits for the breeding programs. Trait-based and targeted SNPs are being deployed in sets of 24 and 96 SNPs on a Fluidigm EP1 system. At the same time, 384 SNP sets and a 6K SNP chip developed by Susan McCouch at Cornell University are being used for higher density genome scans on an Illumina system. Genotyping by sequencing (GBS) approaches with 96 and 384 barcoded samples per sequence lane are also being evaluated in comparison to SNP array technology based on the number of loci, call rates, turnaround times, and cost per sample. An efficient sample processing workflow with an integrated LIMS is also being optimized to enable high throughput genotyping with sample tracking to minimize errors. Moreover, web-based SNP data analysis tools have been deployed through the IRRI Galaxy workbench to speed up SNP data analysis. Future efforts will focus on large-scale deployment of GBS across breeding materials to enable QC genotyping, tracking of donor introgressions, and integration of genome-wide prediction into the variety development pipelines. The large-scale application of high-density markers will help transform IRRI’s rice breeding programs and increase the rate of genetic gain towards developing high-yielding, stress-tolerant varieties for target environments and market segments