Multilateral Economic Institutions and U.S. Foreign Policy: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Multilateral Int\u27l Dev., Multilateral Insts., & Int\u27l Econ., Energy, & Envtl. Pol\u27y of the S. Comm. on Foreign Relations, 115th Cong., Nov. 27, 2018 (Statement of Jennifer A. Hillman)

Virtually every major international gathering of world leaders recently has ended in failure—or at least failure to reach enough agreement to issue a concluding statement or communique. These failures come at a time when many have been looking for signs that world leaders would come together to address the most pressing problems facing the world—including climate change, the breakdown in the rules of the international trading system, the need everywhere for good jobs that pay a living wage, and rapidly growing income inequality. The failure of these meetings to produce formal agreements—or even specific paths to reaching agreements in the future—despite the high stakes has left many questioning the ability of the world’s leaders to meet global challenges, shedding a spotlight on the institutions and fora that were established for the purpose of achieving multilateral solutions—particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The failure to reach agreements can best be seen as part of a long-term trend toward increased complexity in the world that makes it nearly impossible to reach traditional multilateral binding accords, combined with a waning of faith on the part of many countries in multilateralism and multilateral institutions. A number of clear trends emerge from the failures to reach accords at virtually all recent international gatherings: 1) Government policies and international arrangements for collective decision-making have not kept pace with changes in the world, especially the high degree of international economic integration and interdependence. Much of the increasing complexity in the international economic order stems from the explosive growth in the number and size of multinational corporations and financial institutions, many of which now dwarf the size of most of the nations in the world. Added to the complexity is the increase in the speed at which goods, money and technology moves around the globe in our digital age. 2) Learning to operate in this vastly more complex world will require more multilateralism, not less. As countries emerged from the era of colonialization and began opening their markets, the number of players on global stage increased, making reaching consensus among a much larger group of disparate interests more difficult. But because the most significant problems facing the world cross many international boundaries, solving them will require that countries come together to find regional, plurilateral, or global solutions. 3) It is essential that the international economic institutions be updated and improved, not destroyed or left to wither. Because it is clear that reaching major new binding accords or creating new international institutions is quite difficult, the best and most achievable solution is to renovate our existing institutions. Each needs to modernize and improve their governance structures to ensure that work can get done despite the increases in complexities and to update their mandates to ensure the ability to address the problems of the 21st century, many of which are quite different from those that existed in the 1940s when these institutions were created. Given that the crisis is most acute at the WTO, this testimony will focus on what must be done to renovate the World Trade Organization and why doing so is critical, both for the trading system and for the continued existence of a rules-based international economic order. The need for the WTO and its dispute settlement system to remain viable is particularly critical if we are to address the challenges presented by the explosive growth of China and its transformation into the largest exporter of goods in the world

The Archaeology of the Archaic Periods in East Texas

The archaeology of the Archaic periods—Early, ca. 10,000–8000 years B.P., Middle, ca. 8000–5000 years B.P., and Late, ca. 5000–2500 years B.P.—in East Texas is not well understood in broad terms, although valuable information on the archaeological character of the Archaic peoples in the region has been gained over the years from the detailed investigation of a few specific sites. New knowledge concerning the archaeology of the Archaic periods in East Texas is slow in coming, due in part to the kinds of Archaic sites that have been identified by archaeologists during survey investigations and/or recommended by archeologists, state agencies, and federal agencies for further work; a general inability to identify contextually intact buried sites in the valleys of East Texas rivers and creeks; and the lack of development of a chronology based on well–controlled absolute dating of features or buried occupation zones in single component or multi–component stratified sites. This article summarizes what is currently known about Archaic peoples and groups over this lengthy period of time in the East Texas region, including the kinds of sites that have been investigated, their known or estimated chronological age, and their associated material culture remains; it does not attempt to rectify the limitations of the known Archaic archaeological record, but rather judiciously presents archaeological findings from selected sites in East Texas, as well as in northwestern Louisiana. Some broad themes of the Archaic in the Eastern Woodlands and Southeastern U.S. also come under consideration, particularly the lack of complexity and the notable apparent absence of evidence of Archaic ritual beliefs seen in the East Texas archaeological record compared to neighboring regions

The Crisis of Communication in the Information Age: Revisiting C.P. Snow\u27s Two Cultures in the Era of Fake News

The purpose of this paper is to revisit C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture in light of the cultural dominance of information technology. The crisis of communication in the information age, whether in fake news, political polarisation or science denial, has come about because both scientific and literary cultures, in seeking a world without entropy, have inadvertently stumbled upon a world without meaning. In order to explain how this has happened, the paper first explores Snow\u27s challenge: to describe the second law of thermodynamics. The paper then provides a description of entropy that is neutral with regard to thermodynamics and information, and not simply a measure of something more intuitive like disorder, uncertainty, mixed-up-ness, diffusion, complexity or emergence. Finally, the paper argues that Snow\u27s suggestion that everyone should be able to describe the second law is timely right now because entropy is the bridge between information and reality, and the difference between science and science fiction

ZnTrack -- Data as Code

The past decade has seen tremendous breakthroughs in computation and there is no indication that this will slow any time soon. Machine learning, large-scale computing resources, and increased industry focus have resulted in rising investments in computer-driven solutions for data management, simulations, and model generation. However, with this growth in computation has come an even larger expansion of data and with it, complexity in data storage, sharing, and tracking. In this work, we introduce ZnTrack, a Python-driven data versioning tool. ZnTrack builds upon established version control systems to provide a user-friendly and easy-to-use interface for tracking parameters in experiments, designing workflows, and storing and sharing data. From this ability to reduce large datasets to a simple Python script emerges the concept of Data as Code, a core component of the work presented here and an undoubtedly important concept as the age of computation continues to evolve. ZnTrack offers an open-source, FAIR data compatible Python package to enable users to harness these concepts of the future.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, 2MB PD

Post-compulsory education in England: choices and implications

Most students do not follow the ‘academic track’ (i.e. A-levels) after leaving school and only about a third of students go to university before the age of 20. Yet progression routes for the majority that do not take this path but opt for vocational post-compulsory education are not as well-known, which partly has to do with the complexity of the vocational education system and the difficulty of deciphering available data. If we are to tackle long-standing problems of low social mobility and a long tail of underachievers, it is essential that post-16 vocational options come under proper scrutiny. This paper is a step in that direction. We use linked administrative data to track decisions made by all students in England who left compulsory education after having undertaken the national examination – the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) – at age 16 in the year 2009/10. We track them up to the age of 21, as they progress through the education system and (for some) into the labour market. We categorise the many different types of post-16 qualifications into several broad categories and we look at the probability of achieving various educational and early labour market outcomes, conditional on the path chosen at age 17. We also take into account the influence of demographics, prior attainment and the secondary school attended. Our findings illustrate the strong inequality apparently generated by routes chosen at age 17, even whilst controlling for prior attainment and schooling up to that point

Contemplations on sport, complexity, ages of being and practice

From my experience of working alongside coaches, I would say that they are complexpeople. The people they coach are complex too. In the present paper, I considercomplexity as an underlying dynamic to (coaching) practice, something that might beunderstood, not only through one's own life, but through the notion of shared lives.The central thematic of the story to follow is that we live and practice through different‘ages of being' and that our complication changes as we age. These ideas and theirrelevance to critical thinking and personal practice are illustrated through a personal story,a father and son story. The tale begins, as many sporting father and son stories might, asthey run together on a windswept beach. From that childhood memory, a meandering taleof growth, companionship and critical reflection unfolds. By charting this particularrelationship, one shaped and sustained by a shared history, yet defined by different ‘agesof being', I contemplate often fractured and sometimes shared relationships betweenourselves and with sport. It is a story described partly in parallel, across generational andworking contexts and in life-long terms. The story telling ends with an attempt at definingmyself, my complexities and my own practice in the present day. Through this, I urge al lcoaching practitioners to reflect on their work and on the intentions and scope of theirresearch and, finally, the associations of such thinking with their own ages of being

Some Factors Giving Rise To Differential Grouping Among The Pupils Of Trinity Gardens Elementary School Of Houston, Texas

A study of theoretical statements and researches of other scholars was made in order to ascertain whether this problem has already been solved. No others scholar has made this study. However, other scholars have made related studies. These studies have proved valuable as sources of data. Brief summaries of theoretical statements and researches of scholars are given below. Theoretical Statements and Researches of Other Scholars Theoretical Statements t Walter R, Smith states that the boys gang is more or less definitely organized for general associational purposes. The typical gang-age is ten to sixteen. During this period the instinct for group association stirs every boy\u27s heart. Puffer further states that the gang is no mere haphazard association. Accidents of various kinds - age, propinquity, likeness of interest—bring together a somewhat random group. Immediately the boys react on one another. One or more leaders come to the fore. The gang organizes itself, finds or makes its meeting place, establishes its standards, and begins to do things. It develops, in some sort a collective mind, and acts as a unit to carry out schemes and activities which would hardly so much as enter the head of one boy alone. According to Murphy, and Newcomb, Friendship has been investigated largely in terms of propinquity, age-level, sex, mental age, and other characteristics that define the boundaries -within which friends will be selected. Childhood friendships cannot be considered without reference to the process of forming playgroups in school hours. These groups not only express but help in forming individual attachments. The lowest number of pairs (children who choose each other for activities) and the highest number of isolated children are found in the kindergarten, first and second grades. This indicates that children of this age are seldom sufficiently certain whom to choose. Prom the fourth grade on, there is an increase of the mutual pairs of friendship and an increasing complexity in group structure

New statistical method identifes cytokines that distinguish stool microbiomes

Regressing an outcome or dependent variable onto a set of input or independent variables allows the analyst to measure associations between the two so that changes in the outcome can be described by and predicted by changes in the inputs. While there are many ways of doing this in classical statistics, where the dependent variable has certain properties (e.g., a scalar, survival time, count), little progress on regression where the dependent variable are microbiome taxa counts has been made that do not impose extremely strict conditions on the data. In this paper, we propose and apply a new regression model combining the Dirichlet-multinomial distribution with recursive partitioning providing a fully non-parametric regression model. This model, called DM-RPart, is applied to cytokine data and microbiome taxa count data and is applicable to any microbiome taxa count/metadata, is automatically fit, and intuitively interpretable. This is a model which can be applied to any microbiome or other compositional data and software (R package HMP) available through the R CRAN website

Caveat Emptor to Strict Liability: One Hundred Years of Products Liability Law

The development of the law of products liability is historically related to industrial growth, business and economic expansion, and the growing demand over the years for consumer protection. As the industrial system has come of age and man has begun to make excursions into outer space, the ancient principle of caveat emptor- let the buyer beware has been significantly changed in favor of the consumer. As we emerged from the ancient mercantile society, where the seller and buyer usually met and bargained, to an impersonal market characterized by corporate organization, industrial and technological advancement and complexity, and sophisticated marketing and finance, the law changed in response to the new circumstances. Although the shift from caveat emptor to the promulgation of judicial and legislative rules, safeguards and standards, enlarging the legal rights of the buyer and consumer, came slowly and irregularly in the United States, greater strides have been made in the development of products liability law in the last decade than were made in the entire preceding century. This greater advance can be accounted for by the scientific and economic explosion following World War II and by the greater concern and emphasis being placed on human loss and injury resulting from defective products than on commercial loss suffered by the buyer