The control over personal data: True remedy or fairy tale ?

This research report undertakes an interdisciplinary review of the concept of "control" (i.e. the idea that people should have greater "control" over their data), proposing an analysis of this con-cept in the field of law and computer science. Despite the omnipresence of the notion of control in the EU policy documents, scholarly literature and in the press, the very meaning of this concept remains surprisingly vague and under-studied in the face of contemporary socio-technical environments and practices. Beyond the current fashionable rhetoric of empowerment of the data subject, this report attempts to reorient the scholarly debates towards a more comprehensive and refined understanding of the concept of control by questioning its legal and technical implications on data subject\^as agency

Thinking Outside the Box: The Essence and Implications of Quantum Entanglement

Many experiments have shown that quantum entanglement is physically real. In this paper, we will discuss its ontological origin, implications and applications by thinking outside the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics. We argue that quantum entanglement originates from the primordial spin processes in non-spatial and non-temporal pre-spacetime, implies genuine interconnectedness and inseparableness of once interacting quantum entities, plays vital roles in biology and consciousness and, once better understood and harnessed, has far-reaching consequences and applications in many fields such as medicine and neuroscience. We further argue that quantum computation power also originates from the primordial spin processes in pre-spacetime. Finally, we discuss the roles of quantum entanglement in spin-mediated consciousness theory

Assessing the Modern Era of International Trade

This Book Review surveys The Post-Cold War Trading System by Sylvia Ostry. Part I explains the features of international trade law and policy the book highlights, and the perspectives offered by the book about those features. Part II of this review critically analyzes the book. It identifies the issues not addressed, and the arguments not made. Part II thereby imparts to the prospective reader a sense of what must be learned from other sources on international trade law and policy. Part III offers a brief concluding observation about the future direction of international trade scholarship

Inflation and Eternal Inflation

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by eternal inflation are unobservable, it is argued that eternal inflation has real consequences in terms of the way that predictions are extracted from theoretical models. The ambiguities in defining probabilities in eternally inflating spacetimes are reviewed, with emphasis on the youngness paradox that results from a synchronous gauge regularization technique. Vilenkin's proposal for avoiding these problems is also discussed.Comment: 27 pages, including 5 figures, LaTeX (elsart macros for Physics Reports, included). To be published in the David Schramm Memorial Volume of Physics Report

Trade, Envy and Growth: International Status Seeking in a Two-Country World

This paper analyzes international status seeking in a two-country model of endogenous growth: utility of agents in developing countries is affected by consumption gaps with the average consumer in advanced economies. By distorting terms of trade, status seeking: (i) may compensate for structural gaps in physical productivity, inducing convergence; (ii) may revert the link between trade and growth; and (iii) induces divergence when interacting with technological catching-up. In particular, envy in conjunction with catching-up predicts switchovers of growth leadership: when the advanced economy is both status- and technology-leader in the short run, convergence in interest rates - e.g. due to R&D spillovers - implies that the initially lagging economy becomes growth-leader in the long run, due to permanent price distortions induced by envy.Endogenous Growth; International Trade; Consumption Externalities; Productivity Di¤erences; Status Seeking; Technology Diffusion