WTO Rules in the Audio-Visual Sector

International Relations/Trade,

Progressing towards a just future through the MDGS: what is the meaning of Equity in the trading system?

In the trade policy area MDG 8 Develop a global partnership for development is the most relevant. Despite important efforts, MDGs' implementation is proving very complex and it is falling way behind schedule. This is also reflected in the enduring difficulties current round of multilateral trade negotiations: the Doha Development Agenda. Hence, two key questions come to the fore. Do statements such as the Millennium Declaration, and in particular their call for equity in the trading system, have any (policy) impact? And even more basically, do they 'mean' anything? And, if they do, what is such meaning, or perhaps more normatively, what should it be? The paper attempts to provide some tentative replies to such questions. It argues that negotiations especially in the Doha Round have registered limited progress and that it would be necessary to move decisively in the direction of opening developed country markets to products, services and workers of developing countries, encouraging and supporting appropriate and paced liberalization and domestic reform efforts in poor countries, increasing their export capacity, while preserving their ability to pursue human development policies. But more fundamentally it stresses that trade liberalization commitments of this kind may not be enough to achieve an 'equitable' trading system truly able to deliver benefits commensurate to the development needs of all its participants. An 'equitable' system could not but put people with their rights and needs as its focus of attention. This would mean unequivocally according instrumental value to trade liberalization and intrinsic value and hence priority to sustainable human development. --

Embedded model discrepancy: A case study of Zika modeling

Mathematical models of epidemiological systems enable investigation of and predictions about potential disease outbreaks. However, commonly used models are often highly simplified representations of incredibly complex systems. Because of these simplifications, the model output, of say new cases of a disease over time, or when an epidemic will occur, may be inconsistent with available data. In this case, we must improve the model, especially if we plan to make decisions based on it that could affect human health and safety, but direct improvements are often beyond our reach. In this work, we explore this problem through a case study of the Zika outbreak in Brazil in 2016. We propose an embedded discrepancy operator---a modification to the model equations that requires modest information about the system and is calibrated by all relevant data. We show that the new enriched model demonstrates greatly increased consistency with real data. Moreover, the method is general enough to easily apply to many other mathematical models in epidemiology.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Ripples and Grains Segregation on Unpaved Road

Ripples or corrugations are common phenomena observed in unpaved roads in less developed countries or regions. They cause several damages in vehicles leading to increased maintenance and product costs. In this paper, we present a computational study about the so-called washboard roads. Also, we study grain segregation on unpaved roads. Our simulations have been performed by the Discrete Element Method (DEM). In our model, the grains are regarded as soft disks. The grains are subjected to a gravitational field and both translational and rotational movements are allowed. The results show that wheels' of different sizes, weights and moving with different velocities can change corrugations amplitude and wavelength. Our results also show that some wavelength values are related to specific wheels' speed intervals. Segregation has been studied in roads formed by three distinct grain diameters distribution. We observed that the phenomenon is more evident for higher grain size dispersion

The Presidential Succession Act at 75 | The Bumping Provisions of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947: Policy and Constitutional Considerations

These remarks were delivered as part of the program entitled The Presidential Succession Act at 75: Praise It or Bury It?, which was held on April 6, 2022, and hosted by the Fordham University School of Law. The Presidential Succession Act sets out the presidential line of succession and other procedures for situations in which the president and vice president have both died, resigned, been removed, or become unable to discharge the presidency’s powers and duties. The Act also addresses succession scenarios before Inauguration Day. In light of the statute’s seventy-fifth anniversary, this program explored relevant history and analyzed whether reform to the statute is needed. In these remarks, Americo Cinquegrana, a former Deputy Counsel for Intelligence Policy to the U.S. Attorney General, discusses the dangers of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947’s “bumping provision,” which provides that a Cabinet secretary acting as president can be supplanted by the Speaker of the House or Senate president pro tempore

Measurement of convective mass transfer coefficients by holographic interferometry

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D44483/83 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo