Bilateral investment treaties treatment of international capital movement: time for reform?

PhDWhile the freedom to move capital is necessary for foreign investors, the power of the state to regulate capital transfers is necessary to prevent volatile capital from causing financial crises as well as to mitigate such crises when they occur. Thus, in regulating international capital movement, a balance should be made between the right to transfer funds and the state’s right to protect the stability of its economy. It is in relation to achieving this balance that this thesis argues that bilateral investment treaties’ (BITs) regulation of capital transfers is deficient, both substantively and procedurally. On substance, this thesis identifies three substantive defects that affect obligations under BITs: absoluteness, immediacy, and breadth. First, many BITs adopt an absolute approach in liberalizing capital that does not permit any restrictions or exceptions, nor does it distinguish between different kinds of capital, or between the right to import capital and the right to repatriate capital. Second, the obligation to permit transfers is immediate and does not allow for a gradual liberalization of capital. Third, many BITs’ terms and obligations are broad and therefore vague, such as the broad definition of investment, or the obligation to grant fair and equitable treatment, which is also broad and interpreted in a manner that restricts the regulatory powers of the host state. Such results could have been partly mitigated if there were a dispute settlement mechanism with the power to create precedent and with it a clearer and more coherent body of rules. But BITs’ investor-state arbitration is also deficient since it consists of ad hoc tribunals, which are not bound by precedent; and their decisions are not generally subject to substantive review. This leads to an inconsistent and incoherent body of law that protects neither the state’s regulatory powers nor the legitimate expectation of investor

Investigation of constructed wetlands capability to remove mercury from contaminated waters

Wetlands have been known as an efficient and low-cost technology in treating wastewater. It was reported that wetlands (natural and constructed) were used to purify (a) municipal; (b) industrial; (c) acidic; and (d) agricultural wastewater. Mercury has been used intensively by wide variety of industries because of its unique properties. Consequently, it was present at various levels in wastewater discharged. The ability of constructed wetlands to serve as a sink of mercury before entering larger aquatic systems has not been investigated. This study focuses on the capability of constructed wetlands (Free Water Surface) to remove mercury from contaminated water/wastewater and reduce the widespread dispersion of the toxic substance to streams, rivers, reservoirs, and oceans. Mercury removal pathways considered in the study are sorption to the solid phase and uptake by plants. Current design approaches of constructed wetlands lack essential parameters necessary to optimise their capabilities for mercury removal. To evaluate these parameters a combination of experimental and numerical modeling approaches were undertaken. Experimental investigations were conducted to investigate the ability of Water Hyacinth ( Eichhornia crassipes )--floating plants--and Reeds ( Phragmites communis )--rooted plants--to remove inorganic mercury compounds from water. Kinetics of mercury removal by floating and rooted plants in the concentration range of 5 to 150 ppb were investigated and the apparent removal rate coefficients were determined for a first order kinetic model. Numerical modeling investigations were then carried out to: (a) expand the results obtained in the experimental phase by examining the distribution of mercury forms in water including: HgOH +1 , Hg(OH) 3 -1 , Hg +2 , H9Cl +1 , HgCl 2 (aq), HgCl 3 -1 , HgCl 4 -2 , HgClOH (aq) and evaluating the amount of bioavailable mercury for plant uptake; (b) verify the effects of pH, temperature, and chloride concentrations in water on Hg speciation; (c) assess characteristics of mercury adsorption on four different sediment materials (kaolinite, natural soil, glokonite, and bentonite) at three pH values and three different adsorbent medium for five initial mercury concentrations (1E-7 to 1E-3 moles) using a triple layer adsorption model. The major results suggest that--properly designed--constructed wetlands can remove up to 95% of mercury discharged within short period of 3 days. The removal process occurs at in two phases fast and around 10 times slower thereafter. The uptake of the bioavailable form of mercury (He 2 +2 ) was influenced mainly by the pH of the water discharged. Higher adsorbent mass concentration in sediments and higher pH result in less amount of bioavailable mercury. The amount of bioavailable mercury was proportional to the initial mercury concentrations. It was concluded also that mercury has high affinity to be sorbed on all tested sediment mediums. The findings of this research could be also applied in preparing environmental risk impact assessments and could be considered as the first nuclei of establishing regulations (codes) governing the design of constructed wetlands to remove mercury from contaminated waters. However, a pilot field study is still necessary to validate the experimental results

The Role of Penetration Testing in Forensic Multimedia Retrieval Process

Digital forensic investigators are faced with multimedia retrieval and discovery challenges that require innovation and application of evolving methodologies. This work is made more difficult in critical infra-structure environments where the acquired evidence is in many formats, types and presentations. Penetration testing is one of the techniques used to focus an investigation and to target the potential case information from the vulnerability identification phase, through to the media identification phase. In this chapter a review of these processes is made and a framework example developed to show how the investigator discovers relevant evidence. The problem for the digital investigator is the vast array of media in which evidence is stored or transmitted. Some work is from live retrieval and others static. A framework of methods that is flexible and adaptable to the context of investigation is proposed and the discovery methods for multimedia environments elaborated

An Innovative Word Encoding Method For Text Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network

Text classification plays a vital role today especially with the intensive use of social networking media. Recently, different architectures of convolutional neural networks have been used for text classification in which one-hot vector, and word embedding methods are commonly used. This paper presents a new language independent word encoding method for text classification. The proposed model converts raw text data to low-level feature dimension with minimal or no preprocessing steps by using a new approach called binary unique number of word "BUNOW". BUNOW allows each unique word to have an integer ID in a dictionary that is represented as a k-dimensional vector of its binary equivalent. The output vector of this encoding is fed into a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for classification. Moreover, the proposed model reduces the neural network parameters, allows faster computation with few network layers, where a word is atomic representation the document as in word level, and decrease memory consumption for character level representation. The provided CNN model is able to work with other languages or multi-lingual text without the need for any changes in the encoding method. The model outperforms the character level and very deep character level CNNs models in terms of accuracy, network parameters, and memory consumption; the results show total classification accuracy 91.99% and error 8.01% using AG's News dataset compared to the state of art methods that have total classification accuracy 91.45% and error 8.55%, in addition to the reduction in input feature vector and neural network parameters by 62% and 34%, respectively.Comment: Accepted @ 14th International Computer Engineering Conference (ICENCO2018), Faculty of Engineering , Cairo University, Egypt, Dec. 29-30, 201

Association between obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and depression and the effect of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment

Amr Makram El-Sherbini1, Adel Salah Bediwy2, Ashraf El-Mitwalli31Department of Psychiatry, Elminia University Hospital, Faculty of Medicine, Elminia, 2Chest Department, Faculty of Medicine, Tanta University, 3Department of Neurology, Mansoura School of Medicine, University of Mansoura, Mansoura, EgyptBackground: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a relatively common disorder which has a negative impact on the psychological well-being of affected individuals.Objective: To assess the association between OSA and depression as well as the effect of treatment with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP).Methods: A total of 37 newly diagnosed individuals with OSA underwent an overnight polysomnography and were assessed using the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), and the Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Patients were assessed before and after 2 months of CPAP use.Results: Of the 37 patients included in the study, 21 (56.7%) had clinically relevant depression as indicated by a score >10 on the HDRS and eleven patients (29.7%) met the diagnostic criteria for a major depressive episode using the Structured Clinical Interview. Scores on the HDRS were correlated with the Apnea Hypoxia Index, ESS scores, and oxygen saturation. Patients showed a significant reduction in depressive symptoms and improvement in ESS scores after CPAP treatment.Conclusion: Patients with OSA should be screened carefully for depressive disorders. CPAP should be tried first before starting other treatment modalities for depression.Keywords: obstructive sleep apnea, depression in OSA, CPAP and depressio

Limited Invasive Techniques in Management of Sander's Type II, III Calcaneal Fractures

Background: A thorough understanding of the clinical and radiographic anatomy of the calcaneus and its articulations is crucial when attempting less invasive procedures for intraarticular calcaneus fractures.Objective: The aim of this work is to evaluate the functional outcome and to assess the anatomical restoration of the calcaneus with radiographic measurements after percutaneous fixation of Sanders type II and type III calcaneal fractures by K-wires and cannulated screws. Patients and methods: This was a prospective study that is conducted on 23 patients whom were classified as Sanders type II, III Calcaneal fractures. This study was done at Alexandria Police Hospital and Zagazig University Hospital. These patients were followed up for at least 6 months postoperatively. All patients in the study were evaluated including history taking and clinical examination. All patients had preoperative lab investigations and were evaluated radiologically with X-ray calcaneus and CT scan, and were followed up at outpatient clinic twice in the first week then once a week for the next two months.Results: The final results at the end of this study were satisfactory in 91.3% of patients and unsatisfactory in 8.7% of patients. About (81.3%) of the excellent results were obtained in Sanders type II fractures, while 18.7 % of the excellent results were obtained in Sanders type III fractures. Conclusion: Less invasive surgical techniques for treating displaced intraarticular calcaneus fractures have been undertaken in an attempt to reduce complications and improve recovery when surgery is indicated. These emerging techniques may be beneficial in patients with soft-tissue compromise, multiple comorbidities, and displaced intraarticular fractures with minimal comminution

On the Stable Throughput of Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks with Finite Relaying Buffer

In this paper, we study the problem of cooperative communications in cognitive radio systems where the secondary user has limited relaying room for the overheard primary packets. More specifically, we characterize the stable throughput region of a cognitive radio network with a finite relaying buffer at the secondary user. Towards this objective, we formulate a constrained optimization problem for maximizing the secondary user throughput while guaranteeing the stability of the primary user queue. We consider a general cooperation policy where the packet admission and queue selection probabilities, at the secondary user, are both dependent on the state (length) of the finite relaying buffer. Despite the sheer complexity of the optimization problem, attributed to its non-convexity, we transform it to a linear program. Our numerical results reveal a number of valuable insights, e.g., it is always mutually beneficial to cooperate in delivering the primary packets in terms of expanding the stable throughput region. In addition, the stable throughput region of the system, compared to the case of infinite relaying queue capacity, marginally shrinks for limited relaying queue capacity.Comment: 5 pages, IEEE PIMRC 201

Estimated Glycated albumin' levels early in pregnancy could detect women at risk to develop gestational diabetes mellitus

Background: Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is characterized by dysfunction in maintaining glucose homeostasis leading to adverse maternofetal outcomes and this necessitates the use of markers for its early prediction. Objectives: To determine the ability of the estimated percentage of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c%) and glycated albumin (GA%) at the 6th gestational week (GW) to define women liable to develop GDM. Patients and methods: 402 women were clinically evaluated and gave blood samples for estimation of fasting blood glucose (FBG) and HbA1c% and GA% at the 6th-8th GW. At the 24th GW, all women underwent the evaluation of insulin resistance (IR) using the Homeostasis model assessment of IR score and the 75-Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (75-OGTT) to diagnose GDM. The levels of estimated variate at the 6th-8th GW were statistically analyzed to define the predictor for GDM. Results: 62 women developed IR and 36 of them progressed to GDM. Statistical analyses defined FBG, GA%, HbA1c% as predictors for IR and GDM, but the Paired-sample area difference under the ROC curves defined high GA% as the significant positive predictor for GDM. Kaplan-Meier analysis defined GA% at 14% and 15% could define the risk for GDM by 20% and 40%, respectively but the evaluated performance characters at 15% were significantly (P=0.0074) higher than at 14 %. Conclusion: Estimation of GA% in blood samples obtained at the 6th-8th GW could predict the oncoming GDM with high specificity and negative predictive value at the cutoff of 15%