GATT and the Emergence of the World Trade Organisation

I met Soumyen Mukherjee in Sydney in 1971 for the first time during the Vietnam Moratorium days. I was impressed by his radical humanism, his concern for oppressed people everywhere particularly in India, and his search for the correct way of understanding historical materialism. I was very pleased to have a fellow Bengali to teach history at the University of Sydney. I talked to him a lot during the days he was the Director for the Centre for Indian Studies. I am convinced that here is a scholar who stands for non-racism, non-alignment and anti-imperialism. Soumyen has become a trusted friend who will never let his friends down and who is truly international in outlook. Narrow domestic and sectarian approaches to history outrage him and he is prepared to denounce them in the strongest possible manner. He does not listen to fools easily and is prepared to fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party. I sincerely hope that this paper will stimulate his approach towards international trade and development issues

Inadmissible Class of Boolean Functions under Stuck-at Faults

Many underlying structural and functional factors that determine the fault behavior of a combinational network, are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we show that there exists a large class of Boolean functions, called root functions, which can never appear as faulty response in irredundant two-level circuits even when any arbitrary multiple stuck-at faults are injected. Conversely, we show that any other Boolean function can appear as a faulty response from an irredundant realization of some root function under certain stuck-at faults. We characterize this new class of functions and show that for n variables, their number is exactly equal to the number of independent dominating sets (Harary and Livingston, Appl. Math. Lett., 1993) in a Boolean n-cube. We report some bounds and enumerate the total number of root functions up to 6 variables. Finally, we point out several open problems and possible applications of root functions in logic design and testing

An objective validation of polyp and instrument segmentation methods in colonoscopy through Medico 2020 polyp segmentation and MedAI 2021 transparency challenges

Automatic analysis of colonoscopy images has been an active field of research motivated by the importance of early detection of precancerous polyps. However, detecting polyps during the live examination can be challenging due to various factors such as variation of skills and experience among the endoscopists, lack of attentiveness, and fatigue leading to a high polyp miss-rate. Deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to this challenge as it can assist endoscopists in detecting and classifying overlooked polyps and abnormalities in real time. In addition to the algorithm's accuracy, transparency and interpretability are crucial to explaining the whys and hows of the algorithm's prediction. Further, most algorithms are developed in private data, closed source, or proprietary software, and methods lack reproducibility. Therefore, to promote the development of efficient and transparent methods, we have organized the "Medico automatic polyp segmentation (Medico 2020)" and "MedAI: Transparency in Medical Image Segmentation (MedAI 2021)" competitions. We present a comprehensive summary and analyze each contribution, highlight the strength of the best-performing methods, and discuss the possibility of clinical translations of such methods into the clinic. For the transparency task, a multi-disciplinary team, including expert gastroenterologists, accessed each submission and evaluated the team based on open-source practices, failure case analysis, ablation studies, usability and understandability of evaluations to gain a deeper understanding of the models' credibility for clinical deployment. Through the comprehensive analysis of the challenge, we not only highlight the advancements in polyp and surgical instrument segmentation but also encourage qualitative evaluation for building more transparent and understandable AI-based colonoscopy systems

Aid and Australian Aid Policy

Few issues of economic development arouse such deep emotions or controversies as the role of the foreign sector. Most orthodox economists believe that foreign aid, investment, technology and transnational corporations (TNC) are important contributory factors to economic development. On the other hand, the neo-Marxist paradigm suggests that the present system revolving around the foreign sector represents the continuation of domination over the developing by developed countries. Foreign aid, investment, technology and TNC are regarded as tools of neo-imperialism, the devices by which developed countries continue to retain control over the economies of the ex -colonies. The role of foreign aid in economic development is also criticised by some extreme right scholars who argue that foreign aid is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic development. In Section 1, foreign aid will be analysed both from the orthodox as well as from neo-Marxist positions. The main features of Australian recent foreign aid will be discussed in Section 2. The policy implications and some recommendations will be made in the final Section 3

Aid and Australian Aid Policy

Few issues of economic development arouse such deep emotions or controversies as the role of the foreign sector. Most orthodox economists believe that foreign aid, investment, technology and transnational corporations (TNC) are important contributory factors to economic development. On the other hand, the neo-Marxist paradigm suggests that the present system revolving around the foreign sector represents the continuation of domination over the developing by developed countries. Foreign aid, investment, technology and TNC are regarded as tools of neo-imperialism, the devices by which developed countries continue to retain control over the economies of the ex -colonies. The role of foreign aid in economic development is also criticised by some extreme right scholars who argue that foreign aid is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic development. In Section 1, foreign aid will be analysed both from the orthodox as well as from neo-Marxist positions. The main features of Australian recent foreign aid will be discussed in Section 2. The policy implications and some recommendations will be made in the final Section 3.Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty,

Improved Upper Bound on Independent Domination Number for Hypercubes

We revisit the problem of determining the independent domination number in hypercubes for which the known upper bound is still not tight for general dimensions. We present here a constructive method to build an independent dominating set $S_n$ for the $n$-dimensional hypercube $Q_n$, where $n=2p+1$, $p$ being a positive integer $\ge 1$, provided an independent dominating set $S_p$ for the $p$-dimensional hypercube $Q_p$, is known. The procedure also computes the minimum independent dominating set for all $n=2^k-1$, $k>1$. Finally, we establish that the independent domination number $\alpha_n\leq 3 \times 2^{n-k-2}$ for $7\times 2^{k-2}-1\leq n1$. This is an improved upper bound for this range as compared to earlier work.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, and 3 table