Cottonseed meal :a good feed for laying hens

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The Political Economy of International Sales Law

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, or CISG, has been adopted by more than 60 countries in an effort to harmonize the law that applies to international sales contracts. In this paper, we argue that the effort to create uniform international sales law (ISL) fails to supply contracting parties with the default terms they prefer, thus violating the normative criterion that justifies the law-making process for commercial actors in the first instance. Our argument rests on three claims. First, we contend that the process by which uniform ISL is drafted will dictate the form that many provisions take. Second, we contend that the legal form dictated by the drafting process has significant substantive consequences, particularly for the policy objectives of uniform ISL. That leads to our third claim. We predict that in order to achieve uniform ISL that is widely adopted, those involved in the drafting process will systematically promulgate many vague standards that contracting parties would not choose for themselves. These defaults cannot be justified as the inevitable cost of achieving an optimal level of uniformity. If the products of a uniform ISL are default terms that parties do not want, then the underlying justification for the law-making function – reduction of contracting costs – vanishes. We find significant correspondence between our predictions about the drafting of uniform international sales law and the CISG. The CISG was drafted by parties whose objectives did not necessarily coincide with those of the commercial actors whose conduct the treaty was intended to regulate. The result is a variety of vague standards and compromises that appear inconsistent with commercial interests. We also illustrate the ways in which the CISG avoided potential correctives to these problems. We conclude by suggesting that commercial actors involved in international sales would prefer to choose governing law from among legal regimes that compete to supply parties with more desirable substantive terms

Risk, Courts, and Agencies

Public risks are precisely the risks that have recently captured the attention of the legal community and the world at large, in no small part because they give rise to such novel problems for lawyers and such grave apprehensions among lay people. Public risks have moved the legal system to relax doctrines--regarding, for example, standards of causation and culpability, burdens of proof, sharing of liability--that were designed to deal with the private risks that once dominated the landscape. And public risks have moved lay people to intensify their demands for risk control measures. These developments suggest that public risks are subject to especially harsh treatment, yet such treatment might often be contrary to minimizing the sum of all risk-related costs. If some public risks, whatever their dangers, are in fact safer or otherwise more beneficial than the risks they would displace, then cost minimization requires open-minded efforts to encourage many of the very technological threats that current legal and popular opinion would instead deter. As a consequence, the question of what to do about public risk has become a subject of considerable (and sometimes heated) debate. That debate is our concern throughout all that follows. We begin in Part I with a summary of the contending views in the ongoing argument about public risk, giving particular attention to two important points of contention. The first of these has to do with attitudes. The general public, and to some degree the legal system as well, have a particular aversion to public risk. Is this justified? The second point of contention, intimately related to the first, has to do with institutions, and especially with judicial versus administrative rule. At present, the courts are playing an important part in shaping the legal response to public risk. Is this sensible? According to one powerfully stated outlook--an outlook that runs directly against the grain of prevailing sentiments--the answer to each of the foregoing questions is a firm no. Our actions increase, rather than minimize, risk costs. We worry too much about public risks and not enough about private ones. We control public risks with a haphazard mix of market, judicial, administrative, and legislative measures that too often proceed in the wrong direction, without coordination, and with too little reliance on agencies and too much on courts. The courts especially are said to pander to uninformed and irrational risk attitudes; their decisions show a myopic bias against new technology and in favor of its victims. New or complex technologies are subjected to a degree of scrutiny that riskier but established (often private) risk sources never underwent and could not survive. As a result, we have too much private risk and too little public risk, not more safety but less. Some of the critics advancing this line call for a reduction of the judicial role in risk assessment and management, and for more reliance on administrative agencies. Agencies, they argue, have more expertise, are more objective and rational, can be more attentive to the net effects of technological advance. Courts, they conclude, should defer to them. This is the set of views that we call into question here. After sketching the lines of debate in Part I, we turn in Part II to a prefatory discussion about why risk has to be regulated at all, and under what circumstances. Part III and much of Part IV then address the debate about institutions, taking up courts and agencies in turn. In Part III, we model the litigation process in a way that suggests how courts might well be managing risk much more productively than one would at first suppose. In Part IV, we pursue a similar model to show why agencies might fall far short of what is claimed on their behalf, were the courts to be more deferential. A significant portion of the agency discussion is devoted to attitudes about risk. The question of attitudes has been begged in the legal debate about public risk, yet the topic is of fundamental importance: attitudes about risk--about the meanings of risk--have much to do with choosing or devising the right management institutions. The comparative analysis of courts and agencies in Parts III and IV leads us to conclude that ambitious proposals to increase the scope of agency authority at the expense of judicial scrutiny are remarkably premature. We stop short of saying that the present institutional arrangements are, however imperfect, the best we can hope for given current understanding. We insist, though, that those critics who would alter existing arrangements through sweeping delegations to experts and bureaucrats have utterly failed to carry a reasonable burden of proof. A careful comparative assessment simply raises too many doubts about the wisdom of wholesale abdication to technocratic rule. Part V underscores this conclusion with some speculation about the larger implications of technocracy in a democratic system. Our concerns in this respect lead us to consider an alternative and currently popular view that public risk should be managed through one or another version of participatory democracy. We end up being as skeptical here as we are about technocracy. Obviously, then, we think that much ground has still to be covered before anyone can confidently come forth with ambitious programs for risk assessment and management. As we see it, the public risk debate presently rests at the inside edge of a vast and expanding universe, an unsurprising thing given that risk has only recently been highlighted on social and legal agendas. The entire topic--its attitudinal, institutional, and scientific aspects--is still so shrouded with uncertainty that it is difficult to be confident about anything other than the need for more information and more argument. What we hope to do is move matters forward by bringing into view some considerations that must (but thus far do not) figure in the ongoing debate

Risk, Courts, and Agencies

Public risks are precisely the risks that have recently captured the attention of the legal community and the world at large, in no small part because they give rise to such novel problems for lawyers and such grave apprehensions among lay people. Public risks have moved the legal system to relax doctrines--regarding, for example, standards of causation and culpability, burdens of proof, sharing of liability--that were designed to deal with the private risks that once dominated the landscape. And public risks have moved lay people to intensify their demands for risk control measures. These developments suggest that public risks are subject to especially harsh treatment, yet such treatment might often be contrary to minimizing the sum of all risk-related costs. If some public risks, whatever their dangers, are in fact safer or otherwise more beneficial than the risks they would displace, then cost minimization requires open-minded efforts to encourage many of the very technological threats that current legal and popular opinion would instead deter. As a consequence, the question of what to do about public risk has become a subject of considerable (and sometimes heated) debate. That debate is our concern throughout all that follows. We begin in Part I with a summary of the contending views in the ongoing argument about public risk, giving particular attention to two important points of contention. The first of these has to do with attitudes. The general public, and to some degree the legal system as well, have a particular aversion to public risk. Is this justified? The second point of contention, intimately related to the first, has to do with institutions, and especially with judicial versus administrative rule. At present, the courts are playing an important part in shaping the legal response to public risk. Is this sensible? According to one powerfully stated outlook--an outlook that runs directly against the grain of prevailing sentiments--the answer to each of the foregoing questions is a firm no. Our actions increase, rather than minimize, risk costs. We worry too much about public risks and not enough about private ones. We control public risks with a haphazard mix of market, judicial, administrative, and legislative measures that too often proceed in the wrong direction, without coordination, and with too little reliance on agencies and too much on courts. The courts especially are said to pander to uninformed and irrational risk attitudes; their decisions show a myopic bias against new technology and in favor of its victims. New or complex technologies are subjected to a degree of scrutiny that riskier but established (often private) risk sources never underwent and could not survive. As a result, we have too much private risk and too little public risk, not more safety but less. Some of the critics advancing this line call for a reduction of the judicial role in risk assessment and management, and for more reliance on administrative agencies. Agencies, they argue, have more expertise, are more objective and rational, can be more attentive to the net effects of technological advance. Courts, they conclude, should defer to them. This is the set of views that we call into question here. After sketching the lines of debate in Part I, we turn in Part II to a prefatory discussion about why risk has to be regulated at all, and under what circumstances. Part III and much of Part IV then address the debate about institutions, taking up courts and agencies in turn. In Part III, we model the litigation process in a way that suggests how courts might well be managing risk much more productively than one would at first suppose. In Part IV, we pursue a similar model to show why agencies might fall far short of what is claimed on their behalf, were the courts to be more deferential. A significant portion of the agency discussion is devoted to attitudes about risk. The question of attitudes has been begged in the legal debate about public risk, yet the topic is of fundamental importance: attitudes about risk--about the meanings of risk--have much to do with choosing or devising the right management institutions. The comparative analysis of courts and agencies in Parts III and IV leads us to conclude that ambitious proposals to increase the scope of agency authority at the expense of judicial scrutiny are remarkably premature. We stop short of saying that the present institutional arrangements are, however imperfect, the best we can hope for given current understanding. We insist, though, that those critics who would alter existing arrangements through sweeping delegations to experts and bureaucrats have utterly failed to carry a reasonable burden of proof. A careful comparative assessment simply raises too many doubts about the wisdom of wholesale abdication to technocratic rule. Part V underscores this conclusion with some speculation about the larger implications of technocracy in a democratic system. Our concerns in this respect lead us to consider an alternative and currently popular view that public risk should be managed through one or another version of participatory democracy. We end up being as skeptical here as we are about technocracy. Obviously, then, we think that much ground has still to be covered before anyone can confidently come forth with ambitious programs for risk assessment and management. As we see it, the public risk debate presently rests at the inside edge of a vast and expanding universe, an unsurprising thing given that risk has only recently been highlighted on social and legal agendas. The entire topic--its attitudinal, institutional, and scientific aspects--is still so shrouded with uncertainty that it is difficult to be confident about anything other than the need for more information and more argument. What we hope to do is move matters forward by bringing into view some considerations that must (but thus far do not) figure in the ongoing debate

The Un-Easy Case for Technological Optimism

Technological optimism is a term of art, an article of faith, and a theory of politics. It is a view that pervades modem attitudes, yet gets little explicit attention. For a brief period the situation was otherwise. In the early 1970s, the optimistic outlook figured prominently in an important debate about nothing less than the future of the world. Technological optimism won. The outcome was unsurprising, given the nature of the argument. On one side of the debate was a group of self-proclaimed Malthusians who foresaw an impending period of stark scarcity unless relatively drastic remedial steps were quickly taken; on the other side were the technological optimists, whose message, essentially, was not to worry--at least not too much. The two sides moved quickly to joinder on an issue that neither could carry. The debate, in other words, reached a dead-end; it came down to believing whatever one wished. Most people wish to be optimistic. This is why the optimists triumphed. It is also why, today, critical discussion of the optimistic viewpoint is largely passé. The literature on the subject is more or less closed. Not many people know very much about it, lawyers in particular. The exception might be those who work and teach in fields like environmental law and natural resources, where technological optimism has a special relevance and a notable dominance. Our aim in this essay is to reopen the old debate and move it to new ground. Resolution, on the assumption it could ever be within our capacities, is for the present not on our agenda. We hope for now only to reveal and explore the assumptions or premises of the optimistic viewpoint, and to explain why they trouble us. Placed in its largest setting, our argument is indeed about the future of the world--a sure way to lose an audience--but we are content merely to consider its implications for technology at a time of continuing enthusiasm for technological solutions, and, briefly, its implications for American politics at a time of growing concern about democracy\u27s capacity to cope with modern-day problems. We proceed from where we began, by considering technological optimism as a term of art, as an article of faith, and especially as a theory of politics

Detecting the harmonics of oscillations with time-variable frequencies

A method is introduced for the spectral analysis of complex noisy signals containing several frequency components. It enables components that are independent to be distinguished from the harmonics of nonsinusoidal oscillatory processes of lower frequency. The method is based on mutual information and surrogate testing combined with the wavelet transform, and it is applicable to relatively short time series containing frequencies that are time variable. Where the fundamental frequency and harmonics of a process can be identified, the characteristic shape of the corresponding oscillation can be determined, enabling adaptive filtering to remove other components and nonoscillatory noise from the signal. Thus the total bandwidth of the signal can be correctly partitioned and the power associated with each component then can be quantified more accurately. The method is first demonstrated on numerical examples. It is then used to identify the higher harmonics of oscillations in human skin blood flow, both spontaneous and associated with periodic iontophoresis of a vasodilatory agent. The method should be equally relevant to all situations where signals of comparable complexity are encountered, including applications in astrophysics, engineering, and electrical circuits, as well as in other areas of physiology and biology

Unstable Hadrons in Hot Hadron Gas in Laboratory and in the Early Universe

We study kinetic master equations for chemical reactions involving the formation and the natural decay of unstable particles in a thermal bath. We consider the decay channel of one into two particles, and the inverse process, fusion of two thermal particles into one. We present the master equations the evolution of the density of the unstable particles in the early Universe. We obtain the thermal invariant reaction rate using as an input the free space (vacuum) decay time and show the medium quantum effects on $\pi+\pi \leftrightarrow \rho$ reaction relaxation time. As another laboratory example we describe the $K+K \leftrightarrow \phi$ process in thermal hadronic gas in heavy-ion collisions. A particularly interesting application of our formalism is the $\pi^{0}\leftrightarrow \gamma +\gamma$ process in the early Universe. We also explore the physics of $\pi^{\pm}$ and $\mu^{\pm}$ freeze-out in the Universe.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, published in Physical Review