Student Comment: TTIP: A Free Trade Agreement That Strengthens the International Trade Environment and Enhances the Regulatory Powers of the WTO

This comment discusses the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP or the Partnership), a bi-lateral trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, in relation to the World Trade Organization (WTO). TTIP pushes the world towards greater trade liberalization, and if implemented, such a trade agreement would affect trillions of dollars in existing trade. When trade barriers are reduced, a significant amount of new possibilities open up, especially in regards to potential markets for exports, growth and improvement of competitive products, and reduction in the losses associated the border. Since its establishment, the WTO has sought to establish an agreement between its members to reduce tariffs and facilitate free trade. However, it has failed to fulfill its role as a rule-maker, particularly via trade agreements, due to multi-polarity and a decline in United States hegemony. The analysis provided discusses how the Partnership could advance the function of the WTO because the implementation of an international bilateral trade agreement removes the rule-maker duty from the WTO and, instead, allows the WTO to focus on the area of dispute resolution, thus taking on a more “softlaw” approach within international trade, and ideally, returning to its full potential

Towards sustainable farming: An analysis and review of the European Union’s agricultural subsidy policy

This paper provides an overview of the most important European agricultural subsidies, which aim at  promoting a more sustainable way of farming. The European Union has put these subsidies into place in order to create a better balance between agriculture and the environment. Through these ‘green’ subsidies  agro-biodiversity can be protected, which is a very important goal since approximately 50% of all species in Europe depend on agricultural habitats or landscapes. The major pressures on biodiversity in agricultural land result from changes in the type and intensity of farming, which generate changes in agricultural landscapes. Such changes can result either from intensification or abandonment, both of which can be detrimental to biodiversity. Each and every single one of the discussed subsidies has its own goals and purposes. (1) Cross compliance, (2) agro-environmental measures, (3) less favoured area payments and (4) subsidies for organic farming have different objectives, which will be addressed in this paper. I will aim at analysing their overall contributions to the goal of fostering sustainable farming within the EU, through highlighting the benefits, strengths and contributions of these four types of subsidies. This paper will examine their key  contents and  provisions, their current level of implementation and practical measures that could be put in place to further enhance their successful implementation

Student Comment: TTIP: A Free Trade Agreement That Strengthens the International Trade Environment and Enhances the Regulatory Powers of the WTO

This comment discusses the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP or the Partnership), a bi-lateral trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, in relation to the World Trade Organization (WTO). TTIP pushes the world towards greater trade liberalization, and if implemented, such a trade agreement would affect trillions of dollars in existing trade. When trade barriers are reduced, a significant amount of new possibilities open up, especially in regards to potential markets for exports, growth and improvement of competitive products, and reduction in the losses associated the border. Since its establishment, the WTO has sought to establish an agreement between its members to reduce tariffs and facilitate free trade. However, it has failed to fulfill its role as a rule-maker, particularly via trade agreements, due to multi-polarity and a decline in United States hegemony. The analysis provided discusses how the Partnership could advance the function of the WTO because the implementation of an international bilateral trade agreement removes the rule-maker duty from the WTO and, instead, allows the WTO to focus on the area of dispute resolution, thus taking on a more “softlaw” approach within international trade, and ideally, returning to its full potential

Quantifying the structure of free association networks across the lifespan

We investigate how the mental lexicon changes over the lifespan using free association data from over 8,000 individuals, ranging from 10 to 84 years of age, with more than 400 cue words per age group. Using network analysis, with words as nodes and edges defined by the strength of shared associations, we find that associative networks evolve in a nonlinear (U-shaped) fashion over the lifespan. During early life, the network converges and becomes increasingly structured, with reductions in average path length, entropy, clustering coefficient, and small world index. Into late life, the pattern reverses but shows clear differences from early life. The pattern is independent of the increasing number of word types produced per cue across the lifespan, consistent with a network encoding an increasing number of relations between words as individuals age. Lifetime variability is dominantly driven by associative change in the least well-connected words

Thoughts about disordered thinking: measuring and quantifying the laws of order and disorder

Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: Evaluation and Modelling of Verbal Associations

We present a quantitative analysis of human word association pairs and study the types of relations presented in the associations. We put our main focus on the correlation between response types and respondent characteristics such as occupation and gender by contrasting syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations. Finally, we propose a personalised distributed word association model and show the importance of incorporating demographic factors into the models commonly used in natural language processing.Comment: AIST 2017 camera-read