274 research outputs found
RCEP vs TPP: the pursuit of eastern dominance
ASEAN when defined as a single regional bloc, can be perceived as being one of the most prominent battle-fields between two new economic powerhouses; the US and China. When compared to efforts in the prior half-century, the USās regional integration efforts were derided politically and economically since the 2007 Western financial crisis. This was predominantly due to a plethora of reasons alike to the fact that post the impasse, the ASEAN nationsā credence of the US as a political and trading partner greatly eroded. As a late runner, China exemplifies her regional prowess via an influx of Chinese emigration in those targeted regions. This enables the ASEAN nations to centre their trade around the Chinese economy in lieu of that of the US. This is galvanised by the wealth of the ethnic minority that efficiently entwine the ASEAN nations with China as the nucleus. Through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, two subsequent agreements were penned; and these concepts are examined from the Chinese perspective, and the effects that are encompassed are further amplified throughout the course of this paper
Comparing regional organizations in global multilateral institutions:ASEAN, the EU and the UN
Structural change brought about by the end of the Cold War and accelerated globalisation have transformed the global environment. A global governance complex is emerging, characterised by an ever-greater functional and regulatory role for multilateral organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and its associated agencies. The evolving global governance framework has created opportunities for regional organisations to participate as actors within the UN (and other multilateral institutions). This article compares the European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as actors within the UN network. It begins by extrapolating framework conditions for the emergence of EU and ASEAN actorness from the literature. The core argument of this article is that EU and ASEAN actorness is evolving in two succinct stages: Changes in the global environment create opportunities for the participation of regional organisations in global governance institutions, exposing representation and cohesion problems at the regional level. In response, ASEAN and the EU have initiated processes of institutional adaptation
Regional actorness and interregional relations:ASEAN, the EU and Mercosur
The European Union (EU) has a long tradition of interregional dialogue mechanisms with other regional organisations and is using these relations to project its own model of institutionalised actorness. This is partly motivated by the emerging actorness of the EU itself, which benefits from fostering capable regional counterparts in other parts of the world. This article advances the argument that actorness, which we conceptualise in terms of institutions, recognition and identity, is a relational concept, dependent on context and perception. Taking the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) and their relations with the EU as case studies, this article demonstrates that the actorness capabilities of all three organisations have been enhanced as result of ASEAN-EU and Mercosur-EU relations. However, there are clear limits to the development of the three components of regional actorness and to the interregional relations themselves. These limits stem both from the type of interregionalism at play and from the different regional models the actors incorporate. While there is evidence of institutional enhancement in ASEAN and Mercosur, these formal changes have been grafted on top of firmly entrenched normative underpinnings. Within the regional organisations, interactions with the EU generate centrifugal forces concerning the model to pursue, thus limiting their institutional cohesion and capacity. In addition, group-to-group relations have reinforced ASEAN and Mercosur identities in contrast to the EU. The formation of such differences has narrowed the scope of EU interregionalism despite the initial success of improved regional actorness
Venezuela e ALBA: regionalismo contra-hegemƓnico e ensino superior para todos
Partindo de um quadro teĆ³rico neo-gramsciano crĆtico Ć globalizaĆ§Ć£o, este artigo aplica a nova teoria do regionalismo (NTR) e a teoria do regionalismo regulatĆ³rio (TRR) Ć sua anĆ”lise e teorizaĆ§Ć£o dos tratados de comĆ©rcio da AlianƧa Bolivariana para os Povos da Nossa AmĆ©rica (ALBA-TCP) como regionalismo contra-hegemĆ“nico na AmĆ©rica Latina e Caribe (ALC). A ALBA estĆ” centrada na ideia de um Socialismo do SĆ©culo XXI, que, como (inicialmente) tambĆ©m a RevoluĆ§Ć£o Bolivariana da Venezuela, substitui a 'vantagem competitiva' pela 'vantagem cooperativa'. Em seu carĆ”ter de conjunto de processos multidimensionais e transnacionais a ALBA-TCP opera dentro de/transversalmente a um nĆŗmero de setores e escalas, ao mesmo passo que as transformaƧƵes estruturais sĆ£o movidas pela interaĆ§Ć£o de agentes do Estado e agentes nĆ£o estatais. A polĆtica de EducaĆ§Ć£o Superior para Todos (ESPT) do governo venezuelano rejeita a agenda neoliberal globalizada de mercadorizaĆ§Ć£o, privatizaĆ§Ć£o e elitismo e reinvindica educaĆ§Ć£o pĆŗblica gratuita em todos os nĆveis como um direito humano fundamental. A ESPT estĆ” sendo regionalizado em um espaƧo educacional emergente da ALBA e assume um papel-chave nos processos de democracia direta e participatĆ³ria, dos quais a construĆ§Ć£o popular (bottom-up) da contra-hegemonia e a redefiniĆ§Ć£o polĆtica e econĆ“mica da ALC dependem. Antes de produzir sujeitos empreendedores conformes ao capitalismo global, a ESPT procura formar subjetividades ao longo de valores morais de solidariedade e cooperaĆ§Ć£o. Isso serĆ” ilustrado com referĆŖncia a um estudo etnogrĆ”fico de caso da Universidade Bolivariana da Venezuela (UBV).This paper employs new regionalism theory and regulatory regionalism theory in its analysis and theorisation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as a counter-hegemonic Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) regionalism. As (initially) the regionalisation of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, ALBA is centred around the idea of a 21st Century Socialism that replaces the 'competitive advantage' with the 'cooperative advantage'. ALBA, as a set of multi-dimensional inter- and transnational processes, operates within and across a range of sectors and scales whilst the structural transformations are driven by the interplay of state and non-state actors. The Venezuelan government's Higher Education For All (HEFA) policy, which is being regionalised within an emergent ALBA education space, assumes a key role in the direct democratic and participatory democratic processes upon which a bottom-up construction of counter-hegemony depends. HEFA challenges the globalised neoliberal higher education agenda of commoditisation, privatisation and elitism. Rather than producing enterprising subjects fashioned for global capitalism, HEFA seeks to form subjectivities along the moral values of solidarity and cooperation
Using Workflows to Explore and Optimise Named Entity Recognition for Chemistry
Chemistry text mining tools should be interoperable and adaptable regardless of
system-level implementation, installation or even programming issues. We aim to
abstract the functionality of these tools from the underlying implementation via
reconfigurable workflows for automatically identifying chemical names. To
achieve this, we refactored an established named entity recogniser (in the
chemistry domain), OSCAR and studied the impact of each component on the net
performance. We developed two reconfigurable workflows from OSCAR using an
interoperable text mining framework, U-Compare. These workflows can be altered
using the drag-&-drop mechanism of the graphical user
interface of U-Compare. These workflows also provide a platform to study the
relationship between text mining components such as tokenisation and named
entity recognition (using maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM) and pattern
recognition based classifiers). Results indicate that, for chemistry in
particular, eliminating noise generated by tokenisation techniques lead to a
slightly better performance than others, in terms of named entity recognition
(NER) accuracy. Poor tokenisation translates into poorer input to the classifier
components which in turn leads to an increase in Type I or Type II errors, thus,
lowering the overall performance. On the Sciborg corpus, the workflow based
system, which uses a new tokeniser whilst retaining the same MEMM component,
increases the F-score from 82.35% to 84.44%. On the PubMed corpus,
it recorded an F-score of 84.84% as against 84.23% by OSCAR
Shaping the global communications milieu : the EU's influence on internet and telecommunications governance
This article evaluates the European Union's (EU) influence in shaping the global governance for telecommunications and the Internet. Through analysing EU behaviour within an actorness framework, we demonstrate how the external opportunity structure and the EU's internal environment has impacted on its ability to exert and maximize its presence in order to meet its goals and aims in these two very different sub-sectors of global communications in terms of evolution and development. Such a comparison of EU actorness, we argue, is revealing in terms of uncovering the underlying factors and conditions that allow the EU to influence two important and dynamic communications sub-sectors
The new scalar politics of evaluation: An emerging governance role for evaluation
In this article we analyze how roles for evaluation are described and argued for in key texts produced and/or promoted by three influential international networks: the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness; the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Assistance Committeeās Network on Development Evaluation; and the Network of Networks for Impact Evaluation. We contend that these complex multilateral networks are working supranationally through soft power to promote: common standards of evaluation practice; a dominant model of evaluation (impact evaluation); and new evaluation roles, relationships and practices for the field of development. Moreover, we argue that this emerging complex multilateral agenda for evaluation may position evaluation and evaluators within a global governance strategy allowing greater influence to international development organizations. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for evaluators working in the field of international development
The implicitome: A resource for rationalizing gene-disease associations
High-throughput experimental methods such as medical sequencing and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify increasingly large numbers of potential relations between genetic variants and diseases. Both biological complexity (millions of potential gene-disease associations) and the accelerating rate of data production necessitate computational approaches to prioritize and rationalize potential gene-disease relations. Here, we use concept profile technology to expose from the biomedical literature both explicitly stated gene-disease relations (the explicitome) and a much larger set of implied gene-disease associations (the implicitome). Implicit relations are largely unknown to, or are even unintended by the original authors, but they vastly extend the reach of existing
Mining metabolites: extracting the yeast metabolome from the literature
Text mining methods have added considerably to our capacity to extract biological knowledge from the literature. Recently the field of systems biology has begun to model and simulate metabolic networks, requiring knowledge of the set of molecules involved. While genomics and proteomics technologies are able to supply the macromolecular parts list, the metabolites are less easily assembled. Most metabolites are known and reported through the scientific literature, rather than through large-scale experimental surveys. Thus it is important to recover them from the literature. Here we present a novel tool to automatically identify metabolite names in the literature, and associate structures where possible, to define the reported yeast metabolome. With ten-fold cross validation on a manually annotated corpus, our recognition tool generates an f-score of 78.49 (precision of 83.02) and demonstrates greater suitability in identifying metabolite names than other existing recognition tools for general chemical molecules. The metabolite recognition tool has been applied to the literature covering an important model organism, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to define its reported metabolome. By coupling to ChemSpider, a major chemical database, we have identified structures for much of the reported metabolome and, where structure identification fails, been able to suggest extensions to ChemSpider. Our manually annotated gold-standard data on 296 abstracts are available as supplementary materials. Metabolite names and, where appropriate, structures are also available as supplementary materials
Identification of a Shared Genetic Susceptibility Locus for Coronary Heart Disease and Periodontitis
Recent studies indicate a mutual epidemiological relationship between coronary heart disease (CHD) and periodontitis. Both diseases are associated with similar risk factors and are characterized by a chronic inflammatory process. In a candidate-gene association study, we identify an association of a genetic susceptibility locus shared by both diseases. We confirm the known association of two neighboring linkage disequilibrium regions on human chromosome 9p21.3 with CHD and show the additional strong association of these loci with the risk of aggressive periodontitis. For the lead SNP of the main associated linkage disequilibrium region, rs1333048, the odds ratio of the autosomal-recessive mode of inheritance is 1.99 (95% confidence interval 1.33ā2.94; Pā=ā6.9Ć10ā4) for generalized aggressive periodontitis, and 1.72 (1.06ā2.76; Pā=ā2.6Ć10ā2) for localized aggressive periodontitis. The two associated linkage disequilibrium regions map to the sequence of the large antisense noncoding RNA ANRIL, which partly overlaps regulatory and coding sequences of CDKN2A/CDKN2B. A closely located diabetes-associated variant was independent of the CHD and periodontitis risk haplotypes. Our study demonstrates that CHD and periodontitis are genetically related by at least one susceptibility locus, which is possibly involved in ANRIL activity and independent of diabetes associated risk variants within this region. Elucidation of the interplay of ANRIL transcript variants and their involvement in increased susceptibility to the interactive diseases CHD and periodontitis promises new insight into the underlying shared pathogenic mechanisms of these complex common diseases
- ā¦