Moving beyond e-journals

Paul Ayris explains to Elspeth Hyams why scholarly communication has moved beyond the debate on e-journals pricing and open access

Preferential trade agreements and the World Trade Organization: developments to the dispute settlement understanding

© 2017 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands. On 21 March 2016, at the 9th Annual Update on World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement, former Chairman of the Special Session of the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), Ambassador Ronald Saborío Soto, spoke on the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) negotiations in light of recent dispute settlement experience. He expressed that changes to the DSU ought to promote the future efficiency and effectiveness of the WTO as a dispute settlement system. The proliferation of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) has been a recurrent curiosity for the WTO, with provisions often competing and overlapping. Earlier work studying these interactions emphasizes uncertainty in the application of non-WTO law, including PTAs, to WTO disputes and highlights the WTO's implicit claim to supremacy. The purpose of this article is to critically analyse the state-of-play of negotiations on improvements and clarifications of the DSU in addressing PTAs. It examines whether current DSU proposals meet the DSB's intended objectives and suggests solutions where problematic uncertainties remain. The article concludes that PTAs have not been sufficiently regarded by negotiators and that more express measures are required in the DSU to clarify such uncertainties and harmonize with PTAs in order to preserve the WTO's future legitimacy

Improved Training for Self-Training by Confidence Assessments

It is well known that for some tasks, labeled data sets may be hard to gather. Therefore, we wished to tackle here the problem of having insufficient training data. We examined learning methods from unlabeled data after an initial training on a limited labeled data set. The suggested approach can be used as an online learning method on the unlabeled test set. In the general classification task, whenever we predict a label with high enough confidence, we treat it as a true label and train the data accordingly. For the semantic segmentation task, a classic example for an expensive data labeling process, we do so pixel-wise. Our suggested approaches were applied on the MNIST data-set as a proof of concept for a vision classification task and on the ADE20K data-set in order to tackle the semi-supervised semantic segmentation problem

Forward dispersion relations and Roy equations in pi-pi scattering

We review results of an analysis of pipi interactions in S, P and D waves for two-pion effective mass from threshold to about 1.4 GeV. In particular we show a recent improvement of this analysis above the K anti-K threshold using more data for phase shifts and including the S0 wave inelasticity from pipi -> K anti-K. In addition, we have improved the fit to the f2(1270) resonance and used a more flexible P wave parametrization above the K anti-K threshold and included an estimation of the D2 wave inelasticity. The better accuracy thus achieved also required a refinement of the Regge analysis above 1.42 GeV. We have checked that the pipi scattering amplitudes obtained in this approach satisfy remarkably well forward dispersion relations and Roy's equations.Comment: 6 pages, invited talk to the IV International Conference on Quarks and Nuclear Physics QNP06, Madrid 5th-10th June 200

Hypothetical choice, egalitarianism, and the separateness of persons

Luck egalitarians claim that disadvantage is worse when it emerges from an unchosen risk than when it emerges from a chosen risk. I argue that disadvantage is also worse when it emerges from an unchosen risk that the disadvantaged agent would have declined to take, had he or she been able to do so, than when it emerges from an unchosen risk that the disadvantaged agent would not have declined to take. Such a view is significant because it allows both luck egalitarians and prioritarians to respond to Voorhoeve and Fleurbaey's charge that they fail to accommodate intuitions about the moral relevance of interpersonal boundaries – the so-called separateness of persons objection. I argue that the view is plausible independently of its ability to answer the separateness of persons objection, and is a natural extension of the luck egalitarian concern with the impact of unchosen circumstance