Generating Equidistributed Meshes in 2D via Domain Decomposition

In this paper we consider Schwarz domain decomposition applied to the generation of 2D spatial meshes by a local equidistribution principle. We briefly review the derivation of the local equidistribution principle and the appropriate choice of boundary conditions. We then introduce classical and optimized Schwarz domain decomposition methods to solve the resulting system of nonlinear equations. The implementation of these iterations are discussed, and we conclude with numerical examples to illustrate the performance of the approach

United States - Section 211 Omnibus Appropriations Act of 1998 (WT/DS176/AB/R) A Comment

As usual the authors have divided their labor, based on expertise. In particular, the economic analysis in section 4 was the responsibility of Damien Neven; Robert Howse's own understanding of the costs and benefits of international trade law rules with respect to intellectual property protection in general depends on a rather different framework for analysing the problem. However, in so far as the legal and economic analysis of the Havana Club case itself is concerned, which deals only with trademarks as a form of IP protection, the authors are in agreemen

Reforming the Reform Process: Privatization in Central and Eastern Europe

As communist regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe have fallen one by one under the weight of economic failure and popular discontent, the task of transforming these countries into stable and vibrant liberal democratic societies has commanded the attention of many Western governments and international organizations. Given the rapid and extremely destabilizing deterioration in the levels of production and employment in each of the Newly Liberalizing Economies (NLCs), economic renewal has become an urgent priority of the transformation process. Initially, the greatest importance was attached to reforms involving stabilization and liberalization of prices, lowering of trade barriers, fiscal restraint, and currency convertibility. Nevertheless, at a relatively early point in the reform enterprise, it became strikingly apparent that extensive micro-economic reforms would also be necessary for the transformation process to succeed. At the core of these micro-economic reforms stands privatization - the policy aimed at reducing the role of government, or increasing the role of the private sector, in an activity or in the ownership of assets. However, unlike the relatively straight-forward adoption of many of the measures aimed at macro-economic reform, the pace of privatization programs in the NLCs, as measured by the amount of existing assets transferred from the state to the private sector, has been extremely disappointing. In Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, for instance, there have been very few large-scale privatizations, although recently there have been some impressive results obtained with respect to small-scale privatization. In attempting to identify the sources of delay in the process, Western commentators have attributed the lion\u27s share of responsibility to policy-makers in the NLCs. This line of attack implicitly assumes that the programs devised by Western policy analysts (largely economists) are fundamentally sound, and that it is only the lack of commitment to, or intellectual appreciation of, the rather unassailable case for radical privatization policies that has impeded successful policy implementation. If this assessment is accurate, then the possibilities for hastening the pace of privatization programs are extremely limited. In this article, we advance a rather different explanation for the debilitating delays and uncertainty that have plagued privatization in Central and Eastern Europe. Instead of focusing on implementation difficulties, we argue that the source of the faltering pace of privatization in the NLCs lies within the basic architecture of the programs themselves

Rewarding Whistleblowers: The Costs and Benefits of an Incentive-Based Compliance Strategy

Canadians today are very much concerned about corporate crime and about corporations that do not comply with regulatory requirements, especially those related to the environment, securities law and occupational health and safety regulations. This increased concern has led to proposals to extend liability for illegal corporate conduct (by making directors personally liable for the actions of their companies, for example); it has also led to arguments in favour of greatly increasing the sanctions on corporations (and individual wrongdoers within those corporations) for wrongful conduct. The recent academic literature reflects a lively debate as to the effectiveness of such proposals in reducing illegal behaviour in corporations and their consequences for the functioning of the corporation as an economic institution. With some notable exceptions, the focus of the debate on sanctions and liability rules has resulted in the relative neglect of an essential ingredient in effective deterrence; the capacity to monitor and detect wrongdoing within the corporation. The lack of attention to the potential for increased compliance through improved monitoring and detection is surprising for several reasons. First, as Jennifer Arlen notes, [m]any corporate crimes - such as securities fraud, government procurement fraud, and some environmental crimes cannot be readily detected by government . Second, there is a significant body of literature on regulatory reform that relates the ineffectiveness of many traditional command and control forms of regulation to the costs and difficulties which are inherent in government monitoring and detection of wrongdoing. Third, one of the most generally held tenets of contemporary criminology is that increasing the likelihood of detection and prosecution tends to be a more effective means of strengthening deterrence than making sanctions more severe. In other words, it is better to put another cop on the beat than to build more jail cells. This study is intended to help redress the inadequate emphasis on monitoring and detection in the current debate on corporate criminal and regulatory responsibility. Accepting the proposition that direct monitoring of corporate conduct by government as a means of detection is unlikely to be cost-effective, our concern is to identify agents within the corporation who can be enlisted in the cause of monitoring and detection, and to consider how public policies can provide stronger incentives, and make it easier, for these agents to identify and disclose wrongdoing within the corporation. In conducting this analysis, we begin by considering one such policy that has generated sustained public attention and controversy over the last decade: so-called whistleblower protection

Evaluating Visualizations of Sets and Networks that Use Euler Diagrams and Graphs

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art visualization techniques that combine Euler diagrams and graphs to visualize sets and networks. Focusing on SetNet, Bubble Sets and WebCola – techniques for which there is freely available software – our evaluation reveals that they can inaccurately and ineffectively visualize the data. Inaccuracies include placing vertices in incorrect zones, thus incorrectly conveying the sets in which the represented data items lie. Ineffective properties, which are known to hinder cognition, include drawing Euler diagrams with extra zones or graphs with large numbers of edge crossings. The results demonstrate the need for improved techniques that are more accurate and more effective for end users.The Leverhulme Trus