Marching towards decolonisation: notes and reflections

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Formation of nanocrystalline aluminum magnesium alloys by mechanical alloying

The effect of the nominal Mg content and the milling time on the microstructure and the hardness of mechanically alloyed Al (Mg) solid solutions is studied. The crystallite size distribution and the dislocation structure are determined by X-ray diffraction peak profile analysis and the hardness is obtained from depth sensing indentation test. Magnesium gradually goes into solid solution during ball milling and after about 3 h almost complete solid solution state is attained up to the nominal Mg content of the alloys. With increasing milling time the dislocation density, the hardness and the Mg content in solid solution are increasing, whereas the crystallite size is decreasing. A similar tendency of these parameters is observed at a particular duration of ball milling with increasing of the nominal Mg content. At the same time for long milling period the dislocation density slightly decreases together with a slight reduction of the hardness

FOREIGN INVESTMENTS IN DISPUTED MARITIME ZONES: MARITIME DISPUTES AS EVENTS OF FORCE MAJEURE IN INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT CONTRACTS

Sovereign rights in Exclusive economic zones and Continental shelves are functionally limited to the economic exploitation of these zones. Moreover, in the case of disputed maritime zones these sovereign rights are neither exclusive nor necessarily constant. Nevertheless, states are still expected to provide the investments established in these zones the same treatment they should provide in their territories where they exercise full and constant sovereignty. If a host state agrees to the establishment of an investment in a maritime zone that become later contested, do the occurrence of the contestation and the hazards arising from such contestation relief the host state from its contractual and treaty obligations toward the investment by virtue of the force majeure concept. This paper argues that a traditional interpretation of the force majeure concept in respect of investment agreements and contracts, hampers states ability to de-escalate their maritime disputes, diminishes its capacity to conclude delimitation agreements and reduces the promotion of the UNCLOS III as well as its mechanisms for disputes settlement. It proposes a contextualist interpretation of the force majeure concept that is adapted to the exploitation of disputed maritime zones and states obligations under the international law of the sea. First, it examines the concept of force majeure as a doc-trinal hypothesis and its applications in international contracts and international in-vestment agreements. Second, it analyzes the legal act of maritime contestation as a force majeure event according to the possible interpretations of the concept of “force majeure”. Finally, it examines the recurrent legal implications susceptible of arising out of a contestation; provisional orders and unfavorable delimitation and their qualifica-tion as a force majeure event in the realm of investment agreements and contract

Mitigating Approximate Memorization in Language Models via Dissimilarity Learned Policy

Large Language models (LLMs) are trained on large amounts of data, which can include sensitive information that may compromise personal privacy. LLMs showed to memorize parts of the training data and emit those data verbatim when an adversary prompts appropriately. Previous research has primarily focused on data preprocessing and differential privacy techniques to address memorization or prevent verbatim memorization exclusively, which can give a false sense of privacy. However, these methods rely on explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of the data to be protected, which often results in an incomplete solution to the problem. To address this, we propose a novel framework that utilizes a reinforcement learning approach (PPO) to fine-tune LLMs to mitigate approximate memorization. Our approach utilizes a negative similarity score, such as BERTScore or SacreBLEU, as a reward signal to learn a dissimilarity policy. Our results demonstrate that this framework effectively mitigates approximate memorization while maintaining high levels of coherence and fluency in the generated samples. Furthermore, our framework is robust in mitigating approximate memorization across various circumstances, including longer context, which is known to increase memorization in LLMs

Attitudes towards English Literature: The Case of EFL Students at Three Saudi Colleges

The primary aim of the study was to investigate the attitudes held by Saudi EFL students and the difficulties they have in studying English literature. Another aim was to explore gender differences in attitudes towards English literature. The relationships between (1) general motivational orientations to learn English and attitudes towards English literature, and (2) general motivational orientations to learn English and attitudes towards English literature, and performance in literary courses were also explored. A cohort of 180 Eighth level majors at three Saudi colleges completed a researcher-developed 28-item questionnaire probing their general motivational orientations to learn English and attitudes towards English literature in terms of emotions associating studying English literature, cultural and religious sensitivities about studying English literature and the importance of studying English literature. Participants were found to hold positive attitudes towards English literature. They reported no cultural or religious sensitivities about studying English literature in their context. The difficulties they reported facing when studying English literature included difficult vocabulary and literary terms, difficult content and long pieces of literature, lack of language proficiency, and having to exert great effort. No gender differences were found in attitudes. Intrinsic motivation was found to be a significant predictor of positive attitudes towards English literature. Finally, a significant positive relationship was found between general motivational orientations to learn English and attitudes towards English literature, and performance in literary courses. Instructional implications and suggestions for further research are provided

Some topics in the calculation of QCD hard scattering processes

We have studied the single effective subprocess approximation for two-jet events at large transverse momentum. This strongly suggested a factorized form for the cross-section for producing two jet events in pp and pp interactions in terms of an effective structure function and single basic subprocesses. Also the single and two-jet fractions which are based on the effective structure function have been studied and it is shown that the contribution of these fractions in pp and pp interactions are independent of the jet angular distribution. We then tried to explain the surprising similarity between the angular distributions of different 2 → 3 QCD parton-parton subprocesses in the transverse plane. This feature turns out to be associated with an exact relationship between Altarelli-Parisi splitting kernels. Our results are published in Phys. Lett. B212 (1988), 95.The second part of our work is to handle the calculation of the matrix element squared for six-gluon scattering to the leading order in the number of colours and a compact expression was obtained in terms of kinematical variables. This resulted in Durham preprint DTP 88/40 (1989). We developed a powerful technique which strongly suggested a factorized form for the non-leading terms. Together with the leading expression, this gave the exact matrix element squared for the six- gluon scattering for the first time represented analytically in terms of kinematical invariants in a compact form. Finally we examined how the non-leading terms are growing in importance when one increases the number of gluons in multi-gluon scattering

Finding a Needle in the Adversarial Haystack: A Targeted Paraphrasing Approach For Uncovering Edge Cases with Minimal Distribution Distortion

Adversarial attacks against language models(LMs) are a significant concern. In particular, adversarial samples exploit the model's sensitivity to small input changes. While these changes appear insignificant on the semantics of the input sample, they result in significant decay in model performance. In this paper, we propose Targeted Paraphrasing via RL (TPRL), an approach to automatically learn a policy to generate challenging samples that most likely improve the model's performance. TPRL leverages FLAN T5, a language model, as a generator and employs a self learned policy using a proximal policy gradient to generate the adversarial examples automatically. TPRL's reward is based on the confusion induced in the classifier, preserving the original text meaning through a Mutual Implication score. We demonstrate and evaluate TPRL's effectiveness in discovering natural adversarial attacks and improving model performance through extensive experiments on four diverse NLP classification tasks via Automatic and Human evaluation. TPRL outperforms strong baselines, exhibits generalizability across classifiers and datasets, and combines the strengths of language modeling and reinforcement learning to generate diverse and influential adversarial examples.Comment: EACL 2024 - Main conference - Camera ready versio