A Trade Regime for Sub-National Exports Under the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

Regulations relating to disease management have traditionally been an important component of the overall environment in which international trade in agriculture products occurs. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) allows members to restrict or prohibit imports from a country when imported products present a risk to human, animal or plant health or life. As the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, also commonly called Mad Cow disease in the media) outbreak in Canada showed, the disease status of a country is a major competitive advantage and losing disease-free status can impose significant costs on an industry. The risks associated with SPS-based border closures were not well anticipated by the Canadian industry and government, and little was done in preparation for the potential change in the trading environment and the ensuing losses. This is a mistake many stakeholders in the industry plan to avoid making again.International Relations/Trade,

A Trade Regime for Sub-National Exports Under the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

Regulations relating to disease management have traditionally been an important component of the overall environment in which international trade in agriculture products occurs. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) allows members to restrict or prohibit imports from a country when imported products present a risk to human, animal or plant health or life. As the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, also commonly called Mad Cow disease in the media) outbreak in Canada showed, the disease status of a country is a major competitive advantage and losing disease-free status can impose significant costs on an industry. The risks associated with SPS-based border closures were not well anticipated by the Canadian industry and government, and little was done in preparation for the potential change in the trading environment and the ensuing losses. This is a mistake many stakeholders in the industry plan to avoid making again.International Relations/Trade,

Z-selective dimerization of aromatic terminal alkynes catalyzed by an iridium(I) n-heterocyclic carbene-phosphine system

The development of an iridium-catalyzed regio- and stereoselective dimerization process has enabled the formation of (Z)-enyne products. More specifically, low catalyst loadings of an iridium(I) complex, featuring a bulky N-heterocyclic carbene-phosphine ligand combination, has been successfully employed in this selective head-to-head dimerization of terminal alkynes via C-H activation

Simulation Theorems via Pseudorandom Properties

We generalize the deterministic simulation theorem of Raz and McKenzie [RM99], to any gadget which satisfies certain hitting property. We prove that inner-product and gap-Hamming satisfy this property, and as a corollary we obtain deterministic simulation theorem for these gadgets, where the gadget's input-size is logarithmic in the input-size of the outer function. This answers an open question posed by G\"{o}\"{o}s, Pitassi and Watson [GPW15]. Our result also implies the previous results for the Indexing gadget, with better parameters than was previously known. A preliminary version of the results obtained in this work appeared in [CKL+17]

Magnetic field generation in finite beam plasma system

For finite systems boundaries can introduce remarkable novel features. A well known example is the Casimir effect [1, 2] that is observed in quantum electrodynamic systems. In classical systems too novel effects associated with finite boundaries have been observed, for example the surface plasmon mode [3] that appears when the plasma has a finite extension. In this work a novel instability associated with the finite transverse size of a beam owing through a plasma system has been shown to exist. This instability leads to distinct characteristic features of the associated magnetic field that gets generated. For example, in contrast to the well known unstable Weibel mode of a beam plasma system which generates magnetic field at the skin depth scale, this instability generates magnetic field at the scales length of the transverse beam dimension [4]. The existence of this new instability is demonstrated by analytical arguments and by simulations conducted with the help of a variety of Particle - In - Cell (PIC) codes (e.g. OSIRIS, EPOCH, PICPSI). Two fluid simulations have also been conducted which confirm the observations. Furthermore, laboratory experiments on laser plasma system also provides evidence of such an instability mechanism at work

Performance Limits of Stochastic Sub-Gradient Learning, Part II: Multi-Agent Case

The analysis in Part I revealed interesting properties for subgradient learning algorithms in the context of stochastic optimization when gradient noise is present. These algorithms are used when the risk functions are non-smooth and involve non-differentiable components. They have been long recognized as being slow converging methods. However, it was revealed in Part I that the rate of convergence becomes linear for stochastic optimization problems, with the error iterate converging at an exponential rate $\alpha^i$ to within an $O(\mu)-$neighborhood of the optimizer, for some $\alpha \in (0,1)$ and small step-size $\mu$. The conclusion was established under weaker assumptions than the prior literature and, moreover, several important problems (such as LASSO, SVM, and Total Variation) were shown to satisfy these weaker assumptions automatically (but not the previously used conditions from the literature). These results revealed that sub-gradient learning methods have more favorable behavior than originally thought when used to enable continuous adaptation and learning. The results of Part I were exclusive to single-agent adaptation. The purpose of the current Part II is to examine the implications of these discoveries when a collection of networked agents employs subgradient learning as their cooperative mechanism. The analysis will show that, despite the coupled dynamics that arises in a networked scenario, the agents are still able to attain linear convergence in the stochastic case; they are also able to reach agreement within $O(\mu)$ of the optimizer

Solar wind collisional heating

To properly describe heating in weakly collisional turbulent plasmas such as the solar wind, inter-particle collisions should be taken into account. Collisions can convert ordered energy into heat by means of irreversible relaxation towards the thermal equilibrium. Recently, Pezzi et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 116, 2016, p. 145001) showed that the plasma collisionality is enhanced by the presence of fine structures in velocity space. Here, the analysis is extended by directly comparing the effects of the fully nonlinear Landau operator and a linearized Landau operator. By focusing on the relaxation towards the equilibrium of an out of equilibrium distribution function in a homogeneous force-free plasma, here it is pointed out that it is significant to retain nonlinearities in the collisional operator to quantify the importance of collisional effects. Although the presence of several characteristic times associated with the dissipation of different phase space structures is recovered in both the cases of the nonlinear and the linearized operators, the influence of these times is different in the two cases. In the linearized operator case, the recovered characteristic times are systematically larger than in the fully nonlinear operator case, this suggesting that fine velocity structures are dissipated slower if nonlinearities are neglected in the collisional operator

Locus model for space-time fabric and quantum indeterminacies

A simple locus model for the space-time fabric is presented and is compared with quantum foam and random walk models. The induced indeterminacies in momentum are calculated and it is shown that these space-time fabric indeterminacies are, in most cases, negligible compared with the quantum mechanical indeterminacies. This result restricts the possibilities of an experimental observation of the space-time fabric

Some Remarks about the Complexity of Epidemics Management

Recent outbreaks of Ebola, H1N1 and other infectious diseases have shown that the assumptions underlying the established theory of epidemics management are too idealistic. For an improvement of procedures and organizations involved in fighting epidemics, extended models of epidemics management are required. The necessary extensions consist in a representation of the management loop and the potential frictions influencing the loop. The effects of the non-deterministic frictions can be taken into account by including the measures of robustness and risk in the assessment of management options. Thus, besides of the increased structural complexity resulting from the model extensions, the computational complexity of the task of epidemics management - interpreted as an optimization problem - is increased as well. This is a serious obstacle for analyzing the model and may require an additional pre-processing enabling a simplification of the analysis process. The paper closes with an outlook discussing some forthcoming problems