Quality competition, Pricing-To-Market and Non-Tariff measures: A Unified Framework For the Analysis of Bilateral Unit Values

This paper presents a unified framework for analyzing several factors that have been independently studied as determinants of unit values in international trade: product differentiation by quality (which suggests that unit values should be positively correlated with exporters' per capita income), pricing-to-market (which suggests they should be positively correlated with importers' per capita income), and non-tariff measures (which suggests that remaining residuals may contain evidence of trade barriers). On a large sample of bilateral unit values for 2005, we find that about 58 percent of all HS-6 products demonstrate both significant quality-ladder effects and pricing-to-market effects, with quality-ladder effects predominating in importance. Distance-related effects appearing directly in prices appear significantly larger than one would expect as a result of shipping margins. We also rank importers by the remaining unexplained variation in import prices, and examine whether these variations are plausibly related to non-tariff measures.

The effects of genetic ancestry on elite sprint athlete status in the West African diaspora

Elite athletic performance is widely acknowledged to result from the exposure of a favourable genetic endowment to a favourable combination of environmental factors including culture, diet, training regime and socioeconomic status. Athletes from West African descendant populations in North America and Western Europe have long been prominent in elite sprint running, constituting 63% of the top 100 performers in each sprint discipline, outperforming athletes from Europe (23%), West Africa (8%) and the rest of the world (6%). These members of the West African diaspora are genetically admixed, resulting in detectable levels of both African and European ancestry because of gene flow between African slaves and Europeans during chattel slavery in the 16th to 19th centuries. The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate the effect that ancestral genetic composition may have had on the likelihood of becoming a top-class sprint athlete amongst samples of African-Americans and Jamaicans. It was hoped that these findings would add to the existing research in attempting to understand the unique combination of factors that produce elite sprint athletes. Ancestrally informative genetic data from elite African-American and Jamaican sprint athletes and ethnically-matched controls were used to explore how genetic ancestry affects sprint athlete status in these populations. These data are also vital when investigating the putative origins of an admixed population, and relatively little research has investigated the genetic ancestry of modern Jamaicans when compared to African-Americans. To bring the two groups to comparable levels of insight, the population history of the Jamaican people was estimated by comparing the observed matrilineal gene pool to the gene pools of known source regions of Africa. By simulating a stable population with the observed population dynamics from slave-era Jamaica, it was possible to draw conclusions about selection acting on the Jamaican slave population from the colonisation of the island by England in 1655 until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. In addition to the Jamaican maternal lineages already genotyped, paternal lineages in both African-Americans and Jamaicans, as well as maternal lineages in African-Americans were genotyped to assess any association these lineages had with elite sprint athlete status. These lineages were also compared between the cohorts to assess any differences in lineage composition across both groups of athletes and controls. Finally, locus-specific genetic ancestry was calculated to map loci associated with elite athlete status to regions of the genome with a greater amount of African or European ancestry than would be expected under the null hypothesis of no association with ancestry. Assuming a difference in the likelihood of sprint athletes originating from either Africa or Europe, detected associations between locus-specific ancestry and sprint status may indicate specific genomic regions of interest. The main findings of this thesis are: a) Modern Jamaicans are mostly descended from slaves originating from the Gold Coast of Africa, despite large influxes of slaves from the Bight of Biafra and West-central Africa before the end of the slave trade. b) There appears to have been selective pressure acting on the slave population of Jamaica. Differences between the presumptive origins of the observed lineages and the outcome of the stable population model suggested varying levels of mortality and fecundity within the slave population, consistent with earlier ethnographic and linguistic studies. c) The distribution of maternal lineages in the African-American athletes were significantly different from that of African-American controls. Maternal lineage distributions between Jamaican athletes and Jamaican controls were not significantly different. There was insufficient statistical power to infer any differences between the paternal lineages of African-American athletes and controls or the Jamaican athletes and controls. This suggests that either maternal ancestry may be a factor in elite sprint athlete status for African-Americans or it could simply be a false positive, inherent to the methodology used. Jamaican maternal lineages are homogeneous with regards to elite sprint athlete status. There was insufficient statistical power to arrive at similar conclusions regarding the paternal lineages of athletes and controls in either group. d) The maternal lineages of African-American athletes and Jamaican athletes were significantly different, although there was insufficient statistical power to determine if there were any differences between the paternal lineages of African-American athletes and Jamaican athletes. This suggests that the same maternal lineage distribution is not associated with sprint athlete status in the two populations, while there is insufficient evidence to make a similar claim regarding paternal lineages. e) The maternal lineages of African-American controls and Jamaican controls were also significantly different, although there was insufficient statistical power to conclude whether significant difference exists in the paternal lineages of African-American controls and Jamaican controls. These results suggest that there is some evidence that the population histories of African-Americans and Jamaicans are significantly different despite the lack of evidence from the paternal lineages. f) The proportion of genome-wide African ancestry did not differ significantly between either African-American athletes and controls or Jamaican athletes and controls. This suggests that environmental factors typically associated with higher levels of African ancestry in these populations (e.g. lower socioeconomic status, diminished access to healthcare) are not directly linked with elite athlete status. g) The estimated number of generations since admixture occurred did not differ significantly between athletes and controls for either African-Americans or Jamaicans. This suggests that athletes were not more likely than controls to have had European ancestors in the recent past, thereby potentially having greater access to resources. h) Admixture mapping was used to detect an enrichment of European ancestry at chromosome 4q13.1 significantly associated with athlete status in African-Americans. There were no significant loci associated with athlete status in Jamaicans. This suggests that the regions of the genome influencing sprint athlete status may be different in the two populations, although there was insufficient statistical power to draw any meaningful conclusions from the Jamaican data. This thesis has potential implications for future work not only explaining the disproportionate success of West African descendant sprint athletes but also for advancing the basic understanding of the genetic influences on the limits of human performance

2000 Philip C. Jessup

The State of Kuraca and the Republic of Senhava have submitted their differences concerning the vaccine trials to the International Court of Justice for resolution through a Special Agreement, in accordance with Article 40(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice

ADR and Access to Justice: Current Perspectives

Extract: I want to give you a roadmap for our program. We will not be delivering individual papers but, rather, hope to have a discussion. We are planning to spend thirty minutes on introductions for the purpose of allowing you to identify the source of each panelist\u27s perspectives. We will then use an hour, more or less, for a discussion among the panel. That will leave fifteen minutes for audience questions and participation. Because we will be publishing an edited transcript, we ask that you hold your questions until the end. Access to justice is a broad topic, and we cannot cover everything. You will notice a few major omissions. Most notably, we are not going to emphasize consumer pre-dispute arbitration agreements. This is not because they are not important, but because much has been written and said on this topic, and it could easily swallow the whole discussion. Also, we are probably not going to say very much about restorative justice, and I am sure you will notice some other holes. We invite you to raise missing issues in your comments. Let me start with a few opening remarks. We are building upon earlier panels on access to justice at this meeting. At the ones I attended, I have heard two different themes. One is about the availability of lawyers and the value of legal representation, emphasizing that having a lawyer is a key aspect of access to justice. Another theme asks whether the legal system is providing justice aside from the question of adequate representation in individual cases. This critique emphasizes the extent to which the litigation system is stacked, and ways in which laws fail to recognize the individual realities of the disadvantaged. Both these themes are highly relevant to the role of dispute resolution in access to justice

UC-426 Cybersecurity Park

We are presenting two additional modules to the Cyber Security Park, a long-running game project that is part of the realities lab. Whack-a-Malware is an arcade game where the player has to whack various malware, each with unique effects that mimic real-world malware. This includes Adware, Spyware, Ransomware, Computer Worms, and Trojan Horses. The player is equipped with two hammers that instantly destroy malware. But it goes on a three-second cooldown every time they destroy something. The player can reduce the cooldown by destroying adware as they are the main cause of slowing down the computer. Digital Footprints Private Investigator is a complete rework of an existing module. The player will be tasked by their client to find the perpetrator who has been anonymously intimidating them online and in person. The Player will have to explore the city to find digital footprint clues that will provide alibis and evidence against the suspects in the case

Risk‐based strategies for surveillance of bovine Tuberculosis infection in cattle for low risk areas in England and Scotland

Disease surveillance can be made more effective by either improving disease detection, providing cost savings, or doing both. Currently, cattle herds in low-risk areas for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in England (LRAs) are tested once every four years. In Scotland, the default herd testing frequency is also four years, but a risk-based system exempts some herds from testing altogether. To extend this approach to other areas, a bespoke understanding of at-risk herds and how risk-based surveillance can affect bTB detection is required. Here, we use a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) to inform a Bayesian probabilistic model of freedom from infection and explore risk-based surveillance strategies in LRAs and Scotland. Our analyses show that in both areas the primary herd-level risk factors for bTB infection are the size of the herd and purchasing cattle from high-risk areas of Great Britain and/or Ireland. A risk-based approach can improve the current surveillance system by both increasing detection (9% and 7% fewer latent infections), and reducing testing burden (6 % and 26% fewer animal tests) in LRAs and Scotland, respectively. Testing at-risk herds more frequently can also improve the level of detection by identifying more infected cases and reducing the hidden burden of the disease, and reduce surveillance effort by exempting low-risk herds from testing

The Hubble Space Telescope Survey of M31 Satellite Galaxies. II. The Star Formation Histories of Ultrafaint Dwarf Galaxies

We present the lifetime star formation histories (SFHs) for six ultrafaint dwarf (UFD; M V > − 7.0, 4.9<log10(M*(z=0)/M⊙)<5.5 ) satellite galaxies of M31 based on deep color–magnitude diagrams constructed from Hubble Space Telescope imaging. These are the first SFHs obtained from the oldest main-sequence turnoff of UFDs outside the halo of the Milky Way (MW). We find that five UFDs formed at least 50% of their stellar mass by z = 5 (12.6 Gyr ago), similar to known UFDs around the MW, but that 10%–40% of their stellar mass formed at later times. We uncover one remarkable UFD, And xiii, which formed only 10% of its stellar mass by z = 5, and 75% in a rapid burst at z ∼ 2–3, a result that is robust to choices of underlying stellar model and is consistent with its predominantly red horizontal branch. This “young” UFD is the first of its kind and indicates that not all UFDs are necessarily quenched by reionization, which is consistent with predictions from several cosmological simulations of faint dwarf galaxies. SFHs of the combined MW and M31 samples suggest reionization did not homogeneously quench UFDs. We find that the least-massive MW UFDs (M *(z = 5) ≲ 5 × 104 M ⊙) are likely quenched by reionization, whereas more-massive M31 UFDs (M *(z = 5) ≳ 105 M ⊙) may only have their star formation suppressed by reionization and quench at a later time. We discuss these findings in the context of the evolution and quenching of UFDs

Association analysis of ACE and ACTN3 in Elite Caucasian and East Asian Swimmers

PURPOSE: Polymorphic variation in the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and alpha-actinin-3 (ACTN3) genes has been reported to be associated with endurance and/or power-related human performance. Our aim was to investigate whether polymorphisms in ACE and ACTN3 are associated with elite swimmer status in Caucasian and East Asian populations. METHODS: ACE I/D and ACTN3 R577X genotyping was carried out for 200 elite Caucasian swimmers from European, Commonwealth, Russian and American cohorts (short and middle distance, SMD &le; 400 m, n = 130; long distance, LD&nbsp;greater than&nbsp;400 m, n = 70) and 326 elite Japanese and Taiwanese swimmers (short distance, SD &le; 100 m, n = 166; middle distance, MD: 200 - 400 m, n = 160). Genetic associations were evaluated by logistic regression and other tests accommodating multiple testing adjustment. RESULTS: ACE I/D was associated with swimmer status in Caucasians, with the D-allele being overrepresented in SMD swimmers under both additive and I-allele dominant models (permutation test p = 0.003 and p = 0.0005, respectively). ACE I/D was also associated with swimmer status in East Asians. In this group, however, the I-allele was overrepresented in the SD swimmer group (permutation test p = 0.041 and p = 0.0098 under the additive and the D-allele-dominant models, respectively). ACTN3 R577X was not significantly associated with swimmer status in either Caucasians or East Asians. CONCLUSIONS: ACE I/D associations were observed in these elite swimmer cohorts, with different risk alleles responsible for the associations in swimmers of different ethnicities. The functional ACTN3 R577X polymorphism did not show any significant association with elite swimmer status, despite numerous previous reports of associations with 'power/sprint' performance in other sports.Additional co-authors: Jason Gulbin, Viktor A. Rogozkin, Ildus I. Ahmetov, Nan Yang, Kathryn N. North, Saraslanidis Ploutarhos, Hugh E. Montgomery, Mark E.S. Bailey, and Yannis P. Pitsiladi