The Re-emergence of a Clash of Rights: A Critical Analysis of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Decision in R. v. S. (N.)

This paper is a case comment on the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2012 decision in R. v. S. (N.). The authors place this decision within the Supreme Court’s “conflict of rights” jurisprudence and provide an overview of this case law, using Justice Iacobucci’s articulation of “reconciling rights” as a framework. Ultimately, the authors argue that, contrary to the Supreme Court’s statements in the decision, S.(N.) is not an example of reconciling rights (as that term is understood according to Justice Iacobucci’s articulation of it) and that ultimately one right was preferred over another. The authors also point out several of the practical implications of the decision, namely, how the decision will likely lead to increased procedural burdens for witnesses, that it requires courts to consider the strength of a witness’s subjective religious beliefs and the issues that it will cause regarding access to justice

Chollet's permanent conjecture for 4×44\times 4 matrices

In the year 1982, John Chollet conjectured that, for any pair of $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrices $A,B$, $per(A)\cdot per(B)\geq per(A\circ B)$, where $A\circ B$ is the Hardamard product of $A$ and $B$. This conjecture was proved to be valid for $n=2, 3$ in the year 1987. In this paper, we show that the conjecture holds true for $n=4$

Heuristics for high-utility local process model mining

Local Process Models (LPMs) describe structured fragments of process behavior occurring in the context of less structured business processes. In contrast to traditional support-based LPM discovery, which aims to generate a collection of process models that describe highly frequent behavior, High-Utility Local Process Model (HU-LPM) discovery aims to generate a collection of process models that provide useful business insights by specifying a utility function. Mining LPMs is a computationally expensive task, because of the large search space of LPMs. In supportbased LPM mining, the search space is constrained by making use of the property that support is anti-monotonic. We show that in general, we cannot assume a provided utility function to be anti-monotonic, therefore, the search space of HU-LPMs cannot be reduced without loss. We propose four heuristic methods to speed up the mining of HU-LPMs while still being able to discover useful HU-LPMs. We demonstrate their applicability on three real-life data sets

Import tariffs, quality investment and welfare

In this paper we study incentives for a government to impose a discriminatory or uniform import tariff on its low and high quality imports. In comparison to free trade both tariffs decrease total welfare. In response to any tariff, firms decrease quality investment and total output sold declines. The degree of product differentiation under both the tariffs increases. Consumer surplus declines by a greater amount than the increase in revenues under an import tariff. While the uniform tariff works to the advantage of the high quality firm, the discriminative tariff works to the advantage of the low quality firm. Total welfare, though lower than under free trade, is greater under a uniform than under a discriminatory tariff

A Predictive Study of Wiki Interaction: Can Attitude toward Wiki Predict Wiki Interaction in High-Context Cultures Groups?

Wiki technology is more than a technical mechanism to support language learning. It should be seen as an attitude toward social learning technology with consideration for social and cultural factors of the learners. It is not appropriate to assume all students would perceive the social functions of Wikis in the same way and be equally eager to engage in the technology. Learners from different cultural groups may perceive and interact differently in Wiki-based learning environments because the influence of their cultural perceptions regulates their interaction. This study purposes to examine the predictive relationship between attitude toward Wiki and Wiki interaction in a single culture background classroom. It is concluded that there is a medium to strong, positive relationship between attitudes of learners toward language learning in Wiki learning environments and Wiki interaction in a Chinese ESL classroom. Strategies to support and improve attitudes of learners toward language learning in Wiki learning environments are suggested