The Yellow Brick Road? Establishing a Constitutional Right to State-Funded Counsel for Matters of Civil Law in Canada

Canadians do not have a constitutional right to state-funded counsel for matters of civil law, unlike for matters of criminal law. This article examines the reasons for this and, more importantly, the significant barriers for establishing a general constitutional right to state-funded counsel for civil cases. Analysis in this article shows that the most significant barriers for establishing such a general constitutional right have been, and will likely continue to be, the courts‘ interpretation of the Constitution from the perspective of the Charter framers and their reluctance to impose a positive constitutional obligation on government that would dictate the allocation of public funds

Prospects for Inter-Regional Cooperation

There is a growing tendency to compare regionalism in Europe and Asia. Such analysis often uses the EU as the basis for comparison in analyzing ASEAN’s promotion of Asian regional cooperation. However, given the significant differences between the two regions, the European experience is not directly transferable. Rather than imposing one region’s processes and experience onto the other, it is more important to cultivate inter-regional cooperation that will enable Europe and Asia to learn and benefit from each other. Despite mutual acknowledgment of the need for deeper and broader inter-regional cooperation, interaction between the EU and ASEAN has so far been limited. However, the long-term prospects for inter-regional cooperation are promising, with the EU and ASEAN facing both internal challenges in their integration processes and common economic and security threats in their respective regions

Optimizing Music Learning: The Effects of Contextual Interference on Memorization

The purpose of this study was to assess if blocked or interleaved practice learning was more effective for memorizing music, and to assess if metacognitive judgements aligned with performance. The study included 21 proficient pianists who regularly engage in piano practice. Participants learnt two excerpts and two technical studies, and played them from memory on both day 1 and day 2 of testing. Performances were recorded and rated by an expert in the field on a percentage scale. A two-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis revealed no significant main effect of day on practice schedule, (F(1,20) = .15, p = 0.70, ηp2 = .01), or schedule on day, (F(1,20) = 1.03, p = .32, ηp2 = .05), with no significant interaction between the two variables (F(1,20) = 3.20, p = .77). Results revealed that metacognitive judgements did not align with performance. Although results were not significant, overall performance under the interleaved condition was slightly better than the blocked condition, indicating that there may be some benefits to interleaved practice. This warrants further research on how the contextual interference effect impacts memorization amongst pianists

Leader-driven Change from Aquino to Duterte: Towards a Redirection or Restructuring in Philippine Foreign Policy?

The global perceptions of leaders have significant influence in a state’s foreign policy. In the Philippines’ case, the striking contrast between Presidents Benigno Aquino III, who possesses a moralist and liberalist views, and Duterte, who holds a legalist and realist global perceptions, led to significant changes in their foreign policies. These are evident in their conflicting stance on two cases involving the death penalty of a Filipino worker in Indonesia in 2013; and the country’s maritime arbitration case with China filed in 2013 and eventually won in 2016. Their divergence caused important leader-driven changes, which may result in either a redirection or a restructuring in the country’s foreign policy

The Effect of Spectral Composition on the Photochemical Production of Hydrogen Peroxide in Lake Water

Hydrogen peroxide was produced when samples of lake water were exposed to direct or filtered sunlight in which UV or UV(B+C) light was selectively removed. In all cases, the concentration of hydrogen peroxide increased linearly with time-integrated irradiance. While both visible and UV light can induce the formation of hydrogen peroxide, the contribution from the latter was disproportionately large as it was responsible for about two-thirds of the formation of hydrogen peroxide. Among the UV lights, the contributions from UV-A and UV-(B+C) light were 70% and 30% respectively. The contribution from UV-A light was equivalent to about one half of the total production of hydrogen peroxide. Thus, relative to its contribution to the total irradiance in the solar spectrum, UV-A light is the most efficient type of light for the formation of hydrogen peroxide in lake waters

Distinguishing double neutron star from neutron star-black hole binary populations with gravitational wave observations

Gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars cannot be easily distinguished from those produced by a comparable-mass mixed binary in which one of the companions is a black hole. Low-mass black holes are interesting because they could form in the aftermath of the coalescence of two neutron stars, from the collapse of massive stars, from matter overdensities in the primordial Universe, or as the outcome of the interaction between neutron stars and dark matter. Gravitational waves carry the imprint of the internal composition of neutron stars via the so-called tidal deformability parameter, which depends on the stellar equation of state and is equal to zero for black holes. We present a new data analysis strategy powered by Bayesian inference and machine learning to identify mixed binaries, hence low-mass black holes, using the distribution of the tidal deformability parameter inferred from gravitational-wave observations.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures - v2: matches the published version in Phys. Rev. D 102, 02302

Mining Top-K Frequent Itemsets Through Progressive Sampling

We study the use of sampling for efficiently mining the top-K frequent itemsets of cardinality at most w. To this purpose, we define an approximation to the top-K frequent itemsets to be a family of itemsets which includes (resp., excludes) all very frequent (resp., very infrequent) itemsets, together with an estimate of these itemsets' frequencies with a bounded error. Our first result is an upper bound on the sample size which guarantees that the top-K frequent itemsets mined from a random sample of that size approximate the actual top-K frequent itemsets, with probability larger than a specified value. We show that the upper bound is asymptotically tight when w is constant. Our main algorithmic contribution is a progressive sampling approach, combined with suitable stopping conditions, which on appropriate inputs is able to extract approximate top-K frequent itemsets from samples whose sizes are smaller than the general upper bound. In order to test the stopping conditions, this approach maintains the frequency of all itemsets encountered, which is practical only for small w. However, we show how this problem can be mitigated by using a variation of Bloom filters. A number of experiments conducted on both synthetic and real bench- mark datasets show that using samples substantially smaller than the original dataset (i.e., of size defined by the upper bound or reached through the progressive sampling approach) enable to approximate the actual top-K frequent itemsets with accuracy much higher than what analytically proved.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, accepted for presentation at ECML PKDD 2010 and publication in the ECML PKDD 2010 special issue of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journa