Reforming WTO Rules on State-Owned Enterprises: SOEs and Financial Advantages

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are pervasive worldwide nowadays, particularly in the emerging countries. SOEs are currently more active in global markets than decades ago, engaging in cross-border trade and investment. Concerns, hence, have arisen, that there are negative effects on global markets associated with SOEs usually receiving various advantages, particularly, such as financial advantages. Meanwhile, SOEs often act as the givers of financial advantages. Current WTO rules are not sufficient to address the problem of SOEs as givers of financial advantages, and the problem of SOEs as recipients of financial advantages. This article tries to push the current WTO rules to their limits, and to find potential approaches to address those problems. The efforts, however, failed to some degree. Hence, the article makes recommendations to improve them by three types of proposals, i.e., trade remedies proposals, trade rules proposals, and a competition rules proposal within the framework of the WTO. In the end, the author also engages with other academic articles on SOEs, and where they support the author’s position or differ from it. Explanations are also given on how proposals made by the author are similar to or differ from what was proposed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and why the author’s approach is better

The Impact of Reviews of Physicians on Patient Choice

How reviews impact patient choice in health field is still unknown. Patients often worry about their diseases and are eager to find a high skill physician to cure their painful. Traditional hospitals often lack information about individual physician, and with the emergence of online health communities (OHCs), patients can get physician service information on the platform. This study researches the role of reviews in health field and how the roles change with different diseases by collecting data from an online health community. We divide patient reviews into two kinds: online service reviews and offline service reviews based on different services. We find disease risk significantly moderates the relationship between reviews and patient choice: when patients get high-risk diseases, they care more offline service reviews than low-risk diseases. On the contrary, when patients get low-risk diseases, they care more online service reviews than high-risk diseases

A Cross-Cultural Study of Consumer Perceptions of Clothing Fit

Many studies and industry initiatives endeavor to provide well-fitted ready-to-wear products (RTW) to consumers. However, consumer perception of clothing fit has not been fully studied. We conducted a simulated fitting room study and a 3D virtual fitting study to investigate consumers\u27 understanding of fit through their fitting practices and their organic language. It was found that both Chinese and American women experienced difficulties in fit evaluation. They lacked knowledge and methods of fit evaluation as well as vocabulary to describe clothing misfit. Therefore, more research is needed in clothing fit evaluation by consumers

Topological aspects of Z/2Z\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} eigenfunctions for the Laplacian on S2S^2

This paper concerns the behavior of the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the round sphere's Laplacian acting on the space of sections of a real line bundle which is defined on the complement of an even numbers of points in $S^2$. Of particular interest is how these eigenvalues and eigenvectors change when viewed as functions on the configuration spaces of points

Microglia-Astrocyte Communication in Alzheimer's Disease

Microglia and astrocytes are regarded as active participants in the central nervous system under various neuropathological conditions, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Both microglia and astrocyte activation have been reported to occur with a spatially and temporarily distinct pattern. Acting as a double-edged sword, glia-mediated neuroinflammation may be both detrimental and beneficial to the brain. In a variety of neuropathologies, microglia are activated before astrocytes, which facilitates astrocyte activation. Yet reactive astrocytes can also prevent the activation of adjacent microglia in addition to helping them become activated. Studies describe changes in the genetic profile as well as cellular and molecular responses of these two types of glial cells that contribute to dysfunctional immune crosstalk in AD. In this paper, we construct current knowledge of microglia-astrocyte communication, highlighting the multifaceted functions of microglia and astrocytes and their role in AD. A thorough comprehension of microglia-astrocyte communication could hasten the creation of novel AD treatment approaches.</p

Revisit Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing from the Language Perspective

We focus on the weakly-supervised audio-visual video parsing task (AVVP), which aims to identify and locate all the events in audio/visual modalities. Previous works only concentrate on video-level overall label denoising across modalities, but overlook the segment-level label noise, where adjacent video segments (i.e., 1-second video clips) may contain different events. However, recognizing events in the segment is challenging because its label could be any combination of events that occur in the video. To address this issue, we consider tackling AVVP from the language perspective, since language could freely describe how various events appear in each segment beyond fixed labels. Specifically, we design language prompts to describe all cases of event appearance for each video. Then, the similarity between language prompts and segments is calculated, where the event of the most similar prompt is regarded as the segment-level label. In addition, to deal with the mislabeled segments, we propose to perform dynamic re-weighting on the unreliable segments to adjust their labels. Experiments show that our simple yet effective approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin

EEG-based fatigue driving detection using correlation dimension

Driver fatigue is an important cause of traffic accidents and the detection of fatigue driving has been a hot issue in automobile active safety during the past decades. The purpose of this study is to develop a novel method to detect fatigue driving based on electroencephalogram (EEG). The volunteer is asked to perform simulated driving tasks under different mental state while EEG signals are acquired simultaneously from six electrodes at central, parietal and occipital lobe, including C3, C4, P3, P4, O1 and O2. Due to the non-linearity of human brain responses, correlation dimension is estimated with G-P algorithm to quantify the collected EEGs. Statistical analysis reveals significant decreases from awake to fatigue state of the correlation dimension for all the channels across 5 subjects (awake state: 3.87±0.13; fatigue state: 2.76±0.34; p< 0.05, paired t-test), which indicates that the correlation dimension is a promising parameter in detecting fatigue driving with EEGs