2,033 research outputs found

    Predicting Outcomes in Investment Treaty Arbitration

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    Crafting appropriate dispute settlement processes is challenging for any conflict-management system, particularly for politically sensitive international economic law disputes. As the United States negotiates investment treaties with Asian and European countries, the terms of dispute settlement have become contentious. There is a vigorous debate about whether investment treaty arbitration (ITA) is an appropriate dispute settlement mechanism. While some sing the praises of ITA, others offer a spirited critique. Some critics claim that ITA is biased against states, while others suggest ITA is predictable but unfair due to factors like arbitrator identity or venue. Using data from 159 final cases derived from 272 publicly available ITA awards, this Article examines outcomes of ITA cases to explore those concerns. Key descriptive findings demonstrate that states reliably won a greater proportion of cases than investors; and for the subset of cases investors won, the mean award was US$45.6 million with mean investor success rate of 35%. State success rates were roughly similar to respondent-favorable or state-favorable results in whistleblowing, qui tam, and medical-malpractice litigation in U.S. courts. The Article then explores whether ITA outcomes varied depending upon investor identity, state identity, the presence of repeat-player counsel, arbitrator-related, or venue variables. Models using case-based variables always predicted outcomes whereas arbitrator-venue models did not. The results provide initial evidence that the most critical variables for predicting outcomes involved some form of investor identity and the experience of parties’ lawyers. For investor identity, the most robust predictor was whether investors were human beings, with cases brought by people exhibiting greater success than corporations; and when at least one named investor or corporate parent was ranked in the Financial Times 500, investors sometimes secured more favorable outcomes. Following Marc Galanter’s scholarship demonstrating that repeat-player lawyers are critical to litigation outcomes, attorney experience also affected ITA outcomes. Investors with experienced counsel were more likely to obtain a damage award against a state, whereas states retaining experienced counsel were only reliably associated with decreased levels of relative investor success. Although there was variation in outcomes, ultimately, the data did not support a conclusion that ITA was completely unpredictable; rather, the results called into question some critiques of ITA and did not prove that ITA is a wholly unacceptable form of dispute settlement. Instead, the results suggest the vital debate about ITA’s future would be well served by focusing on evidence-based insights and reliance on data rather than nonreplicable intuition

    The Three-Dimensional Spatial Structure of Cirrus Clouds Determined from Lidar Satellite Observations

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    Simultaneous imagery from the University of Wisconsin Volume Imaging Lidar (VIL) and meteorological satellites were used to quantify the spatial structure of cirrus clouds with 60 m resolution. This data was used to determine the spatial distributions of cloud base altitude, cloud top altitude, and mid-cloud altitude. Two dimensional auto-correlation functions describing the mean shape of cirrus clouds were computed. Because cirrus clouds seldom have distinct edges, these correlation functions are derived as a function of a threshold value which defines the cloud edge

    Casimir Force between a Dielectric Sphere and a Wall: A Model for Amplification of Vacuum Fluctuations

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    The interaction between a polarizable particle and a reflecting wall is examined. A macroscopic approach is adopted in which the averaged force is computed from the Maxwell stress tensor. The particular case of a perfectly reflecting wall and a sphere with a dielectric function given by the Drude model is examined in detail. It is found that the force can be expressed as the sum of a monotonically decaying function of position and of an oscillatory piece. At large separations, the oscillatory piece is the dominant contribution, and is much larger than the Casimir-Polder interaction that arises in the limit that the sphere is a perfect conductor. It is argued that this enhancement of the force can be interpreted in terms of the frequency spectrum of vacuum fluctuations. In the limit of a perfectly conducting sphere, there are cancellations between different parts of the spectrum which no longer occur as completely in the case of a sphere with frequency dependent polarizability. Estimates of the magnitude of the oscillatory component of the force suggest that it may be large enough to be observable.Comment: 18pp, LaTex, 7 figures, uses epsf. Several minor errors corrected, additional comments added in the final two sections, and references update

    A Landscape Cannot Be A Homeland

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    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.What is the problem for which landscape is the answer? In this paper, I offer a response to this question, first posed at a meeting of landscape researchers in Brussels in 2011. I argue that the problem can be defined as ontopology, or what I call here homeland thinking, and I propose that a landscape cannot be a homeland. The salience of landscape as a critical term instead involves modes of thinking and feeling that chafe against invocations of homeland as a site of existential inhabitation, as a locus of sentiment and attachment, and a wellspring of identity. The paper explores the connections between ideas of landscape and homeland through discussions of the European Landscape Convention, phenomenology and the term homeland itself. I conclude by arguing that a landscape must be understood as a kind of dislocation or distancing from itself. There are, after all, no original inhabitants

    Is Step Down Assessment of Screen-Detected Lesions as Safe as Workup at a Metropolitan Assessment Centre?

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    Objective: BreastScreen WA offers population mammographic screening via fixed clinics in the metropolitan area and mobile clinics that visit country areas every two years. If an abnormality is suspected following mobile clinic screening, women undergo Step Down Assessment; diagnostic further views are performed at the mobile clinic and if a possibly significant abnormality persists, country women are referred to a Perth Metropolitan Breast Assessment Centre. The purpose of this retrospective cohort study was to determine if Step Down Assessment in country Western Australia offered the same diagnostic effectiveness as screening and assessment in the metropolitan area. Methods: The study included all screening episodes at BreastScreen WA between 1999 and 2008. Screening episodes from metropolitan and mobile clinics were compared according to the primary outcomes of cancer detection rates, recall and further investigations, cancer size, return to screen rates and interval cancers. Results: Cancer detection rate per 1,000 screening episodes was lower for the country program than the metropolitan program (3.07 (2.84–3.31) versus 7.04 (6.82–7.27)). The false negative (interval cancer) rate was lower for Step Down Assessment than for the metropolitan program. The size of cancers detected was similar for both screening services. Return to screen rates were comparable between both groups. Conclusion: The results indicate that the current service model is providing appropriate diagnostic effectiveness, as well as comparable client satisfaction, for country and metropolitan women

    The Asymptotic Giant Branches of GCs: Selective Entry Only

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    The handful of available observations of AGB stars in Galactic Globular Clusters suggest that the GC AGB populations are dominated by cyanogen-weak stars. This contrasts strongly with the distributions in the RGB (and other) populations, which generally show a 50:50 bimodality in CN band strength. If it is true that the AGB populations show very different distributions then it presents a serious problem for low mass stellar evolution theory, since such a surface abundance change going from the RGB to AGB is not predicted by stellar models. However this is only a tentative conclusion, since it is based on very small AGB sample sizes. To test whether this problem really exists we have carried out an observational campaign specifically targeting AGB stars in GCs. We have obtained medium resolution spectra for about 250 AGB stars across 9 Galactic GCs using the multi-object spectrograph on the AAT (2df/AAOmega). We present some of the preliminary findings of the study for the second parameter trio of GCs: NGC 288, NGC 362 and NGC 1851. The results indeed show that there is a deficiency of stars with strong CN bands on the AGB. To confirm that this phenomenon is robust and not just confined to CN band strengths and their vagaries, we have made observations using FLAMES/VLT to measure elemental abundances for NGC 6752.We present some initial results from this study also. Our sodium abundance results show conclusively that only a subset of stars in GCs experience the AGB phase of evolution. This is the first direct, concrete confirmation of the phenomenon.Comment: 4 pages, to appear in conference proceedings of "Reading the book of globular clusters with the lens of stellar evolution", Rome, 26-28 November 201

    Longitudinal dynamics of skin bacterial communities in the context of Staphylococcus aureus decolonization

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    Decolonization with topical antimicrobials is frequently prescribed in health care and community settings to prevent Staphylococcus aureus infection. However, effects on commensal skin microbial communities remains largely unexplored. Within a household affected by recurrent methicillin-resistant S. aureus skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI), skin swabs were collected from the anterior nares, axillae, and inguinal folds of 14 participants at 1- to 3-month intervals over 24 months. Four household members experienced SSTI during the first 12-months (observational period) and were prescribed a 5-day decolonization regimen with intranasal mupirocin and bleach water baths at the 12-month study visit. We sequenced the 16S rRNA gene V1-V2 region and compared bacterial community characteristics between the pre- and post-intervention periods and between younger and older subjects. The median Shannon diversity index was stable during the 12-month observational period at all three body sites. Bacterial community characteristics (diversity, stability, and taxonomic composition) varied with age. Among all household members, not exclusively among the four performing decolonization, diversity was unstable throughout the year post-intervention. In the month after decolonization, bacterial communities were changed. Although communities largely returned to their baseline states, relative abundance of some taxa remained changed throughout the year following decolonization (e.g., more abundan
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