Bringing the Question of Chinese IPR Enforcement to the WTO Under TRIPS: An Effective Strategy or a Meaningless and Overused Tactic by the U.S.?

China has had a long history of high levels of piracy and counterfeiting. Leaders of China’s Food and Drug Administration have confessed that their pharmaceutical market is immersed in fake and deadly drugs.\ud In addition, DVD’s and VCD’s containing pirated versions of Chinese and foreign films or television series are easily found in China’s major cities. Since China is the world’s fastest growing economy and the contributor of the largest trade deficit to the United States (U.S.) (U.S. $268 billion in 2008), it is no surprise that the issue of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) counterfeiting and piracy are of national interest to the U.S..\u

Low-Dose Exposure to Bisphenol A in Early Life

Bisphenol A (BPA) has lower estrogenic potency than 17b-estadiol. The reference dose of BPA is defined as 50 ug/kg bw/day by the Environmental Protection Agency. The lower doses of BPA than no observable effect level are considered safe. However, early life exposure to low-dose BPA may increase the risk of developing adult onset disease. The harmful effects caused by low-dose BPA in fetus and newborns can transmit to third or fourth generations. The suggested mechanism of transgeneration is epigenetic changes. In addition, simultaneous exposure to various chemicals can induce combined effects. Low-dose effects of BPA are ongoing controversy because the animal test results will be the same in humans. Epidemiologic evidences are needed to provide the human health effects from exposure to low dose of BPA

Recruiting the Most Vulnerable: What Explains the Use of Child Soldiers?

What factors influence the use of child soldiers in armed conflict? The recruitment of child soldiers is widespread in modern conflict, with at least 300,000 children believed to be serving as soldiers until recent years. A growing body of analysis looks at this question but there is a limited amount of systematic research. The existing literature focuses on factors such as poverty, the youth population, and the availability of lightweight weapons as factors behind child recruitment, but other explanations seem likely. To better understand this important issue, this dissertation examines two under-examined factors – international humanitarian regulation and external support – and uses quantitative analyses to test resulting hypotheses. The first chapter addresses the impact of the international humanitarian regulations on governments and rebel groups’ child recruitment. An important finding is that the existing regulations do not seem to reduce governments and rebel groups’ forced recruitment. The second and the third chapters focus solely on rebel groups’ child recruitment. These two chapters suggest external support is a crucial factor in rebel groups’ child recruitment. More specifically, the second chapter examines how different types of external support can affect rebel groups’ child recruitment and argues that rebel groups that receive territorial support are more likely to recruit children than rebels that do not. The third chapter investigates how two different types of external supporters can influence child soldiering by rebel groups. The results indicate that rebel groups that receive support from different rebel groups are more likely to recruit children than those that do not. Overall, this dissertation contributes to debates on child soldiering, rebel group dynamics, international humanitarian regulation, and related topics. Doing so, it sheds light on previously unexamined factors behind this important phenomenon, providing contributions to both theory and policy

The Effect of Negative CSR Information by Luxury Fashion Brands on Consumer Response

Contrary to positive corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities by luxury fashion brands in western countries, little attention has been paid by the same companies to Korean society (FSS, 2012). South Korea is poised to be the next luxury power house in Asia, even overtaking Japan (Luxe Brand Advisors, 2012). Are Korean consumers not as sensitive as western consumers about CSR by luxury fashion brands? To answer these questions, this study explores the effect of negative CSR information by luxury fashion companies on consumer responses

Highway Construction Productivity Measurement with a Wireless Real-Time Productivity Measurement System

Seonghoon Kim, Yong Bai, Yang-Ki Jung, and Dukgeun Yun, Highway Construction Productivity Measurement with a Wireless Real-Time Productivity Measurement System, Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board (Volume: 2228 issue: 1) pp. 26-33. Copyright © 2011 SAGE Publications. DOI: 10.3141/2228-04.Improving the quality of construction schedules calls for development of an advanced productivity measurement system. Existing on-site construction productivity measurement methods have some common limitations, such as not providing data necessary for engineers and project managers to conduct real-time analyses and share data with other project participants. A wireless real-time productivity measurement (WRITE) system was developed to address those shortfalls. The field experiment was conducted at two different stages: asphalt paving projects, including hot-mix asphalt and hot-in-place recycling, and a bridge reconstruction project. Productivity data collected from the WRITE system were also compared with productivity data collected from construction documents, such as contractors' daily logs and pay estimate documents, to identify the feasibility of this system for measuring the performance of construction projects. For data analyses, statistical methods such as normality test, paired t-test, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used. The result of statistical analyses proved that the developed system generated identical productivity measurements compared with the stopwatch method and construction documents. The success of this research project made several major contributions to the advancement of the construction industry. First, the research advanced the application of wireless technology in highway construction operations. Second, it provided an advanced technology for engineers and project managers to determine productivity in real time. Third, productivity data can be shared between project participants via the Internet. With these advancements, communication and coordination will be improved at construction sites. Consequently, the WRITE system will enhance owners' and contractors' ability to manage construction projects

DiPair: Fast and Accurate Distillation for Trillion-Scale Text Matching and Pair Modeling

Pre-trained models like BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) have dominated NLP / IR applications such as single sentence classification, text pair classification, and question answering. However, deploying these models in real systems is highly non-trivial due to their exorbitant computational costs. A common remedy to this is knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015), leading to faster inference. However -- as we show here -- existing works are not optimized for dealing with pairs (or tuples) of texts. Consequently, they are either not scalable or demonstrate subpar performance. In this work, we propose DiPair -- a novel framework for distilling fast and accurate models on text pair tasks. Coupled with an end-to-end training strategy, DiPair is both highly scalable and offers improved quality-speed tradeoffs. Empirical studies conducted on both academic and real-world e-commerce benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach with speedups of over 350x and minimal quality drop relative to the cross-attention teacher BERT model.Comment: 13 pages. Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 202

Fatty liver disease and the risk of erosive oesophagitis in the Korean population: a cross-sectional study

Objectives To investigate an association between fatty liver disease (FLD) and erosive oesophagitis. Design and setting This was a cross-sectional study of subjects selected from examinees who underwent health check-up, including oesophagogastroduodenoscopy in one hospital between 2004 and 2011. Erosive oesophagitis was classified according to the Los Angeles classification and FLD was diagnosed with ultrasonography. The anthropometric and laboratory data of the subjects were analysed using X-2 test and multivariate logistic regression. Additionally, we have analysed our data with two-stage least square estimation using the Baltagi-Chang one-way model to clarify unobserved confounding variable. Primary outcome measure The effect of FLD on erosive oesophagitis. Results Among the 14 723 eligible subjects, 4232 (28.7%) subjects diagnosed with FLD were classified into the fatty liver group and 10 491 (71.3%) subjects without FLD were classified into the non-fatty liver group. The incidence rate of erosive oesophagitis was significantly higher in the fatty liver group than in the non-fatty liver group (10.4% vs6.1%, p< 0.0001). The multivariate analysis revealed that the fatty liver group was significantly associated with erosive oesophagitis (OR 1.19, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.37, p= 0.016). Conclusion FLD diagnosed by ultrasonography is an independent risk factor of erosive oesophagitis. It suggests that FLD-related metabolic abnormality may be associated with erosive oesophagitis

Influence of sarcopenia on postoperative complications in patients undergoing autologous microsurgical breast reconstruction: an inverse probability of treatment weighting analysis

BackgroundSarcopenia is characterized by the loss of skeletal muscle mass and power. Preoperative sarcopenia may be associated with an increased risk of postoperative complications after autologous free-flap breast reconstruction surgery; however, this relationship is controversial.ObjectivesThis study aimed to determine whether preoperative sarcopenia is associated with a high complication rate in patients undergoing autologous free-flap breast reconstruction.MethodsPatients who underwent autologous free-flap breast reconstruction at our hospital between 2019 and 2021 were included in the study. Data on significant complications requiring surgical intervention were retrospectively collected from the medical records. Sarcopenia was defined as having a skeletal muscle index value &lt;41 cm2/m2. The skeletal muscle index was calculated by dividing the sum of the psoas and iliopsoas muscle areas at the level of the third lumbar vertebra by the patient’s height in meters squared. The relationship between preoperative sarcopenia and postoperative complications was investigated using an inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) analysis.ResultsAmong the 203 participants, 90 (44.33%) had preoperative sarcopenia. The general patient characteristics were similar between the sarcopenia and non-sarcopenia groups after IPTW adjustment. Sarcopenia did not significantly increase the risk of flap failure or emergency surgery related to breast reconstruction before IPTW adjustment. However, after IPTW adjustment, the rates of recipient site infection and hematoma were significantly higher in participants with sarcopenia than in those without sarcopenia (p &lt; 0.001 and p = 0.014, respectively).ConclusionPreoperative sarcopenia may influence certain complications of autologous free-flap breast reconstruction surgery