Negotiate or Litigate? Effects of WTO Judicial Delegation on U.S. Trade Politics

Goldstein and Steinberg argue that the World Trade Organization Appellate Body has been able to use its authority to engage in judicial lawmaking to reduce trade barriers in ways that would not otherwise have been possible through negotiation. This lawmaking authority was not the result of a purposeful delegation; rather, it was an unintended byproduct of the creation of an underspecified set of rules and procedures. There is nevertheless a high rate of compliance with Appellate Body decisions because decentralized enforcement can induce domestic importers to lobby for trade liberalization. In the US, this judicial lawmaking may also allow the President to achieve trade policies that are more liberal than those desired by Congress, if compliance can be achieved by a regulatory change or by sole Executive action

United States Trade Protectionism: Institutions, Norms, and Practices Symposium: The Political Economy of International Trade Law and Policy

is Article first explores the origins and evolution of existing trade norms and institutions.7 Then, as an example of the pressures on and potential responses open to United States industry, the Article turns to the recent experiences of the United States semiconductor industry.8 The Article concludes with some thoughts on the future of trade policymaking institutions, including the insight that the failure in United States trade policy has been in part due to the lack of ideas on how the United States should respond to foreign competition in a burgeoning world economy

Arctic Economics Workshop

About this Report This report serves as the official Summary final report to participants and the public, from the Arctic Economics Workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation grant issued July 2017. It is a summary of participant remarks, ideas, and suggestions from the workshop. It will also be included as an addendum to our official reports to the National Science Foundation to be issued Spring, 2018. After the initial section on background and introduction, the remaining report highlights the three keynote presentations and the introductory presentation by the hosts who presented the research undertaken for the Workshop. The discussions for all of these presentations and the rest of the meeting are presented in the Summary section of this report and the section on Research Questions. The follow up recommendations appear in the final section. Background and Introduction On November 6-8, 2018, an Arctic Economics workshop funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation1 was held on the Monterey campus of The Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in Monterey, California. The workshop was convened to better understand the state of economic research about the Arctic, search for possible reasons for the relatively few publications by economists, and, throughout this meeting to find ways to encourage more research by economists about the Arctic. The workshop was organized by Dr. Judith Kildow of the Center for the Blue Economy (CBE) at MIIS and Professor Michael Goldstein of Babson College, and attended by 16 academic and government participants. The time was ripe for such a workshop. Over two years ago, researchers at The Center for the Blue Economy began to measure and describe the economy of the Arctic as part of its focus on “The Blue Economy”.2 Unfortunately, despite notable searching by their team, there was a dearth of reliable, consistent data that could be used for time-series analysis or for serious economic study. However, in April 2017, the ECONOR III 2015 Update, 3 produced with funds from the Norwegian government, and with the support of the Arctic Council, was released and provided a treasure trove of economic data. Perhaps due to the previous lack of data, a literature review showed academic economists were writing far fewer articles on the topic than non-economists such as anthropologists, lawyers, political scientists, and sociologists. The workshop was thus convened to be an exploratory examination of the status of economic research about the Arctic, particularly research done by credentialed economists as either sole authors or among interdisciplinary teams. The workshop gathered a diverse team of experts, some were focused on the Arctic, some were not; some were economists, and some were in related fields; some were academics, some were practitioners, and some were government experts, to discuss why so few economists were publishing works about the Arctic and what might be done to encourage such work

Studies on tannins in plants

Tannins have been defined as phenolic hydroxyl compounds of relatively high molecular weight which precipitate proteins. Chemically, they can be divided into two classes (hydrolysable and condensed tannins), depending on their reaction with hot mineral acid. The structure of both classes has been discussed and a number of theories enumerated regarding possible linkages involved in the polymerisation of condensed tannins. The biosynthesis of tannins has been discussed. The widespread distribution of tannins in the plant kingdom and the simultaneous occurrence of leuco-anthocyanins and "botanical tannins" is mentioned. The loss of both astringency and tannins in fruits on ripening is discussed. The effect of mineral nutrition, light and season on the concentration of tannins in plants is referred to. Chemical and physical methods for the analysis of tannins have been discussed, and five analytical methods have been investigated for characterising the phenolic nuclei and applied to model compounds. These methods have been extended and used to study the changes in tannins in bananas, peaches and plums on ripening, with particular reference to the changes in the leuco-anthocyanins. The results with the banana confirm the hypothesis of Swain (1956) that the reduction in astringency on ripening is due to polymerisation of the tannins; somewhat ambiguous results were obtained with the juicy fruits. In order to develop a different method for measuring astringency, the inhibition of enzymes by tannins was investigated. A number of reagents were shown which could reverse this inhibition, and the use of some of these reactivating agents, both for extracting tannins and for protecting enzymes from inhibition, is suggested. Lastly, the synthesis of leuco-anthocyanins in sycamore tissue culture was studied, and it was found that both restricted aeration and "strain" differences affect the production of these compounds. <p

Sunday Driver links axonal transport to damage signaling

Neurons transmit long-range biochemical signals between cell bodies and distant axonal sites or termini. To test the hypothesis that signaling molecules are hitchhikers on axonal vesicles, we focused on the c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) scaffolding protein Sunday Driver (syd), which has been proposed to link the molecular motor protein kinesin-1 to axonal vesicles. We found that syd and JNK3 are present on vesicular structures in axons, are transported in both the anterograde and retrograde axonal transport pathways, and interact with kinesin-I and the dynactin complex. Nerve injury induces local activation of JNK, primarily within axons, and activated JNK and syd are then transported primarily retrogradely. In axons, syd and activated JNK colocalize with p150Glued, a subunit of the dynactin complex, and with dynein. Finally, we found that injury induces an enhanced interaction between syd and dynactin. Thus, a mobile axonal JNK–syd complex may generate a transport-dependent axonal damage surveillance system

Reply to Jensen and Kowalik: Consideration of mixed infections is central to understanding HCMV intrahost diversity.

Kowalik and Jensen (1) have reported that intra-host variation in HCMV approaches levels similar to those of HCV, with fast mutation rates mooted as one explanation (2).While we discussed that HCMV mutation rates were postulated as an explanation for high diversity, the focus of our work is on observed inconsistencies in nucleotide diversity between and within patients (3). Kowalik and Jensen did calculate HCMV mutation rates to be similar to MCMV but maintained that this could underestimate the true levels (2). In contrast, our study showed that in the absence of mixed infections, HCMV is no more diverse than other DNA viruses, and considerably less so than chronic RNA viruses. This simple conclusion is different to that of Kowalik and Jensen and had not been stated prior to our publication.N

A Search for High-Energy Counterparts to Fast Radio Bursts

We report on a search for high-energy counterparts to fast radio bursts (FRBs) with the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). We find no significant associations for any of the 23 FRBs in our sample, but report upper limits to the high-energy fluence for each on timescales of 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 s. We report lower limits on the ratio of the radio to high-energy fluence, $\frac{f_{r}}{f_{\gamma}}$, for timescales of 0.1 and 100 s. We discuss the implications of our non-detections on various proposed progenitor models for FRBs, including analogs of giant pulses from the Crab pulsar and hyperflares from magnetars. This work demonstrates the utility of analyses of high-energy data for FRBs in tracking down the nature of these elusive sources

Accuracy of ICD-9-CM Codes by Hospital Characteristics and Stroke Severity: Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Program

Background—Epidemiological and health services research often use International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD‐9‐CM) codes to identify patients with clinical conditions in administrative databases. We determined whether there are systematic variations between stroke patient clinical diagnoses and ICD‐9‐CM codes, stratified by hospital characteristics and stroke severity. Methods and Results—We used the records of patients discharged from hospitals participating in the Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Program in 2013. Within this stroke‐enriched cohort, we compared agreement between the attending physician\u27s clinical diagnosis and principal ICD‐9‐CM code and determined whether disagreements varied by hospital characteristics (presence of a stroke unit, stroke team, number of hospital beds, and hospital location). For patients with a documented National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score at admission, we assessed whether diagnostic agreement varied by stroke severity. Agreement was generally high (\u3e 89%); differences between the physician diagnosis and ICD‐9‐CM codes were primarily attributed to discordance between ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack (TIA), and subarachnoid and intracerebral hemorrhage. Agreement was higher for patients in metropolitan hospitals with stroke units, stroke teams, and \u3e 200 beds (all P \u3c 0.001). Agreement was lowest (60.3%) for rural hospitals with ≤ 200 beds and without stroke units or teams. Agreement was also lower for milder (94.9%) versus more‐severe (96.4%) ischemic strokes (P \u3c 0.001). Conclusions—We identified disagreements in stroke/TIA coding by hospital characteristics and stroke severity, particularly for milder ischemic strokes. Such systematic variations in ICD‐9‐CM coding practices can affect stroke case identification in epidemiological studies and may have implications for hospital‐level quality metric