Towards a Development-Oriented Multilateral Framework on Competition Policy

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) is a successful attempt by the international community to codify and unify the law of the sea. After long negotiations, the LOSC opened for signature at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) in 1982. Together with its two formal associations, the Part XI Implementation Agreement 1994 and the Straddling and Migratory Fish Stocks Agreement 1995, it is regarded as one of the most comprehensive documents ever adopted by the international community. The LOSC not only succeeded in addressing all topics covered by its ancestors, the four 1958 Geneva Conventions, but it actually succeeded in addressing much more. More importantly, at least to this author\u27s perception, it created a new approach in developing customary international law by adopting a package deal theory. This Article submits that by combining this innovative approach with three other methods specified by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)- that is, to codify or modify preexisting customary international norms, to crystallize emerging customary international norms, and to initiate a progressive process of developing customary international norms - the LOSC represents customary international law to a very wide extent. As a result, at least in the context of the law of the sea, the distinction between treaty law and customary law is blurred

Towards a Development-Oriented Multilateral Framework on Competition Policy

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) is a successful attempt by the international community to codify and unify the law of the sea. After long negotiations, the LOSC opened for signature at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) in 1982. Together with its two formal associations, the Part XI Implementation Agreement 1994 and the Straddling and Migratory Fish Stocks Agreement 1995, it is regarded as one of the most comprehensive documents ever adopted by the international community. The LOSC not only succeeded in addressing all topics covered by its ancestors, the four 1958 Geneva Conventions, but it actually succeeded in addressing much more. More importantly, at least to this author\u27s perception, it created a new approach in developing customary international law by adopting a package deal theory. This Article submits that by combining this innovative approach with three other methods specified by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)- that is, to codify or modify preexisting customary international norms, to crystallize emerging customary international norms, and to initiate a progressive process of developing customary international norms - the LOSC represents customary international law to a very wide extent. As a result, at least in the context of the law of the sea, the distinction between treaty law and customary law is blurred

CALIPS: DESIGN OF UBIQUITOUS DECISION SUPPORT MECHANISM FOR THE CAMPUS LIFE PLANNING FROM THE VIEW OF INTEGRATING GENERAL BAYESIAN NETWORKS AND CONTEXT PREDICTION

Recently, ubiquitous decision support systems become more popular in many applications. However, the campus life planning area has remained untouched in the decision support literature. Moreover, the potentials of context prediction in lieu of context awareness systems were rarely explored in previous studies of the ubiquitous decision support systems. In this sense, this study proposes the systematic usage of General Bayesian Networks (GBNs) to organize high quality of causal knowledge base to be used for the sake of campus life planning. The prototype named CALIPS was designed on the smartphone. Two research questions that were never investigated in literature were raised- (1) suggestion of the ubiquitous decision support mechanism for the campus life planning, named CALIPS, and (2) integrating GBN and context prediction into the CALIPS. Experiment results proved to support the validity of the CALIP

Effect of Plate Surface Characteristics on Image Reproduction in Electrostatic Planographic Platemaking

Four different types of surfaces of aluminum plates; 1) brush grained, 2) chemically grained, 3) brush grained and anodized, and 4) electrochemical ly grained and anodized substrates coated with polyvinyl oxazol, an organic photoconductor were studied. The experiments were divided into two parts. The first part concerned with the photoelectric characteristics of the various surfaces, and the second part was involved with image quality relative to photoelectric properties of different substrates. The characteristics of each of the surfaces was briefly discussed. Photoelectric properties such as 1) photosensitivity, 2) spectral response, 3) surface acceptance potential, 4) dark decay, 5) light decay, 6) retentivity, and 7) residual potential of the various surfaces of the aluminum substrates were reported. Image quality of a variety of plates in terms of 1) resolution of halftones and line patterns, 2) edge sharpness, 3) solid fill-in, 4) image density, and 5) cleanliness of non-image area were analyzed. The relationship of photoelectric properties vs. image quality of these surfaces was reported. Most of the experiments were repeated several times and the data were analyzed by statistical techniques, i.e., correlation, regression analysis, analysis of variance and multiple regression. The plates were not press tested. Under experimental conditions, the electrochemically grained and anodized surface exhibited the best photoelectric properties as well as image quality. The (electro-) chemical graining of the plates provided better photoelectric properties when compared to mechanical graining. Anodizing the plate surface further improved photoelectric characteristics. Image quality was related to the photoelectric performance of surfaces of the plates

Maximum Score Estimation of Preference Parameters for a Binary Choice Model under Uncertainty

This paper develops maximum score estimation of preference parameters in the binary choice model under uncertainty in which the decision rule is affected by conditional expectations. The preference parameters are estimated in two stages: we estimate conditional expectations nonparametrically in the first stage and then the preference parameters in the second stage based on Manski (1975, 1985)'s maximum score estimator using the choice data and first stage estimates. The paper establishes consistency and derives rate of convergence of the two-stage maximum score estimator. Moreover, the paper also provides sufficient conditions under which the two-stage estimator is asymptotically equivalent in distribution to the corresponding single-stage estimator that assumes the first stage input is known. These results are of independent interest for maximum score estimation with nonparametrically generated regressors. The paper also presents some Monte Carlo simulation results for finite-sample behavior of the two-stage estimator