The World Health Organization\u27s New International Health Regulations: Incursion on State Sovereignty and Ill-Fated Response to Global Health Issues

Part II of this Development discusses the legal initiative undertaken by the WHO when it first drafted the International Health Regulations in 1969 ( IHRs 1969 ). This section also outlines the purpose of the IHRs 1969 and highlights some of their major shortcomings. Section II then discusses the 2005 revisions to the IHRs 1969 and analyzes them with particular attention paid to the increased legislative and constitutional power granted to the WHO. Section III considers the potential conflict between the IHRs 2005 revisions and the principle of state sovereignty as well as the revisions\u27 conflict with federal structures of government inherent in a number of large Western states. Lastly, Section III addresses the extent to which the WHO is seeking to become a supranational organization capable of side-stepping states\u27 rights irrespective of geopolitical boundaries. Given the increased political power of the WHO and the level of state acquiescence to its power, Section IV concludes that public international health concerns appear to have superseded all notions of state sovereignty as a matter of customary international law. Furthermore, it can be argued that certain provisions within the IHRs 2005 are ineffective in preventing the globalization of so-called fast epidemics such as SARS or avian influenza and do little, if anything, to combat diseases, such as AIDS, which are already in their true globalization phase

Defining Textual Entailment

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and philosophical issues involved in providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic

Impulse

College: [Page] 2 John M. Hanson Professorship: New department head Nadim Wehbe is named first recipient of a new professorship. [Page] 6 Sponsored Rooms: Lohr College shows several rooms made possible by donors. [Page] 8 Raven Industries: Partnership with firm at Research Park at South Dakota State University allows students to gain experience. [Page] 10 Scholarships: Efforts by Dale Stevens and Emmett Myhre create new scholarships. [Page] 12 Scholars Weekend: Current students help introduce future Jackrabbits to campus. [Page] 14 Fergen scholarships: Electrical engineering graduate funds four scholarships.Students:[Page] 15 Construction and operations management gets HElP: Program receives first installment of four-year grant to build industry awareness.[Page] 17 Soldier of the Year Dalton DeBoer was named South Dakota’s Soldier of the Year and prepares for upcoming competitions. [Page] 18 Athletics success: The Jackrabbits advanced to postseason play in basketball and engineering students lead the way while a recent graduate prepares for a possible professional football career. [Page] 20 NASA: Electrical engineering graduate students receive award from NASA for work. [Page] 21: Outstanding graduate: Mountain-Plains Consortium honors graduate student Brittney Ahrenstorff for studying ice’s impact on bridges.Faculty: [Page] 22 50 years: Donald J. Struck recalls 50 years in the classroom. [Page] 24 Wehbe honored by peers: Structural Engineering Institute recognizes department head as a fellow. [Page] 26 A statistical look at the college [Page] 28 Faculty farewells/news Alex Moutsoglou and Pat Pannell look to new adventures.Alumni:[Page ]30 Reece Kurtenbach: The connection between Daktronics and the college continues with new CEO, an ’87 grad. [Page] 32 Distinguished Alumni/Engineers: Jane McKee Smith, Dick Sayre, Lynn Seppala [Page] 33 Alumni news [Page] 34 dean’s Club [Page] 36 Development Director’s columnhttps://openprairie.sdstate.edu/coe_impulse/1050/thumbnail.jp

Models of propositional content

Propositions, in addition to being the things that sentences express relative to contexts of utterance, can be invoked to play a few theoretical roles: since a sentence seems to be true just in case it expresses a true proposition, propositions could be seen as the primary bearers of truth and falsity; since sentences can be said to be necessarily or possibly true in virtue of expressing necessarily or possibly true propositions, propositions could be seen as being the primary bearers of modal properties; since it is possible to know what someone said, propositions would be the things that we are properly said to know. Propositions are of deep philosophical interest mostly due to the fact that each of these four theoretical roles involves a perennial philosophical subject meaning, truth, modality, and knowledge. There should be no surprise that philosophers are intent on analyzing and understanding propositions. Of course, merely specifying a list of philosophically interesting theoretical roles does not suffice as an analysis. Other than the fact that propositions play these theoretical roles, they seem to be mysterious place-holders. What precisely are the things that can be simultaneously expressed by a sentence, true, necessary, and known? One ambition of a theory of propositional content is to point to a class of entities that can be modeled in a way that satisfies the philosophical demands of each of these roles. To this end, I provide a novel theory of propositional content and show that it yields solutions to problems plaguing its competitors. Based on a generalization of standard intensional models, I develop a formal framework in which propositions are identified with partitions of sets of possible worlds

Selective Precipitation and Purification of Monovalent Proteins Using Oligovalent Ligands and Ammonium Sulfate

This paper describes a method for the selective precipitation and purification of a monovalent protein (carbonic anhydrase is used as a demonstration) from cellular lysate using ammonium sulfate and oligovalent ligands. The oligovalent ligands induce the formation of protein–ligand aggregates, and at an appropriate concentration of dissolved ammonium sulfate, these complexes precipitate. The purification involves three steps: (i) the removal of high-molecular-weight impurities through the addition of ammonium sulfate to the crude cell lysate; (ii) the introduction of an oligovalent ligand and the selective precipitation of the target protein–ligand aggregates from solution; and (iii) the removal of the oligovalent ligand from the precipitate by dialysis to release the target protein. The increase of mass and volume of the proteins upon aggregate formation reduces their solubility, and results in the selective precipitation of these aggregates. We recovered human carbonic anhydrase, from crude cellular lysate, in 82% yield and 95% purity with a trivalent benzene sulfonamide ligand. This method provides a chromatography-free strategy of purifying monovalent proteins—for which appropriate oligovalent ligands can be synthesized—and combines the selectivity of affinity-based purification with the convenience of salt-induced precipitation.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

Dependence of Avidity on Linker Length for a Bivalent Ligand–Bivalent Receptor Model System

This paper describes a synthetic dimer of carbonic anhydrase, and a series of bivalent sulfonamide ligands with different lengths (25 to 69 Å between the ends of the fully extended ligands), as a model system to use in examining the binding of bivalent antibodies to antigens. Assays based on analytical ultracentrifugation and fluorescence binding indicate that this system forms cyclic, noncovalent complexes with a stoichiometry of one bivalent ligand to one dimer. This dimer binds the series of bivalent ligands with low picomolar avidities (Kdavidity = 3–40 pM). A structurally analogous monovalent ligand binds to one active site of the dimer with Kdmono = 16 nM. The bivalent association is thus significantly stronger (Kdmono/Kdavidity ranging from 500 to 5000 unitless) than the monovalent association. We infer from these results, and by comparison of these results to previous studies, that bivalency in antibodies can lead to associations much tighter than monovalent associations (although the observed bivalent association is much weaker than predicted from the simplest level of theory: predicted Kdavidity of 0.002 pM and Kdmono/Kdavidity 8 × 106 unitless).Chemistry and Chemical Biolog