New Challenges to Arbitration

[Excerpt] Today we face developments in practically every aspect of our lives portending changes within the next quarter century as great as any we have experienced. Changes in one\u27s own field, as in society in general, are often imperceptible at the time they are occurring. Yet, in looking back over my thirty years of teaching in the field of arbitration, I am struck not only by the major changes which have affected the concepts and practice of arbitration, but also, and more significantly, by the new challenges which are emerging to the whole profession of arbitration as well as to the continued viability of the institution itself

Voting over economic plans

We review and provide motivation for a one-sector model of economic growth in which decisions about capital accumulation are made by a political process. If it is possible to commit for at least three periods into the future, then for any feasible consumption plan, there is a perturbation that is majority-preferred to it. Furthermore, plans that minimize the maximum vote that can be obtained against them yield a political business cycle. If it is impossible to commit, voters select the optimal consumption plan for the median voter

Recommending treatments for comorbid patients using word-based and phrase-based alignment methods

The problem of finding treatments for patients diagnosed with multiple diseases (i.e.~a comorbidity) is an important research topic in the medical literature. In this paper, we propose a new data driven approach to recommend treatments for these comorbidities using word-based and phrase-based alignment methods. The most popular methods currently rely on combining specific information from individual diseases (e.g.~procedures, tests, etc.), then aim to detect and repair the conflicts that arise in the combined treatments. This proves to be a challenge especially in the cases where the studied comorbidities contain large numbers of diseases. In contrast, our methods rely on training a translation model using previous medical records to find treatments for newly diagnosed comorbidities. We also explore the use of additional criteria in the form of a drug interactions penalty and a treatment popularity score to select the best treatment in the case where multiple valid translations for a single comorbidity are available

Early maternal experience shapes offspring performance in the wild

Both the environments experienced by a mother as a juvenile and an adult can affect her investment in offspring. However, the implications of these maternal legacies, both juvenile and adult, for offspring fitness in natural populations are unclear. We investigated whether the juvenile growth rate and adult reproductive traits (length, body condition, and reproductive investment at spawning) of female wild Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) were related to the growth and survival of their offspring. Adult salmon captured on their upstream migration were used to create experimental full-sib clutches of eggs, which were mixed and then placed in artificial nests in a natural stream that lacked salmon due to a migration barrier. Four months later we resampled the stream to obtain family-level estimates of offspring size and survival. Mothers that had grown slowly as juveniles (as determined by scalimetry) but had invested heavily in reproduction (egg production for a given body length) and were in relatively poor body condition (somatic mass for a given body length) at spawning produced the largest eggs. Larger eggs resulted in larger juveniles and higher juvenile survival. However, after controlling for egg size, offspring growth was positively related to maternal juvenile growth rate and reproductive investment. The predictors of offspring survival (i.e., reproductive success) varied with the juvenile growth rate of the mother: If females grew slowly as juveniles, their reproductive success was negatively related to their own body condition. In contrast, the reproductive success of females that grew quickly as juveniles was instead related positively to their own body condition. Our results show that maternal influences on offspring in the wild can be complex, with reproductive success related to the early life performance of the mother, as well as her state at the time of breeding

Generating conflict-free treatments for patients with comorbidity using ASP

Conflicts in recommended medical interventions regularly arise when multiple treatments are simultaneously needed for patients with comorbid diseases. An approach that can automatically repair such inconsistencies and generate conflict-free combined treatments is thus a valuable aid for clinicians. In this paper we propose an answer set programming based method that detects and repairs conflicts between treatments. The answer sets of the program directly correspond to proposed treatments, accounting for multiple possible solutions if they exist. We also include the possibility to take preferences based on drug-drug interactions into account while solving inconsistencies. We show in a case study that our method results in more preferred treatments

Political Competition in a Model of Economic Growth; Some Theoretical Results

We study a one-sector model of economic growth in which decisions about capital accumulation and consumption are made through a political process of two candidate competition. Each voter's utility for a consumption stream is the discounted value of that voter's utility of consumption in each period. We consider the case when voters' one period utility functions for consumption are identical but discount factors are different. We are particularly interested in the conditions under which neoclassical optimal growth paths occur, and conditions in which political business cycles occur. The answer depends on the ability or inability of the candidates to commit to multi-period investment strategies. If candidates can commit indefinitely into the future, then a political (majority rule) equilibrium path will not exist if all discount factors are different. For any feasible consumption path, there is a perturbation which is majority preferred to it. For any neoclassical optimal path there exists a perturbated path that is preferred to it either unanimously or by all but one voter. These results are true even if the perturbations can differ at no more than three consecutive periods from the original path. If candidates are unable to commit to multi-period plans, we show there is a unique subgame perfect, stationary, symmetric equilibrium to the infinite horizon two candidate competition game; namely the optimal consumption path for the median voter. The equilibrium is unique in the following sense: It is the unique limit of subgame perfect equilibria to the finite horizon electoral game. In the case when candidates can commit for a finite time into the future, we show that a stationary minmax path (a path which minimizes the maximum vote that can be obtained against it) yields a political business cycle

Tri-Resonant Leptogenesis

We present a class of leptogenesis models where the light neutrinos acquire their observed mass through a symmetry-motivated construction. We consider an extension of the Standard Model, which includes three singlet neutrinos which have mass splittings comparable to their decay widths. We show that this tri-resonant structure leads to an appreciable increase in the observed CP asymmetry over that found previously in typical bi-resonant models. To analyse such tri-resonant scenarios, we solve a set of coupled Boltzmann equations, crucially preserving the variations in the relativistic degrees of freedom. We highlight the fact that small variations at high temperatures can have major implications for the evolution of the baryon asymmetry when the singlet neutrino mass scale is below $100$ GeV. We then illustrate how this variation can significantly affect the ability to find successful leptogenesis at these low masses. Finally, the parameter space for viable leptogenesis is delineated, and comparisons are made with current and future experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, conference proceedings for Corfu Summer Institute 2022, School and Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity, August 28 - September 8, 2022, Corfu, Greec

Tri-Resonant Leptogenesis in a Seesaw Extension of the Standard Model

We study a class of leptogenesis models where the light neutrinos acquire their observed small masses by a symmetry-motivated construction. This class of models may naturally include three nearly degenerate heavy Majorana neutrinos that can strongly mix with one another and have mass differences comparable to their decay widths. We find that such a tri-resonant heavy neutrino system can lead to leptonic CP asymmetries which are further enhanced than those obtained in the usual bi-resonant approximation. Moreover, we solve the Boltzmann equations by paying special attention to the temperature dependence of the relativistic degrees of freedom of the plasma. The latter results in significant corrections to the evolution equations for the heavy neutrinos and the lepton asymmetry that have been previously ignored in the literature. We show the importance of these corrections to accurately describe the dynamical evolution of the baryon-to-photon ratio $\eta_B$ for heavy neutrino masses at and below $100$ GeV, and demonstrate that successful leptogenesis at lower masses can be significantly affected by the variation of the relativistic dofs. The parameter space for the leptogenesis model is discussed, and it could be probed in future experimental facilities searching for charged lepton flavour violation and heavy neutrinos in future $Z$-boson factories.Comment: 42 pages, 10 figures, additional references included, inclusion of additional clarifying comments, to appear in JHE