The White House and the Kyoto Protocol: Double Standards on Uncertainties and Their Consequences

This paper compares the level of uncertainty widely reported in climate change scientific publications with the level of uncertainty of the costs estimates of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the United States. It argues that these two categories of uncertainties were used and ignored, respectively, in the policy making process in the US so as to challenge the scientific basis on the one hand and on the other hand to assert that reducing emissions would hurt the economy by an amount stated without any qualification. The paper reviews the range of costs estimates published since 1998 on implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the US. It comments on the significance of these cost estimates and identifies a decreasing trend in the successive estimates. This implies that initially some of the most influential economic model-based assessments seem to have overestimated the costs, an overestimation that may have played a significant role in the US decision to withdraw from the Protocol. The paper concludes with advocating that future economic estimates always include uncertainty ranges, so as to be in line with a basic transparency practice prevailing in climate science.United States, Kyoto Protocol, Cost Estimates, Uncertainties

Ranking universities: How to take better account of diversity

In order to rank universities, rather than aggregating the indicators used by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) using weightings which, though reasonable, are at the same time arbitrary and inflexible one can compare universities in terms of dominance and hence deduce various partial or complete rankings. The resultant dominance ranking method is presented in this note. Data are recalled in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 provides full details of the dominance analysis for each university. From this analysis two listings are derived: (i) a front runners list consisting of 34 "nondominated" universities, (Table 4) and (ii) a (new) ranking of the 200 universities surveyed by the THES, based on their respective "active-passive dominance" scores (Table 5). Concluding remarks bear on limits of the data and of the exercise.

Ranking universities : how to take better account of diversity

In order to rank universities, rather than aggregating the indicators used by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) - using weightings which, though reasonable, are at the same time arbitrary and inflexible - one can compare universities in termes of dominance and hence deduce various partial or complete rankings. The resultant dominance ranking method is presented in this note. Data are recalled in Appendix 1. Appendix provides full details of the dominance analysis for each university. From this analysis two listings are derived : (i) a front runners list consisting of 34 ‘non-dominated’ universities (Table 4) and (ii) a (new) ranking of the 200 universities surveyed by the THES, based on their respective ‘active-passive dominance’ scores (Table 5). Concluding remarks bear on limits of the data and of the exercise.

On Cooperation in Musgravian Models of Externalities within a Federation

"Musgravian" externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on "social goods" are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation. The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly. In that context, it is then considered whether and how alternative forms of federal structures are likely to achieve efficiency. Following suggestions from the literature, three such forms are dealt with: "planned", "cooperative" and "majority rule" federalisms. Next, the relevance of non cooperative equilibria is examined, in the light of an interpretation of them as "fall back" positions when disagreement occurs among members of a federation. Finally, the question is evoked of what economics and public finance may have to say on the limits to institutional decentralization, i.e. on the choice between federal, confederal and secessional structures. The paper concludes with a reminder of Musgrave's view on this issue.

Evaluating Unsupervised Dutch Word Embeddings as a Linguistic Resource

Word embeddings have recently seen a strong increase in interest as a result of strong performance gains on a variety of tasks. However, most of this research also underlined the importance of benchmark datasets, and the difficulty of constructing these for a variety of language-specific tasks. Still, many of the datasets used in these tasks could prove to be fruitful linguistic resources, allowing for unique observations into language use and variability. In this paper we demonstrate the performance of multiple types of embeddings, created with both count and prediction-based architectures on a variety of corpora, in two language-specific tasks: relation evaluation, and dialect identification. For the latter, we compare unsupervised methods with a traditional, hand-crafted dictionary. With this research, we provide the embeddings themselves, the relation evaluation task benchmark for use in further research, and demonstrate how the benchmarked embeddings prove a useful unsupervised linguistic resource, effectively used in a downstream task.Comment: in LREC 201

Cooperation, Stability and Self-Enforcement in International Environmental Agreements: A Conceptual Discussion

In essence, any international environmental agreement (IEA) implies cooperation of a form or another. The paper seeks for logical foundations of this. It first deals with how the need for cooperation derives from the public good aspect of the externalities involved, as well as with where the source of cooperation lies in cooperative game theory. In either case, the quest for efficiency is claimed to be at the root of cooperation. Next, cooperation is considered from the point of view of stability. After recalling the two competing concepts of stability in use in the IEA literature, new insights on the nature of the gamma core in general are given as well as of the Chander-Tulkens solution within the gamma core. Free riding is also evaluated in relation with the alternative forms of stability under scrutiny. Finally, it is asked whether with the often mentioned virtue of “self enforcement” any conceptual gain is achieved, different from what is meant by efficiency and stability. A skeptical answer is offered, as a reply to Barrett’s (2003) attempt at giving the notion a specific content.International Environmental Agreements, Cooperation, Stability, Self-enforcement

Simulating with RICE Coalitionally Stable Burden Sharing Agreements for the Climate Change Problem

In this paper we test empirically with the Nordhaus and Yang (1996) RICE model the core property of the transfer scheme adv ocated by Germain, Toint and Tulkens (1997). This scheme is designed to sustain full cooperation in a voluntary international environmental agreement by making all countries at least as well off as they would be by joining coalitions adopting emission abatement policies that maximize their coalition payoff; under the scheme no individual country, nor any subset of countries would have an interest in leaving the international environmental agreement. The simulations show that the transfer scheme yields an allocation in the core of the carbon emission abatement game associated with the RICE model. Finally, we discuss some practical implications of the transfer scheme for current climate negotiations.Environmental economics, climate change, burden sharing, simulations, core of cooperative games

Using Distributed Representations to Disambiguate Biomedical and Clinical Concepts

In this paper, we report a knowledge-based method for Word Sense Disambiguation in the domains of biomedical and clinical text. We combine word representations created on large corpora with a small number of definitions from the UMLS to create concept representations, which we then compare to representations of the context of ambiguous terms. Using no relational information, we obtain comparable performance to previous approaches on the MSH-WSD dataset, which is a well-known dataset in the biomedical domain. Additionally, our method is fast and easy to set up and extend to other domains. Supplementary materials, including source code, can be found at https: //github.com/clips/yarnComment: 6 pages, 1 figure, presented at the 15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Berlin 201

A Short Review of Ethical Challenges in Clinical Natural Language Processing

Clinical NLP has an immense potential in contributing to how clinical practice will be revolutionized by the advent of large scale processing of clinical records. However, this potential has remained largely untapped due to slow progress primarily caused by strict data access policies for researchers. In this paper, we discuss the concern for privacy and the measures it entails. We also suggest sources of less sensitive data. Finally, we draw attention to biases that can compromise the validity of empirical research and lead to socially harmful applications.Comment: First Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing (EACL'17

"Mitigation, Adaptation, Suffering": In Search of the Right Mix in the Face of Climate Change

The usually assumed two categories of costs involved in climate change policy analysis, namely abatement and damage costs, hide the presence of a third category, namely adaptation costs. This dodges the determination of an appropriate level for them. Including adaptation costs explicitly in the total environmental cost function allows one to characterize the optimal (cost minimizing) balance between the three categories, in statics as well as in dynamics. Implications are derived for cost benefit analysis of adaptation expenditures.