Views from Hamburg : the Juno Trader case or how to make sense of the coastal State's rights in the light of its duty of prompt release

Special edition: The United Nations and international legal order - the case of the Juno Trader - on 18 December 2004, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ordered the prompt release of a refrigerated cargo vessel and its cargo for fisheries violations in an exclusive economic zone - Tribunal unanimously decided that the vessel and cargo be released, upon posting of a bond in the form of a bank guarantee - crew should be free to leave without conditions - in this case, on prompt release, the Tribunal made valuable contributions to existing case law on the issue - shows that specialised tribunals may perform a decentralised application of the international rule of law - crystallises international fundamental standards of fairness and human rights.

Dysprosodic speech following basal ganglia insult: Toward a conceptual framework for the study of cerebral representation of prosody

Progress in understanding brain/behavior relationships in adult-acquired dysprosody has led to models of cortical hemispheric representation of prosodic processing based on functional (linguistic vs affective) or physical (timing vs pitch) parameters. These explanatory perspectives have not been reconciled, and also a number of neurobehavior syndromes that include dysprosody among their neurological signs have not yet been integrated. In addition to expanding the functional perspective on prosody, some of these syndromes have implicated a significant role of subcortical nuclei in prosodic competence. In this article, two patients with acquired dysprosodic speech following damage to basal ganglia nuclei were evaluated using behavioral, acoustic, cognitive, and radiographic approaches. Selective quantitative measures were performed on each individual’s performance to provide detailed verification and clarification of clinical observations, and to test hypotheses regarding prosodic function. These studies, combined with a review of related clinical research findings, exemplify the value of a broader perspective on the neurobehavioral dysfunction underlying acquired adult dysprosodic speech, and lead to a new, proposed conceptual framework for the cerebral representation of prosody.

Effectiveness of document representation for classification

Conventionally, document classification researches focus on improving the learning capabilities of classifiers. Nevertheless, according to our observation, the effectiveness of classification is limited by the suitability of document representation. Intuitively, the more features that are used in representation, the more comprehensive that documents are represented. However, if a representation contains too many irrelevant features, the classifier would suffer from not only the curse of high dimensionality, but also overfitting. To address this problem of suitableness of document representations, we present a classifier-independent approach to measure the effectiveness of document representations. Our approach utilises a labelled document corpus to estimate the distribution of documents in the feature space. By looking through documents in this way, we can clearly identify the contributions made by different features toward the document classification. Some experiments have been performed to show how the effectiveness is evaluated. Our approach can be used as a tool to assist feature selection, dimensionality reduction and document classification.

Simulation based knowledge elicitation:effect of visual representation and model parameters

Since much knowledge is tacit, eliciting knowledge is a common bottleneck during the development of knowledge-based systems. Visual interactive simulation (VIS) has been proposed as a means for eliciting experts’ decision-making by getting them to interact with a visual simulation of the real system in which they work. In order to explore the effectiveness and efficiency of VIS based knowledge elicitation, an experiment has been carried out with decision-makers in a Ford Motor Company engine assembly plant. The model properties under investigation were the level of visual representation (2-dimensional, 2½-dimensional and 3-dimensional) and the model parameter settings (unadjusted and adjusted to represent more uncommon and extreme situations). The conclusion from the experiment is that using a 2-dimensional representation with adjusted parameter settings provides the better simulation-based means for eliciting knowledge, at least for the case modelled.

An investigation into the use of knowledge representation in computer-integrated manufacturing

In a certain automobile factory, batch-painting of the body types in colours is controlled by an allocation system. This tries to balance production with orders, whilst making optimally-sized batches of colours. Sequences of cars entering painting cannot be optimised for easy selection of colour and batch size. `Over-production' is not allowed, in order to reduce buffer stocks of unsold vehicles. Paint quality is degraded by random effects. This thesis describes a toolkit which supports IKBS in an object-centred formalism. The intended domain of use for the toolkit is flexible manufacturing. A sizeable application program was developed, using the toolkit, to test the validity of the IKBS approach in solving the real manufacturing problem above, for which an existing conventional program was already being used. A detailed statistical analysis of the operating circumstances of the program was made to evaluate the likely need for the more flexible type of program for which the toolkit was intended. The IKBS program captures the many disparate and conflicting constraints in the scheduling knowledge and emulates the behaviour of the program installed in the factory. In the factory system, many possible, newly-discovered, heuristics would be awkward to represent and it would be impossible to make many new extensions. The representation scheme is capable of admitting changes to the knowledge, relying on the inherent encapsulating properties of object-centres programming to protect and isolate data. The object-centred scheme is supported by an enhancement of the `C' programming language and runs under BSD 4.2 UNIX. The structuring technique, using objects, provides a mechanism for separating control of expression of rule-based knowledge from the knowledge itself and allowing explicit `contexts', within which appropriate expression of knowledge can be done. Facilities are provided for acquisition of knowledge in a consistent manner.

Designing a safety management support system using open architecture databases: the requirements of information representation in the support of managers' risk-related decision-making

This research was conducted at the Space Research and Technology Centre o the European Space Agency at Noordvijk in the Netherlands. ESA is an international organisation that brings together a range of scientists, engineers and managers from 14 European member states. The motivation for the work was to enable decision-makers, in a culturally and technologically diverse organisation, to share information for the purpose of making decisions that are well informed about the risk-related aspects of the situations they seek to address. The research examined the use of decision support system DSS) technology to facilitate decision-making of this type. This involved identifying the technology available and its application to risk management. Decision-making is a complex activity that does not lend itself to exact measurement or precise understanding at a detailed level. In view of this, a prototype DSS was developed through which to understand the practical issues to be accommodated and to evaluate alternative approaches to supporting decision-making of this type. The problem of measuring the effect upon the quality of decisions has been approached through expert evaluation of the software developed. The practical orientation of this work was informed by a review of the relevant literature in decision-making, risk management, decision support and information technology. Communication and information technology unite the major the,es of this work. This allows correlation of the interests of the research with European public policy. The principles of communication were also considered in the topic of information visualisation - this emerging technology exploits flexible modes of human computer interaction (HCI) to improve the cognition of complex data. Risk management is itself an area characterised by complexity and risk visualisation is advocated for application in this field of endeavour. The thesis provides recommendations for future work in the fields of decision=making, DSS technology and risk management.

The Use of Situation Representation when Searching for Solutions in Computer Aided Design Systems

Projects solutions reuse methodology is offered for software development. The main idea consists in connection of the system objective with the situation using the entities which describe the condition of the system in the process of the objective statement. Every situation is associated with one or several design solutions, which can be used at the development. Based on this connection the situation representing language has been created, it lets to express a problem situation using a natural language describe. The similarity measure has been built to compare situations, it is based on the similarity coefficients with adding the absent part weight.

Issues of collaboration, representation, meaning and emotions:utilising participant-led visual diaries to capture the everyday lives of people in mid to later life

In recent years there has been an increasing use of visual methods in ageing research. There are, however, limited reflections and critical explorations of the implications of using visual methods in research with people in mid to later life. This paper examines key methodological complexities when researching the daily lives of people as they grow older and the possibilities and limitations of using participant-generated visual diaries. The paper will draw on our experiences of an empirical study, which included a sample of 62 women and men aged 50 years and over with different daily routines. Participant-led photography was drawn upon as a means to create visual diaries, followed by in-depth, photo-elicitation interviews. The paper will critically reflect on the use of visual methods for researching the daily lives of people in mid to later life, as well as suggesting some wider tensions within visual methods that warrant attention. First, we explore the extent to which photography facilitates a ‘collaborative’ research process; second, complexities around capturing the ‘everydayness’ of daily routines are explored; third, the representation and presentation of ‘self’ by participants within their images and interview narratives is examined; and, finally, we highlight particular emotional considerations in visualising daily life.

On the impossibility of fair risk allocation

Measuring and allocating risk properly are crucial for performance evaluation and internal capital allocation of portfolios held by banks, insurance companies, investment funds and other entities subject to financial risk. We show that by using a coherent measure of risk it is impossible to allocate risk satisfying the natural requirements of (Solution) Core Compatibility, Equal Treatment Property and Strong Monotonicity. To obtain the result we characterize the Shapley value on the class of totally balanced games and also on the class of exact games.

Osztozkodási játékok (Games of fair division)

In this survey we presented several proportional and envy-free cake-cutting algorithms. We also mentioned some interesting open problems.

On the impossibility of fair risk allocation

Measuring and allocating risk properly are crucial for performance evaluation and internal capital allocation of portfolios held by banks, insurance companies, investment funds and other entities subject to financial risk. We show that by using coherent measures of risk it is impossible to allocate risk satisfying simultaneously the natural requirements of Core Compatibility, Equal Treatment Property and Strong Monotonicity. To obtain the result we characterize the Shapley value on the class of totally balanced games and also on the class of exact games.

The effect of bilingual representation in prose reading on explicit and implicit memory

Chinese-English bilingual students were randomly assigned to three reading conditions: In the English-English (E-E) condition (n = 44), a text in English was read twice; in the English-Chinese (E-C) condition (n = 30), the English text was read first and its Chinese translation was read second; in the Chinese-English (C-E) condition (n = 30), the Chinese text was read first and English second. An expected explicit memory test on propositions in the format of sentence verification was given followed by an unexpected implicit memory test on unfamiliar word-forms.^ Analyses of covariance were conducted with explicit and implicit memory scores as the dependent variables, reading condition (bilingual versus monolingual) as the independent variable, and TOEFL reading score as the covariate.^ The results showed that the bilingual reading groups outperformed the monolingual reading group on explicit memory tested by sentence-verification but not on implicit memory tested by forced-choice word-identification, implying that bilingual representation facilitates explicit memory of propositional information but not implicit memory of lexical forms. The findings were interpreted as consistent with separate bilingual memory-storage models and the implications of such models in the study of cognitive structures were discussed in relationship to issues of dual coding theory, multiple memory systems, and the linguistic relativity philosophy. ^