Building on Tangcharoensathien and colleagues’ description of four tactics used by the tobacco, alcohol, processed food, and breast milk substitute industries to interfere with the development and implementation of health policies, we present a fifth tactic: trade and investment disputes. We describe recent examples of trade and investment claims filed by the tobacco in...

A  $ mu $-way  $ G $-trade ($ mu geq 2) $  consists of $ mu $ disjoint decompositions of some simple (underlying) graph $ H $ into copies of a graph $ G. $  The   number of copies of the  graph $ G $ in  each of the decompositions is the volume of the $ G $-trade and   denoted by $ s. $ In this paper, we determine all values  $ s $ for which there exists a $  mu $-way   $ K_{1,m} $-trade of  vo...

Concerns regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have raised awareness about the negative public health impacts of trade and investment agreements. In the past decade, we have learned much about the implications of trade agreements for public health: reduced equity in access to health services; increased flows of unhealthy commodities; limits on access to medicines; and constrained policy...

We want to thank the authors for responding to our paper and for apprising readers as to the effects of the new information technologies in Asian educational settings. We think Miyake has characterized our argument very accurately and succinctly. As she points out the equity issues we raise are exacerbated in Asia because the resources available through new technologies are mostly in English. B...

The SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) is a computer vision algorithm that is used to detect and describe the local image features. The SIFT features are robust to changes in illumination, noise, and minor changes in viewpoint. The SIFT features have been used object recognition, image retrieval and matching, and so on.. The research of SIFT descriptors and improved SIFT descriptors is im...

Iris is one of the most reliable biometric traits due to its stability and randomness. Iris is transformed to polar coordinates by the conventional recognition systems. They perform well for the cooperative databases, but the performance deteriorates for the non-cooperative irises. In addition to this, aliasing effect is introduced as a result of transforming iris to polar domain. In this thesi...

In a supplier-retailer-buyer supply chain, the supplier frequently offers the retailer a trade credit of  periods, and the retailer in turn provides a trade credit of  periods to her/his buyer to stimulate sales and reduce inventory. From the seller’s perspective, granting trade credit increases sales and revenue but also increases opportunity cost (i.e., the capital opportunity loss during cre...

background negotiations surrounding the trans-pacific partnership (tpp) trade and investment agreement have recently concluded. although trade and investment agreements, part of a broader shift to global economic integration, have been argued to be vital to improved economic growth, health, and general welfare, these agreements have increasingly come under scrutiny for their direct and indirect...

Why has SIFT been so successful? Why its extension, DSP-SIFT, can further improve SIFT? Is there a theory that can explain both? How can such theory benefit real applications? Can it suggest new algorithms with reduced computational complexity or new descriptors with better accuracy for matching? We construct a general theory of local descriptors for visual matching. Our theory relies on concep...