Measuring the Frequency Occurrence of Handwriting and Handprinting Characteristics,

The premise of this study was to take a valid population sampling of handwriting and handprinting and assess how many times each of the predetermined characteristic is found in the samples. Approximately 1500 handwriting specimens were collected from across the United States and pared to obtain a representative sample of the U.S. adult population according to selected demographics based on age, sex, ethnicity, handedness, education level, and location of lower‐grade school education. This study has been able to support a quantitative assessment of extrinsic and intrinsic effects in handwriting and handprinting for the six subgroups. Additional results include analyses of the interdependence of characteristics. This study found that 98.55% of handprinted characteristics and 97.39% of cursive characteristics had an independence correlation of under 0.2. The conclusions support use of the product rule in general, but with noted caveats. Finally, this study provides frequency occurrence proportions for 776 handwriting and handprinting characteristics.     

No iceberg in sight: on the absence of WTO disputes challenging fossil fuel subsidies

The empirical record of dispute settlement cases under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on energy subsidies consists only of cases against renewable energy (RE) subsidies, whereas WTO members have not challenged others’ much larger and environmentally harmful fossil fuel subsidies. Yet, the WTO agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures would at first sight seem to create possibilities to forestall environmentally harmful subsidization. In this article, we assess possible explanations for the skewed distribution of energy subsidies dispute settlement complaints at the WTO. We argue that differences in legally relevant characteristics of fossil fuel subsidies, on the one hand, and RE subsidies, on the other hand, largely explain this observation. In the case of RE subsidies, in particular, the disputes filed to date have targeted a much narrower set of measures than the whole range of RE subsidies currently in place, namely those incorporating a local content requirement component. Although this finding is not new, we have probed into this question more systematically, both by widening the scope of the empirical analysis from actual to potential WTO disputes on energy-related policies the European Union and the USA might have initiated, and by systematically assessing the plausibility of alternative explanations.     

Ink dating,part I: Statistical distribution of selected ageing parameters in a ballpoint inks reference population

The development of ink dating methods requires an important amount of work in order to be reliably applicable in practice. Major tasks include the definition of ageing parameters to monitor ink ageing. An adequate parameter should ideally fulfil the following criteria: it should evolve as a function of time in a monotonic way, be measurable in a majority of ink entries, be as accurate and reproducible as possible, and finally it should not be influenced too much by transfer and storage conditions. This work aimed at evaluating the potential of seven ageing parameters for ink dating purposes: the phenoxyethanol quantity, relative peak areas (RPA), three solvent loss ratios (R%, R%*, NR%) and two solvent loss parameters (R_NORM, NR_NORM). These were calculated over approximately one year for 25 inks selected from a large database to represent different ageing behaviours. Ink entries were analysed using liquid extraction followed by GC/MS analysis. Results showed that natural ageing parameters (NR% and NR_NORM) were not suitable ageing parameters for ink entries older than a few weeks. RPA used other compounds present in ink formulations in combination to PE in order to normalise the results. However, it presented particular difficulties as they could not be defined for all inks and were thus applicable only for 64% of the studied inks. Finally, the PE quantity, R% and R_NORM allowed to follow the ageing of the selected inks over the whole time frame and were identified as the most promising. These were thus selected to test three different interpretation models in the second part of this article. The possibilities and limitations of ink dating methods will be discussed in a legal perspective.     

International Organisations and States Within an Agency Relationship: The Distribution of Responsibility

Netherlands International Law Review - This article first examines the entire range of agency relationships between an international organisation, acting as a principal, and one or more states,...     

Foreign Direct Investment in China: Determinants and Effects

This paper attempts to assess the determinants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in China and its effects on the whole economy. After presenting the main theoretical contributions and the previous works done about China’s inward-FDI, an empirical study has been implemented extending the previous ones with a different data set (more recent) and with different methodologies. The traditional determinants of FDI seem to be relevant for China: domestic market size, cost advantages and openness to the rest of the world. Concerning the consequences of FDI on the Chinese economy, our empirical evidence supports the view that FDI affects China’s growth through the diffusion of ideas. Through the introduction of new ideas, multinational firms develop technical progress and hence long-run economic growth. The transmission of ideas seems to have had a positive effect on the Chinese growth.     

Inclusive digital finance: the industry of equity crowdfunding

The Journal of Technology Transfer - Nowadays equity crowdfunding plays an important role in the entrepreneurial finance markets. To better understand the functioning of the industry, it is...     

Rethinking the English–Arabic Legal Translation Course: Restructuring for Specific Competence Acquisition

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The standards for translating texts in specialized fields have become particularly rigorous with...