Books on the topic 'Markov Equivalence'

The EU currently manages access by non-EU/-EEA states to the EU financial market through its ‘third country’ rules, which typically require that the financial governance regime of the state in question is ‘equivalent’ to the EU regime. However, the UK's departure from the EU by 31 March 2019 has raised questions about how UK, as a ‘third country,’ ensures access to the EU financial market, and how a related Free Trade Agreement (FTA) might be configured. This chapter first considers the current regulatory requirements governing third country access to the EU capital market and their implications for the Capital Markets Union. It then examines the evolution of third country/equivalence-related techniques internationally for capital markets and how they might be relevant for the EU. It also speculates as to how the EU's equivalence arrangements for third countries are likely to develop, including in the context of an EU/UK FTA.

The notion of equivalent income has been elaborated in the specialized context of comparing living standards of individuals in different situations regarding non-income attributes (household size, quality of life, market prices). It is defined as the income that would provide the same satisfaction as the current situation if the non-income attributes took particular reference values. Beyond the comparison of living standards, it deserves to be considered as a philosophically promising solution to the problem of interpersonal comparisons of well-being, for the context of social welfare evaluation. It appears indeed attractive when interpersonal comparisons are meant to respect individual preferences while focusing on objective functionings rather than subjective levels of satisfaction or happiness. In this chapter it is scrutinized and compared to alternative approaches: extended preferences, subjective well-being, capabilities.

Understanding change is essential in most scientific fields. This is highlighted by the importance of issues such as shifts in public health and changes in public opinion regarding politicians and policies. Nevertheless, our measurements of the world around us are often imperfect. For example, measurements of attitudes might be biased by social desirability, while estimates of health may be marred by low sensitivity and specificity. In this book we tackle the important issue of how to understand and estimate change in the context of data that are imperfect and exhibit measurement error. The book brings together the latest advances in the area of estimating change in the presence of measurement error from a number of different fields, such as survey methodology, sociology, psychology, statistics, and health. Furthermore, it covers the entire process, from the best ways of collecting longitudinal data, to statistical models to estimate change under uncertainty, to examples of researchers applying these methods in the real world. The book introduces the reader to essential issues of longitudinal data collection such as memory effects, panel conditioning (or mere measurement effects), the use of administrative data, and the collection of multi-mode longitudinal data. It also introduces the reader to some of the most important models used in this area, including quasi-simplex models, latent growth models, latent Markov chains, and equivalence/DIF testing. Further, it discusses the use of vignettes in the context of longitudinal data and estimation methods for multilevel models of change in the presence of measurement error.

This chapter discusses the law on the free movement of goods in the EU. Free movement of goods is one of the four ‘freedoms’ of the internal market. Obstacles to free movement comprise tariff barriers to trade (customs duties and charges having equivalent effect), non-tariff barriers to trade (quantitative restrictions and measures having equivalent effect), and discriminatory national taxation. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) prohibits all kinds of restrictions on trade between Member States. Article 30 (ex Article 25 EC) prohibits customs duties and charges having equivalent effect; Article 34 (ex Article 28 EC) prohibits quantitative restrictions and all measures having equivalent effect; and Article 110 (ex Article 90 EC) prohibits discriminatory national taxation.

The creation of a common market was (and is) a central task of the European Economic Community and today the European Union. The 1957 EEC Treaty thereby offered a variety of legal instruments to unite the different national markets into a ‘common’ European market. Originally, it closely followed the GATT suggestions in Article XXIV and outlawed customs duties (and equivalent measures), while it equally prohibited quantitative restrictions (and equivalent measures). The EEC Treaty also contained a non-discrimination provision for imported goods, yet the latter was textually confined to fiscal measures; and the question therefore arose how the 1957 Rome Treaty would regard State regulatory measures that discriminated against out-of-State goods. This chapter explores the constitutional choices made by the original Rome Treaty and the early Court with regard to market integration.

The chapter describes some asymmetric information models of liquidity. In these models, trades move prices because of the possibility that the trades are based on information not known to the market. A strategic trader is one who takes into consideration that her trades move prices. The chapter describes the Glosten‐Milgrom model of the bidask spread, the Kyle model of market depth, the Glosten model of limit‐order markets, and models of auctions. Except for the auction models, prices are set in these models by uninformed market makers who face adverse selection from informed traders. In the auction models, prices are set by informed individuals bidding against one another. The winner’s curse, the revenue equivalence theorem, and related aspects of auctions are explained.

The theory of intertemporal choice that we have developed so far assumes that there are no imperfections in the credit market. The ability to borrow and save as much as needed—imposing only the intertemporal budget constraint—allows the transfer of resources over time and thus maintenance of a stable consumption profile through the life cycle. The chapter studies how the consumer’s problem changes in the presence of credit market frictions. The latter may explain why consumption growth is sensitive to expected changes in income (excess sensitivity of consumption) and why it is greater than predicted by the certainty equivalence model (excess growth of consumption).

This chapter contributes to the debate on the future of European over-the-counter (OTC) clearing and relevant infrastructures in light of the Capital Markets Union and its re-configuration after Brexit. It begins by introducing some basic notions about clearing dynamics. It then analyses the available divorce options between the EU and the UK once Article 50 has been triggered, and their impact on clearing particularly in light of the European Market Infrastructure Regulation's equivalence regime. Next, it examines the worst-case scenario that would materialize if UK central counterparties (CCPs) were excluded from the single market, and considers possible network strategies that CCPs could adopt to remedy the consequences of Brexit.

Pareto optima and competitive equilibria are defined. Allocations are functions of market wealth (sharing rules) in Pareto optima, which means that all risks except market wealth are perfectly shared. Equilibria in complete markets are shown to be equivalent to Arrow‐Debreu equilibria and to be Pareto optimal. If investors all have linear risk tolerance with the same cautiousness parameter, then equilibria are Pareto optimal, equilibrium prices are independent of the initial wealth allocation (Gorman aggregation), and two‐fund separation holds (all investors hold the risk‐free asset and the market portfolio).

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing able students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter considers Articles 34-37 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Article 34 is the central provision and states that: ‘quantitative restrictions on imports and all measures having equivalent effect shall be prohibited between Member States’. Article 35 contains similar provisions relating to exports, while Article 36 provides an exception for certain cases in which a state is allowed to place restrictions on the movement of goods. The European Court of Justice’s interpretation of Articles 34-37 has been important in achieving single market integration. It has given a broad interpretation to the phrase ‘measures having equivalent effect’ to a quantitative restriction (MEQR), and has construed the idea of discrimination broadly to capture both direct and indirect discrimination.

This chapter examines Google's aims to dominate the global market for information services and data. Drawing from the suggestion that “information is the new oil of the Internet and the currency of the digital world,” it explores how Google's various endeavors seek to control each facet of the data market: data production, data extraction, data refinement, data infrastructure and distribution, and demand. It shows that there is no equivalent company that has ever been capable of dominance in each facet of the oil economy to the extent that Google leads in the data economy. The chapter also discusses the commodification of information in the modern internet economy and argues that Google's interest in internet freedom and connectivity lies in the fact that its survival (in the political economy sense of the word) depends on getting more and more people online to use its complimentary services.

Intellectual Property Law provides a detailed analysis of intellectual property law with reference to a wide range of academic opinion, giving a broad context for exploring the key principles of the subject. In this fifth edition, the introduction has been updated to take account of Brexit. Important developments covered include the introduction of a doctrine of equivalents into UK patent law, the reforms of EU trade mark law (particularly with respect to ‘representation’ of marks, and the ‘functionality exclusions’), and the development of the concept of ‘communication to the public’ by the CJEU. The book covers a number of areas of intellectual property law including copyright, patents, the legal regulation of designs, trade marks and passing off, confidential information, and litigation and remedies. The volume includes a new chapter on the tort of misuse of private information.

The CAPM and factor models in general are explained. Factors can be replaced by the returns or excess returns that are maximally correlated (the projections of the factors). A factor model is equivalent to an affine representation of an SDF and to spanning a return on the mean‐variance frontier. The use of alphas for performance evaluation is explained. Statistical factor models are defined as models in which factors explain the covariance matrix of returns. A proof is given of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory, which states that statistical factors are approximate pricing factors. The CAPM and the Fama‐French‐Carhart model are evaluated relative to portfolios based on sorts on size, book‐to‐market, and momentum.

Chapter 24 considers the most prominent alternative to expectation damages—specific performance. Specific performance is a judicial decree that orders a promisor to render the performance she agreed to render, on pain of a penalty for contempt of court if she does not. The principle that should govern specific-performance—the Specific-Performance Principle—is as follows: actual specific performance should be awarded unless a special moral, policy, or experiential reason suggests otherwise in a given class of cases or the promisee can achieve virtual specific performance by acquiring goods or services in the market that are equivalent to the contracted-for goods or services. Under this principle specific performance should be liberally but not routinely granted.

This article attempts to locate MT (machine translation) in the contemporary context, while identifying its recent trends and themes. The 1990s were marked by the growing clout of empirical approaches, using increasingly available amounts of raw data in the form of parallel corpora. An appropriate instance is statistical MT, depending on bilingual corpus, but wherein, the translation depends on statistical modeling of the word order of target language and of source-target word equivalences. Example-based MT involves matching inputs against actual databases and identifying close matches. Successful MT, especially when attempting translation into languages marking gender of pronouns, those that have zero-anaphora contents, interpretation of anaphora assumes paramountcy. Regarding spoken-language MTs, coupling speech-to-text front-end and text-to-speech, the other way, is inadequate other than rigidly formal languages. More versatile operations such as dealing with dialogues, would involve greater complexities.

This chapter introduces the reader to Artin's classical braid groups Bₙ. The group Bₙ is isomorphic to the mapping class group of a disk with n marked points. Since disks are planar, the braid groups lend themselves to special pictorial representations. This gives the theory of braid groups its own special flavor within the theory of mapping class groups. The chapter begins with a discussion of three equivalent ways of thinking about the braid group, focusing on Artin's classical definition, fundamental groups of configuration spaces, and the mapping class group of a punctured disk. It then presents some classical facts about the algebraic structure of the braid group, after which a new proof of the Birman–Hilden theorem is given to relate the braid groups to the mapping class groups of closed surfaces.

Haydn’s instrumental music is often marked by peculiarities—events that feature harmonic deflections, gasping pauses, metrically dissonant accents, and the like—for which the customary methods of structural and stylistic analysis can promise only limited explanation. The evolving language of Disability Studies in music offers a vantage point for contemplating such idiosyncrasies, most notably those that suggest musical equivalents of impairment and recovery. A disability-related perspective may serve as a guide in the search for appropriate metaphors: words and images that can help breathe life into our interaction with a given work as listeners and performers. As witnessed in certain passages from Haydn’s string quartets and a symphony, a reading that shows the music to embody disabling conditions and their remediation helps us connect with emotions and experiences that may resonate with the lives of the composer and his contemporaries as well as with our own.

The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam and assignment questions. Each book includes key debates, typical questions, diagram answer plans, suggested answers, author commentary and tips to gain extra marks. This chapter deals with divorce, dissolution, separation orders and judicial separation and contains a mixture of essay and problem questions. The first question is a problem question that considers the ground and facts for divorce contained in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 and the equivalent provisions of the Civil Partnership Act 2004. The second is a problem question that also requires students to apply the law of divorce, but further necessitates consideration of judicial separation. The third and fourth questions are essay questions that focus on reform of divorce law and the use of mediation in divorce proceedings.

Each Concentrate revision guide is packed with essential information, key cases, revision tips, exam Q&As, and more. Concentrates show you what to expect in a law exam, what examiners are looking for, and how to achieve extra marks. This chapter discusses the leasehold estate. A lease is one of the estates in land capable of being legal. Without both certainty of term and exclusive possession there can be no lease, although the presence of both does not necessarily mean that a lease exists. Formalities for the creation of a legal lease differ depending upon the duration of the lease. Where these formalities have not been met, an equitable lease may exist provided there is a valid contract capable of specific performance. An equitable lease is not as good as the legal equivalent. The most common types of leases are fixed term and periodic. The process of terminating a lease by forfeiture varies depending upon the type of covenant breached.

Bohr, inspired by Fermi’s discovery of slow neutrons, conceived his theory of the compound nucleus by the end of 1935. He went on to speculate that if the energy of a neutron incident on a nucleus were increased to the fantastically high energy of 1000 million electron volts, the compound nucleus would explode. Using small wooden models Otto Robert Frisch had constructed, Bohr lectured widely on his theory on a trip around the world in the first half of 1937. By then, Russian-born theoretical physicist Gregory Breit and Hungarian-born theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner in Princeton had conceived their fundamentally equivalent theory of neutron+nucleus resonances. Together, their theory and Bohr’s transformed the theory of nuclear reactions. Orso Mario Corbino, Fermi’s mentor, friend, and protector, died on January 23, 1937, at age sixty. Ernest Rutherford, the greatest experimental physicist since Michael Faraday, died on October 19, 1937, at age sixty-six.

The book examines the role of the United Kingdom (UK) in shaping post-crisis financial regulatory reform, and assesses the implications of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU). It develops a domestic political economy approach to examine how the interaction of three domestic groups—elected officials, financial regulators, and the financial industry—shaped UK preferences, strategy, and influence in international and EU-level regulatory negotiations. The framework is applied to five case studies: bank capital and liquidity requirements; bank recovery and resolution rules; bank structural reforms; hedge fund regulation; and the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives. We conclude by reflecting on the future of UK financial regulation after Brexit. The book argues that UK regulators pursued more stringent regulation when they had strong political support to resist financial industry lobbying. UK regulators promoted international harmonization of rules when this protected the competitiveness of industry or enabled cross-border externalities to be managed more effectively, but were often more resistant to new EU rules when these threatened UK interests. Consequently, the UK was more successful at shaping international standards by leveraging its market power, regulatory capacity, and alliance-building (with the US). But it often met with greater political resistance at the EU level, forcing it to use legal challenges to block reform or secure exemptions. The book concludes that political and regulatory pressure was pivotal in defining the UK’s ‘hard’ Brexit position, and so the future UK–EU relationship in finance will most likely be based on a framework of regulatory equivalence.

What does liberal order actually amount to outside the West, where it has been most institutionalised? Contrary to the Atlantic or Pacific, liberal hegemony is thin in the Indian Ocean World; there are no equivalents of NATO, the EU or the US–Japan defence relationship. Yet what this book calls the "Global Indian Ocean" was the beating heart of earlier epochs of globalisation, where experiments in international order, market integration and cosmopolitanisms were pioneered. Moreover, it is in this macro-region that today's challenges will face their defining hour: climate change, pandemics, and the geopolitical contest pitting China and Pakistan against the USA and India. The Global Indian Ocean states represent the greatest range of political systems and ideologies in any region, from Hindu-nationalist India and nascent democracy in Indonesia and South Africa, to the Gulf's mixture of tribal monarchy and high modernism. These essays by leading scholars examine key aspects of political order, and their roots in the colonial and pre-colonial past, through the lenses of state-building, nationalism, international security, religious identity and economic development. The emergent lessons are of great importance for the world, as the "global" liberal order fades and new alternatives struggle to be born.

The rise of post-truth politics marks the most serious crisis of Western liberal democracy since the end of the Cold War. The decline of trust in expert knowledge and mainstream media, the rise of social media devoid of a gatekeeping function and the growth of covert external interference in electoral processes have led to fragmentation, polarization and destabilization of Western democratic systems. What makes post-truth politics so difficult to resist is its apparently democratic character that claims to challenge bureaucratic depoliticization, the rule of experts and the disappearance of alternatives to the hegemonic policy. Biopolitics after Truth refutes this interpretation both historically and conceptually, arguing that by reducing every statement to an opinion equivalent to any other the post-truth ideology leads to the degradation of the public sphere that is essential to democratic governance. Rather than enable resistance to expertise-based biopolitical governmentalities, truth denialism dissolves the only framework where their contestation and transformation could take place. In contrast, Biopolitics after Truth argues for a positive role of truth-telling in the democratization of biopolitical governance. Drawing on Foucault’s late work on truth and subjectivity, it develops an approach to truth-telling as a disruptive speech act that constitutes a political form of life.

The book provides a thorough analysis of the genealogy and the functional logic of German capitalism over the last 130 years. It addresses several puzzles of the existing literature, in particular how economic coordination proved possible and remained stable in a (big) country without prominent traits of neo-corporatism, without long government participation of social democratic parties, without centralized wage bargaining, without active economic steering by the government, under a “monetarist” regime, and under an allegedly liberal, namely “ordoliberal” economic policy. The central claim of the book is that the functional equivalent for all that was a “conservative-continental” welfare state which provided labor and capital with the organizational resources and the infrastructure to establish and maintain long-term economic coordination (of which we know that it is not-self-enforcing, i.e. that it needs institutional support). A better understanding of the German case, which can be seen as prototypical for other continental political economies as well, thus provides us also with a much better understanding of the different variants of coordinated market economies in northern, continental, and southern Europe, i.e. it provides us with a more profound Comparative Political Economy framework. This has important implications for contemporary debates on Germany’s role within international trade, and especially on its role within Europe and especially within the eurozone and its crisis. Much of the current debate, so the book claims, is based on an incomplete account of the functional logic of Modell Deutschland.

E-government refers to a set of public administration and governance goals and practices involving information and communication technologies (ICTs). It utilizes such technologies to serve public agencies’ external audiences and constituents. However, the scope of that service is the subject of much debate and, consequently, no consensual definition of e-government had been formulated. The prehistory of e-government resonates with assumptions from the “new public management” (NPM), which proposed a restructuring of governmental agencies by adopting a market-based approach to ensure cost efficiencies in the public sector. Coined in the mid-1990s, the notion of e-government as equivalent to better government, economic growth, human development, and the knowledge society in general was quickly and uncritically accepted by practitioners and scholars alike. As scholars from different disciplines, including politics communication and sociology, paid increasing attention to the intersections of structural factors, hardware, and culture in the adoption and use of ICTs, research on e-government began to show some diversification. By the twenty-first century, the number of e-government websites from local and national administrations has grown sufficiently to allow some generalizations based on empirical observation. Meanwhile critical and comprehensive approaches to e-government frequently adopt a critical stance to denounce oversimplifications, determinisms, and omissions in the formulation of e-governance projects, as well as in the evaluation, adoption, and assessment of e-government effectiveness. Beyond the particularities of each emerging technology, reflection on the intersections between ICTs and government is moving away from an exclusive focus on hardware and functionality, to consider broader questions on governance.

The variety of conditions that are considered to be ‘cancer’ is extremely wide, with marked variation in the management approach from disease to disease. A common feature in the management of malignant conditions, however, is the involvement of a wide range of medical professionals at different stages of the patient pathway. This commonly includes physicians, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, and specialist nurses, as well as a plethora of other allied disciplines. As such, a practice that has been widely adopted is to work as a multidisciplinary team (MDT), with regular meetings to decide the appropriate treatment for each patient with a cancer diagnosis, on an individual and case-by-case basis. The main treatment modalities for the treatment of cancer are surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. While these are often combined to form a multimodality therapy, they are all, in isolation, potentially radical (curative) therapies for certain conditions. For example, surgery (in the case of a Stage I colon adenocarcinoma), radiotherapy (in the case of early laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma), and chemotherapy (in the case of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia) are all curative as single-modality treatments. It is commonly the case, however, for a patient to require more than one mode of therapy to achieve the best outcome, for example a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy for early breast cancer. It can also be the case that two or more different management strategies are thought to give equivalent oncological results, for example surgery or radiotherapy for early prostate cancer. In this situation, the MDT and the patient need to decide on the ‘best’ management plan for the individual, based on their personal and professional opinions and on the differing toxicity profiles of the alternate treatments.

This 2018 AAPM summer school book covers all the important aspects of current IGRT techniques used in clinics, as well as some emerging technologies that may become available in the future. Reviewers have high praise for the book’s editors and world-renowned contributors. From Doody’s Reviews…"It was genuinely enjoyable to read this book and to have it as a reference for routine clinical, educational, and research needs. It is a must-have for trainees preparing for ABR board exams. To the best of my knowledge, there is not an equivalent or comparable book on the market that is as clear, current, or complete. I highly recommend this book to all medical physicists." From Taoran Li in Medical Physics…"This is definitely a much-needed book, as IGRT has become standard practice in our field, but we had not seen a comprehensive summary based on up-to-date technologies, until the arrival of this book." Image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) has been used since the inception of radiation treatment, but its usage became routine with the development of gantry-mounted cone-beam CT systems in the early 21st century. IGRT is now the norm in the clinics equipped with modern radiation therapy delivery systems. All patients undergoing radiation therapy benefit from this widely available technology, as it enables more accurate delivery of radiation to the intended targets. Since IGRT is a confluence of radiation therapy and imaging physics, many of the topics covered here focus on the application of imaging physics in therapy. Although the majority of image-guidance devices use ionizing radiation, the imaging modalities that use non-ionizing radiation are also included here. This book provides an overview of the state-of-the-art image-guidance techniques employed in radiotherapy, and it provides necessary information to medical physicists who would like to know about current image guidance techniques and modalities.

La región asiste a una constante sucesión de reformas procesales, producto de la irrefutable insatisfacción de la sociedad con sus sistemas de enjuiciamiento. De entre las múltiples preocupaciones que vienen aparejadas con esos movimientos reformistas destaca aquella por la independencia judicial, un tópico de indagación multidisciplinar: desde la ciencia política a la ciencia jurídica, desde la teoría del Estado a la teoría constitucional y, por cierto, a la teoría procesal. La propia conceptualización de la independencia judicial no es unívoca y, así, los acentos aparecen en distintos aspectos. Una mirada recurrente y tradicional apunta al marco institucional: la independencia judicial se asocia al “autogobierno”, a la “autonomía” e, incluso, a la “autarquía financiera”. En un sentido casi contraintuitivo, se define la independencia judicial como la “sumisión exclusiva a la ley” y, coherentemente, como la no sumisión a tribunales superiores, a otro poder ni a entidad o persona alguna; en suma, a la ausencia de subordinación jerárquica. Al fin, se pensará el deber de independencia de los jueces como correlato del derecho de los ciudadanos a ser juzgados desde el sistema jurídico y no desde parámetros extrajurídicos del sistema social (moral, política, economía, preferencias sociales, modas, entre otros. Con acierto, el compilador del libro que comentamos instala el tema en un tiempo en el que se pretende abrir los espacios para la solución jurídica de los conflictos más allá de las fronteras del proceso judicial. Desde ese punto de partida se puede valorar que la obra cuenta con investigaciones generales sobre la independencia judicial, pero también se amplían las referencias procesales a cuestiones vinculadas a medios alternativos de solución de conflictos, en particular la conciliación y el arbitraje. Entre los trabajos generales, los profesores Diana Ramírez Carvajal y Michele Taruffo —quienes conciben al derecho como un fenómeno en la cultura— tratan las relaciones entre los principios de independencia e imparcialidad, frente a los desafíos que se presentan a la labor judicial en este tiempo, y en particular en Colombia. Dentro de los diversos tópicos que señalan los autores, merece especial atención el acertado tratamiento del tema sobrelos efectos que la falta de independencia del vértice de la pirámide judicial produce en la función de todos los jueces. Por su parte el magistrado y docente Danilo Rojas Betancourth expone un metódico trabajo para aclarar las connotaciones del concepto de independencia judicial en el derecho. Destaca la necesidad de entenderlo dando prevalencia a su enfoque como derecho humano, “tanto como exigencia de los jueces mismos, como de los ciudadanos en aras de justicia”. Las profesoras Luz Amparo Granada de Espinal y Catalina Merino Martínez se hacen cargo de unos de los temas de mayor impacto en la adjudicación judicial en el derecho continental: los casos en los que la decisión implica asumir una colisión de principios. La profesora María del Socorro Rueda Fonseca, mediante un sugerente título “El proceso entre las cuerdas”, elabora un análisis comparado del sistema oral y del sistema escrito de la jurisdicción ordinaria colombiana, denunciando que las reformas judiciales que han previsto reducir los niveles de congestión no cumplen sus objetivos. Martha Eugenia Lezcano Miranda trata sobre los retos que para la justicia tiene el fortalecimiento de los medios alternativos de solución de conflictos y las jurisdicciones equivalentes, no solo en Colombia sino en otros países latinoamericanos. Entre sus propuestas cabe resaltar la de fomentar una sólida formación de los jueces en ese ámbito. El tema del arbitraje es desarrollado en varios trabajos. Laura Carballo Piñeiro muestra lo que a su entender son las insuficiencias de los arbitrajes colectivos en la experiencia española. Ana Luiza Nery no solo presenta un pormenorizado análisis conceptual del arbitraje colectivo sino que además especifica los impactos institucionales que este puede ocasionar en el sistema jurídico brasileño. A su vez Cindy Charlotte Reyes Sinisterra muestra los retos que tiene el árbitro de inversión en el posconflicto en Colombia: ¿pueden invocarse los acuerdos de paz como eximentes del cumplimiento de las obligaciones asumidas por el Estado en un Tratado Bilateral de Inversión? El tema de los Mecanismos Alternativos de Solución de Conflictos (quizás una de las cuestiones más relevantes para la cultura actual), lo desarrollan Adriana Patricia Arboleda López, Luis Fernando Garcés Giraldo, Eduardo Murillo Bocanegra, Astelio Silvera Sarmiento, Jovany Sepúlveda Aguirre y Dany Esteban Gallego Quiceno en el ámbito de la conciliación extrajudicial, con el marcado objetivo de reconocerlo como un mecanismo gratuito, rápido y eficaz para la solución de conflictos jurídicos. Joan Picó i Junoy elabora algunas reflexiones sobre la independencia de los peritos judiciales, aproximándose a las diferencias entre la independencia y la imparcialidad judicial y el interrogante sobre si estas deben cobijar a los peritos judiciales de la misma manera como lo hacen con los jueces. Por último, Darío Alejandro Rojas Araque describe los avances que para el proceso de nulidad matrimonial trajo aparejada la reforma procesal del Papa Francisco de 2015, recortando no solo el tiempo del proceso, sino sus costos económicos. En suma, desde mi propia perspectiva de magistrado y profesor universitario, preocupado por la indagación acerca de mi tarea como juez, me complace destacar la profundidad, solvencia y variedad de estos aportes que, sin duda, contribuirán a reflexionar sobre varios de sus aspectos sobresalientes: la solución pacífica de los conflictos de los ciudadanos, las condiciones de la adjudicación de los derechos (sobre todo, la “independencia judicial”) y la propuesta de otras vías adecuadas que colaboran a la efectividad del acceso a justicia.