Foundational Because Prescient (and Unfortunately, Cassandra-like Prescience)

As a law professor who teaches civil procedure and mediation, Pursuing Settlement reads like a history. Menkel-Meadow’s uncanny accuracy in predicting the future, her prescient fears for where institutionalization of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) might take us, and the remarkable continued relevance of her suggested reforms and accompanying experimentation combine to make an easy case for declaring her work foundational....

Improving Singing Voice Separation Using Curriculum Learning on Recurrent Neural Networks

Single-channel singing voice separation has been considered a difficult task, as it requires predicting two different audio sources independently from mixed vocal and instrument sounds recorded by a single microphone. We propose a new singing voice separation approach based on the curriculum learning framework, in which learning is started with only easy examples and then task difficulty is gradually increased. In this study, we regard the data providing obviously dominant characteristics of a single source as an easy case and the other data as a difficult case. To quantify the dominance property between two sources, we define a dominance factor that determines a difficulty level according to relative intensity between vocal sound and instrument sound. If a given data is determined to provide obviously dominant characteristics of a single source according to the factor, it is regarded as an easy case; otherwise, it belongs to a difficult case. Early stages in the learning focus on easy cases, thus allowing rapidly learning overall characteristics of each source. On the other hand, later stages handle difficult cases, allowing more careful and sophisticated learning. In experiments conducted on three song datasets, the proposed approach demonstrated superior performance compared to the conventional approaches.

China's Economic Engagement in North Korea

Since 2005, central Chinese leaders have successfully encouraged local governments and commercial actors to expand their economic interactions with North Korea. However, the resulting expansion in commercial actors and economic interactions has intensified a principal-agent dilemma for Chinese leaders, exacerbating diplomatic tensions, eroding border security, and undermining popular support for Beijing's engagement strategy. In comparison with China's other neighbours, North Korea presents both a difficult case for stimulating economic engagement and a relatively easy case for enforcement. These dynamics are even more likely to emerge across China's 13 other land neighbours.