As soon as Laura climbs on to the unicorn's back she is hurled into a wild and magical world. For only with Laura as their leader can Spellhorn and the Wild Ones reach the safety of the Bright Wilderness. But will Laura ever return to her own world again?

Representation and Understanding

The intersection of insurance regulation and trade agreements is of obvious significance to international competitiveness and, thereby, to national welfare. Yet until this masterful study the subject has remained virtually unexplored. Insurance Regulation in North America, far from merely addressing this important area of theory and practice, superbly balances a world of detailed analysis and commentary with deeply insightful interpretation and debate. The book's focus on insurance regulation in three countries allows the authors to approach the subject in an extraordinary depth that could not be achieved in a more global account. In the course of their treatment the authors offer the reader the following invaluable insights, among many others:analysis of the political dimension of reaching agreements and of implementing them;comparison of the three major trade agreements that apply in the North American insurance market'NAFTA, WTO agreements on financial services, and MEUFTA (the Mexico-European Union Free Trade Agreement)'with emphasis on the relationship between GATS and NAFTA principles;investigation of the clear convergence of regulatory schemes and the probable limits to harmonization;discussion of the arbitrage by which companies get around regulatory restrictions and exploit opportunities created by loopholes;clarification of the crucial issues surrounding the role of customary international law principles in investor protection obligations;discussion of the level of government and which government agencies a company must turn to in order to satisfy legal requirements;analysis of the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Mexico regarding legal effects of treaties on domestic law;commentary on the effects of demutualization and of mergers and acquisitions;discussion of the effect of the entrenchment of U.S. State regulations and the federal government's lack of clear power to force State compliance; anddescription of dispute settlement procedures between governments. Although important issues arising in each of the three countries are all covered, there is an emphasis on the Mexican market in recognition of Mexico's greater future growth potential and of the relative paucity of relevant literature in English. Major case studies that reveal processes of compliance or conflict are analyzed in detail. For insurance professionals'lawyers, business executives, and policymakers'who want to understand what international trade agreements contain, how they work, and how they affect domestic insurance regulation and business strategy in what is rapidly becoming a global market for insurance and other financial services, this book is a gold mine. Scholars and academics in insurance law and international economic law will also find here a fresh new treatise of great significance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2002, held in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico in April 2002. The 56 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 85 submissions from 17 countries. The papers are organized in topical sections on robotics and computer vision, heuristic search and optimization, speech recognition and natural language processing, logic, neural networks, machine learning, multi-agent systems, uncertainty management, and AI tools and applications.

First of all, we want to congratulate two new research communities from M- ico and Brazil that have recently joined the Iberoamerican community and the International Association for Pattern Recognition. We believe that the series of congresses that started as the “Taller Iberoamericano de Reconocimiento de Patrones (TIARP)”, and later became the “Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP)”, has contributed to these groupconsolidatione?orts. We hope that in the near future all the Iberoamerican countries will have their own groups and associations to promote our areas of interest; and that these congresses will serve as the forum for scienti?c research exchange, sharing of - pertise and new knowledge, and establishing contacts that improve cooperation between research groups in pattern recognition and related areas. CIARP 2004 (9th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition) was the ninthinaseriesofpioneeringcongressesonpatternrecognitionintheIberoam- ican community. As in the previous year, CIARP 2004 also included worldwide participation. It took place in Puebla, Mexico. The aim of the congress was to promote and disseminate ongoing research and mathematical methods for pattern recognition, image analysis, and applications in such diverse areas as computer vision, robotics, industry, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, data mining, document analysis,and natural languagep- cessing and recognition, to name a few.

All papers were peer-reviewed. For over 25 years the MaxEnt workshops have explored Bayesian and Maximum Entropy methods in scientific, engineering, and signal processing applications. This proceedings volume covers all aspects of probabilistic inference such as techniques, applications, and foundations. Applications include physics, space science, earth science, biology, imaging, graphical models and source separation.