Hasil untuk "Law of nations"

Alexander Lehner, Giovanni Righetto

Brain drain -- the emigration of skilled individuals toward higher-wage economies -- is a well-documented phenomenon, yet its aggregate economic cost remains difficult to quantify because individual productivity is rarely observed. We offer a novel angle on this measurement challenge by studying professional football, a global labour market in which every participant carries a publicly observable, consistently estimated market value. Using data on over 92,000 professional footballers worldwide from Transfermarkt, we identify nearly 20,000 players with multi-national eligibility and compute the implied transfer of human capital between countries. We find that the resulting "leg drain" disproportionately benefits wealthy European nations -- France alone gains over EUR3 billion in player value -- while African and Caribbean countries bear the largest losses relative to GDP. Italy is the single largest net loser in absolute terms, driven by the outflow of players with Italian heritage to Latin American national teams. A gravity model of bilateral flows reveals that former colonial ties are among the strongest predictors of leg drain intensity: countries with a colonial relationship to a major European footballing nation lose significantly more player value, even after controlling for population and income. These findings provide a transparent, quantifiable analogue to the broader brain drain debate and highlight how historical institutional links continue to shape global talent redistribution.

Raúl Martín Vidal Coronado

El presente artículo plasma el tema de las contrataciones del Estado peruano, ente que refiere todas las políticas y las actuaciones de las entidades públicas para la adquisición de bienes y servicios en las regiones y las localidades de todo el país. Todo proceso de contratación evalúa sus formas y fija sus estándares, armoniza las oportunidades y la libre competencia para las empresas. A todo esto, ¿qué dice la ley de contrataciones y sus actuales modificaciones reguladas en nuestra legislación? ¿Cómo atiende las necesidades y los cambios en el contexto social y económico en el que vivimos? Asimismo, los concursos públicos deben garantizar los procesos de selección de obras, la ética y los principios generales a seguir. El Estado debe procurar el mantenimiento y el sostén de las operaciones para fines de transparencias procesales en la contratación y denunciar las posibles componendas de trato desigual para las empresas competidoras. Los sectores públicos y privados (en materia empresarial) deben seguir las normativas contractuales vigentes, con énfasis en la inclusión social y la democracia participativa. Otro tanto ocurre con la aprobación de los proyectos y la buena gestión del erario nacional. De ese mismo modo, la tratativa en este tema de «acuerdos operacionales» para las contrataciones del Estado debe tener en cuenta las realidades diferenciadas de cada zona, las brechas sociales por subsanar con mucho presentismo político para la capital y poco futuro y progreso para los pueblos. Finalmente, ¿cómo implementar los proyectos de investigación tecnológica para un mejor servicio y cobertura nacional? ¿Factores como el costo de inversión y la responsabilidad burocrática son las salidas más próximas al reto de las contrataciones del Estado? En este trabajo responderemos estas interrogantes.

ADEDEJI DANIEL GBADEBO

This study examines the legal and policy frameworks for the protection of vulnerable children in Nigeria, assessing the extent to which national and international instruments safeguard their rights and welfare. Key legal frameworks, including the Child Rights Act 2003, the Nigerian Constitution (1999, as amended), the Criminal and Penal Codes, the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Law, the Nigeria Labour Act, and the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015, are analysed alongside international instruments such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC). The study highlights the multi-dimensional nature of child vulnerability in Nigeria, including poverty, displacement, harmful cultural practices, and inadequate enforcement of child protection laws. Despite the existence of comprehensive legal frameworks, gaps persist due to weak institutional capacity, uneven domestication of laws, and limited public awareness. The paper recommends strengthening legislative provisions, enhancing enforcement mechanisms, promoting public education on child rights, and fostering collaborative partnerships among government agencies, civil society, and international organizations. The findings underscore the need for a holistic, multi-sectoral approach to ensure the effective protection and welfare of Nigeria’s most vulnerable children.

Sylvain Soleil

W. Bradley Knox, Katie Bradford, Samanta Varela Castro et al.

Amid the growing prevalence of human-AI interaction, large language models and other AI-based entities increasingly provide forms of companionship to human users. Such AI companionship -- i.e., bonded relationships between humans and AI systems that resemble the relationships people have with family members, friends, and romantic partners -- might substantially benefit humans. Yet such relationships can also do profound harm. We propose a framework for analyzing potential negative impacts of AI companionship by identifying specific harmful traits of AI companions and speculatively mapping causal pathways back from these traits to possible causes and forward to potential harmful effects. We provide detailed, structured analysis of four potentially harmful traits -- the absence of natural endpoints for relationships, vulnerability to product sunsetting, high attachment anxiety, and propensity to engender protectiveness -- and briefly discuss fourteen others. For each trait, we propose hypotheses connecting causes -- such as misaligned optimization objectives and the digital nature of AI companions -- to fundamental harms -- including reduced autonomy, diminished quality of human relationships, and deception. Each hypothesized causal connection identifies a target for potential empirical evaluation. Our analysis examines harms at three levels: to human partners directly, to their relationships with other humans, and to society broadly. We examine how existing law struggles to address these emerging harms, discuss potential benefits of AI companions, and conclude with design recommendations for mitigating risks. This analysis offers immediate suggestions for reducing risks while laying a foundation for deeper investigation of this critical but understudied topic.

Eric Gilbertson, Matthew Gilbertson

Not all nations on earth have previously been surveyed accurately enough to know for certain which peak is the national highpoint, the highest peak in the country. Knowledge of these peaks is important for understanding the physical geography of these countries in terms of natural resource availability, watershed management, and tourism potential. For this study, ground surveys were conducted between 2018-2025 with modern professional surveying equipment, including differential GPS units and Abney levels, to accurately determine the national highpoints in five African and Asian countries where uncertainty existed. New national highpoints were determined for Saudi Arabia (Jabal Ferwa), Uzbekistan (Alpomish), Gambia (Sare Firasu Hill), Guinea-Bissau (Mt Ronde), and Togo (Mt Atilakoutse). Elevations were measured with sub-meter vertical accuracy for candidate peaks in Saudi Arabia, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Togo. Relative elevations were measured between contender peaks in Uzbekistan with sufficient accuracy to determine the highpoint.

Mohammad Rashed Albous, Odeh Rashed Al-Jayyousi, Melodena Stephens

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states increasingly adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive economic diversification and enhance services. This paper investigates the evolving AI governance landscape across the six GCC nations, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, through an in-depth document analysis of six National AI Strategies (NASs) and related policies published between 2018 and 2024. Drawing on the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) and Multi-stakeholder Governance theory, the findings highlight a "soft regulation" approach that emphasizes national strategies and ethical principles rather than binding regulations. While this approach fosters rapid innovation, it also raises concerns regarding the enforceability of ethical standards, potential ethicswashing, and alignment with global frameworks, particularly the EU AI Act. Common challenges include data limitations, talent shortages, and reconciling AI applications with cultural values. Despite these hurdles, GCC governments aspire to leverage AI for robust economic growth, better public services, and regional leadership in responsible AI. The analysis suggests that strengthening legal mechanisms, enhancing stakeholder engagement, and aligning policies with local contexts and international norms will be essential for harnessing AI's transformative potential in the GCC.

Klára Jelínková

Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography, published in 2015, is an in-depth examination of the influence that geographic features exert on the geopolitical strategies, international law, historical trajectories, and socioeconomic events of nations. Marshall is an experienced foreign correspondent, drawing on his extensive experience and knowledge of world history and geopolitics.

Grant Nations, C. Luke Nelson, Daniel S. Drew

Electroaerodynamic (EAD) propulsion, where thrust is produced by collisions between electrostatically-accelerated ions and neutral air, is a potentially transformative method for indoor flight owing to its silent and solid-state nature. Like rotors, EAD thrusters exhibit changes in performance based on proximity to surfaces. Unlike rotors, they have no fragile and quickly spinning parts that have to avoid those surfaces; taking advantage of the efficiency benefits from proximity effects may be a route towards longer-duration indoor operation of ion-propelled fliers. This work presents the first empirical study of ground proximity effects for EAD propulsors, both individually and as quad-thruster arrays. It focuses on multi-stage ducted centimeter-scale actuators suitable for use on small robots envisioned for deployment in human-proximal and indoor environments. Three specific effects (ground, suckdown, and fountain lift), each occurring with a different magnitude at a different spacing from the ground plane, are investigated and shown to have strong dependencies on geometric parameters including thruster-to-thruster spacing, thruster protrusion from the fuselage, and inclusion of flanges or strakes. Peak thrust enhancement ranging from 300 to 600% is found for certain configurations operated in close proximity (0.2 mm) to the ground plane and as much as a 20% increase is measured even when operated centimeters away.

Iván Rodríguez Chávez

Anastasiia V. Tokarieva, Inna V. Сhyzhykova

The article is devoted to the analysis of youth civic education, civic engagement, and civic competence in international and national contexts. Over the last decades these themes have acquired importance in research, policy and practice in many parts of the world, including the EU and Ukraine. Citizenship, citizen, civic virtues, civic culture, civic competence are singled out by the authors as the key concepts of the discussed phenomena. Civic competence is defined as a path for a person to be included into a certain political or social community; it is the knowledge and exercising of the rights and duties of this community; it is a civic self-identification and a quality of a personality that necessitates his/her active participation in political or public life and characterizes his/her community involvement; it is a moral value that is based on the sense of patriotism, respect for human rights, sense of duty, responsibility, tolerance, solidarity. The genesis and the formation of the citizenship from the time of Aristotle to the present has passed the way from seeing it as a critical engagement with others; understanding and exercising one’s own rights and freedoms, and towards realizing the necessity of interdependence of the world nations and the world equality. The second part of the article substantiates the importance of youth civic education for both Ukraine and other countries as young people greatly influence the future of their nations. The main structural components of civic education that are presented by the authors include understanding key concepts, fostering respect for law, justice, democracy and common good, encouragement of thought independence. It develops skills of reflection, enquiry and debate. The article also presents the models of civic education for secondary and higher schools and highlights the problems related to the formation of civic education in Ukraine. The emphasis is placed on the use of serious video games as a promising tool for the formation of civic competence actively used in Western Europe. Examples of social projects based on serious video games, web platforms and mobile devices aimed at solving social problems of the society include Nutriciencia project, Ukrainian GameHub project, Hidden in the Part game. Conclusions are made about the need to recognize civic education not only as a subject of the curriculum, but as an integral part of educational policy – central to both educators and the society as a whole, both on the international and national levels.

Rupam Bhattacharyya, Sheo Rama, Atul Kumar et al.

COVID-19 has impacted the economy of almost every country in the world. Of particular interest are the responses of the economic indicators of developing nations (such as BRICS) to the COVID-19 shock. As an extension to our earlier work on the dynamic associations of pandemic growth, exchange rate, and stock market indices in the context of India, we look at the same question with respect to the BRICS nations. We use structural variable autoregression (SVAR) to identify the dynamic underlying associations across the normalized growth measurements of the COVID-19 cumulative case, recovery, and death counts, and those of the exchange rate, and stock market indices, using data over 203 days (March 12 - September 30, 2020). Using impulse response analyses, the COVID-19 shock to the growth of exchange rate was seen to persist for around 10+ days, and that for stock exchange was seen to be around 15 days. The models capture the contemporaneous nature of these shocks and the subsequent responses, potentially guiding to inform policy decisions at a national level. Further, causal inference-based analyses would allow us to infer relationships that are stronger than mere associations.

Omid Askarisichania, Ambuj K. Singh, Francesco Bullo et al.

We draw on the data collected by the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System on millions of international and regional public news stories, and this system's indicators of the orientation toward a specific nation-state. We construct the networks of international amicable and hostile relations among nation-states that occur in specific time-periods in order to study the global evolution of the network of such international appraisals. Our analysis presents evidence of an evolution of the structure of this network and a model of the probabilistic micro-dynamics of the alterations of international appraisals during the 1995-2018 span of the available data. Our research provides empirical findings on long-standing debates in the interdisciplinary field of work on Structural Balance Theory. Also remarkably, we find that the trajectory of the Frobenius norm of sequential transition probabilities, which govern the evolution of international appraisals among nations, dramatically stabilizes.

Santanu Saha, Simone Di Cataldo, Maximilian Amsler et al.

In this work we probe the possibility of high-temperature conventional superconductivity in the boron-carbon system, using ab-initio screening. A database of 320 metastable structures with fixed composition (50$\%$/50$\%$) is generated with the Minima-Hopping method, and characterized with electronic and vibrational descriptors. Full electron-phonon calculations on sixteen representative structures allow to identify general trends in $T_{\textrm{c}}$ across and within the four families in the energy landscape, and to construct an approximate $T_{\textrm{c}}$ predictor, based on transparently interpretable and easily computable electronic and vibrational descriptors. Based on these, we estimate that around 10$\%$ of all metallic structures should exhibit $T_{\textrm{c}}$'s above 30 $K$. This work is a first step towards ab-initio design of new high-$T_{\textrm{c}}$ superconductors.

Rodrigo H. Álvarez-Gutiérrez, Amelia M. Stutz, Chi Y. Law et al.

We analyze the gas mass distribution, the gas kinematics, and the young stellar object (YSO) content of the California Molecular Cloud (CMC) L1482 filament. We derive a Gaia DR2 YSO distance of 511$^{+17}_{-16}$ pc. We derive scale-free power-laws for the mean gas line-mass (M/L) profiles; we calculate the gravitational potential and field profiles consistent with these. We present IRAM 30 m C$^{18}$O (1-0) (and other tracers) position-velocity (PV) diagrams that exhibit complex velocity twisting and turning structures. We find a rotational profile in C$^{18}$O perpendicular to the southern filament ridgeline. The profile is regular, confined ($r\lesssim0.4$ pc), anti-symmetric, and to first order linear with a break at $r\sim0.25$ pc. The timescales of the inner (outer) gradients are $\sim$0.7 (6.0) Myr. We show that the centripetal force, compared to gravity, increases toward the break; when the ratio of forces approaches unity, the profile turns over, just before filament breakup is achieved. The timescales and relative roles of gravity to rotation indicate that the structure is stable, long lived ($\sim$ a few times 6 Myr), and undergoing outside-in evolution. Moreover, this filament has practically no star formation, a perpendicular Planck plane-of-the-sky (POS) magnetic field morphology, and POS "zig-zag" morphology, which together with the rotation profile lead to the suggestion that the 3D shape is a corkscrew filament with a helical magnetic field. These results, combined with results in Orion and G035.39-00.33, suggest evolution toward higher densities as rotating filaments shed angular momentum. Thus, magnetic fields may be an essential feature of high-mass (M $\sim10^5$ M$_{\odot}$) cloud filament evolution toward cluster formation.

David Robie

Constitutional guarantees of free speech and media freedom are well established 'on paper' in most South Pacific nations. How these gurantees are interpreted is constantly a source of tension between policitans, media practicioners and constitutional advocates. Recent attempts by two countries in the region, Fiji and Tonga, to introduce draconian legislation have partially successful, provoking international condemnation. In Feburary 2003, a series of five bans on the Auckland-published Taimi 'o Tonga newspaper led to conflict between the island kingdom's Supreme Court and the Privy Council. This eventually provoked controversial consitutional changes that were adopted on October 16 in spite of unprecedented protests. These changes, in the form of the Media Operators Act 2003, Newspaper Act 2003, and Act of Constitution of Tonga (Amendment) Act 2003, are expected to effectively ban the paper for good and, according to some legal analysts, may end the rule of law.  In Fiji a draft Media Council of Fiji Bill was made public in May 2003 and submissions were invited. However, the proposed law stirred a strong reaction from the media and civil society groups as being 'unconstitutional'. This article examines and analyses the debate over self-regulation and public accountability of the media versus state control in the South Pacific.

Lorenz A. Gilch

This article is devoted to the forecast of the Africa Cup of Nations 2019 football tournament. It is based on a Poisson regression model that includes the Elo points of the participating teams as covariates and incorporates differences of team-specific skills. The proposed model allows predictions in terms of probabilities in order to quantify the chances for each team to reach a certain stage of the tournament. Monte Carlo simulations are used to estimate the outcome of each single match of the tournament and hence to simulate the whole tournament itself. The model is fitted on all football games on neutral ground of the participating teams since 2010.

Célia Barbosa Abreu, Dalton Robert Tibúrcio

O artigo analisa o dever de atuação da Agência Reguladora para corrigir a falha de mercado da coletivização do processo de compra dos planos de assistência privada à saúde. Para tanto, o texto enfrenta a questão constitucional atinente à restrição ao direito de livre iniciativa e desenvolve a categoria do direito fundamental à boa regulação. A partir da revisão bibliográfica e jurisprudencial e da análise de dados disponíveis, o artigo identifica que a atividade privada de assistência à saúde está sujeita a um regime constitucional diferenciado, por força da necessidade de prévia autorização para o seu desenvolvimento, o que viabiliza o estabelecimento da obrigatoriedade de oferta de planos individuais e familiares. Em suas conclusões, o artigo aponta que embora o regulador possua discricionariedade para escolher os meios mais adequados ao enfrentamento do problema, a persistência do quadro de desequilíbrio na oferta dos tipos de planos de saúde exige uma atuação clara e motivada da Agência Reguladora, na busca por garantir o direito à livre escolha do consumidor, assegurado pelo direito fundamental à boa regulação.

Giovanni Abramo, Ciriaco Andrea D'Angelo, Flavia Di Costa

The study of the concept of "scientific excellence" and the methods for its measurement and evaluation is taking on increasing importance in the development of research policies in many nations. However, scientific excellence results as difficult to define in both conceptual and operational terms, because of its multi-dimensional and highly complex character. The literature on the theme is limited to few studies of an almost pioneering character. This work intends to contribute to the state of the art by exploring a bibliometric methodology which is effective, simple and inexpensive, and which further identifies "excellent" centers of research by beginning from excellence of the individual researchers affiliated with such centers. The study concentrates on the specific case of public research organizations in Italy, analyzing 109 scientific categories of research in the so called "hard" sciences and identifying 157 centers of excellence operating in 60 of these categories. The findings from this first application of the methodology should be considered exploratory and indicative. With a longer period of observation and the addition of further measurements, making the methodology more robust, it can be extended and adapted to a variety of national and supranational contexts, aiding with policy decisions at various levels.