Hasil untuk "Law of nations"

S. Merry

Noelle Law, Yuki Miura

Natural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage annually and posing growing threats to infrastructure and human livelihoods. Accurate data on roofing materials is critical for modeling building vulnerability to natural hazards such as earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, yet such data remain unavailable. To address this gap, we introduce RoofNet, the largest and most geographically diverse novel multimodal dataset to date, comprising over 51,500 samples from 184 geographically diverse sites pairing high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) imagery with curated text annotations for global roof material classification. RoofNet includes geographically diverse satellite imagery labeled with 14 key roofing types -- such as asphalt shingles, clay tiles, and metal sheets -- and is designed to enhance the fidelity of global exposure datasets through vision-language modeling (VLM). We sample EO tiles from climatically and architecturally distinct regions to construct a representative dataset. A subset of 6,000 images was annotated in collaboration with domain experts to fine-tune a VLM. We used geographic- and material-aware prompt tuning to enhance class separability. The fine-tuned model was then applied to the remaining EO tiles, with predictions refined through rule-based and human-in-the-loop verification. In addition to material labels, RoofNet provides rich metadata including roof shape, footprint area, solar panel presence, and indicators of mixed roofing materials (e.g., HVAC systems). RoofNet supports scalable, AI-driven risk assessment and serves as a downstream benchmark for evaluating model generalization across regions -- offering actionable insights for insurance underwriting, disaster preparedness, and infrastructure policy planning.

William Law

The rapid advancement of creating Zero-Knowledge (ZK) programs has led to the development of numerous tools designed to support developers. Popular options include being able to write in general-purpose programming languages like Rust from Risc Zero. Other languages exist like Circom, Lib-snark, and Cairo. However, developers entering the ZK space are faced with many different ZK backends to choose from, leading to a steep learning curve and a fragmented developer experience across different platforms. As a result, many developers tend to select a single ZK backend and remain tied to it. This thesis introduces zkSDK, a modular framework that streamlines ZK application development by abstracting the backend complexities. At the core of zkSDK is Presto, a custom Python-like programming language that enables the profiling and analysis of a program to assess its computational workload intensity. Combined with user-defined criteria, zkSDK employs a dynamic selection algorithm to automatically choose the optimal ZK-proving backend. Through an in-depth analysis and evaluation of real-world workloads, we demonstrate that zkSDK effectively selects the best-suited backend from a set of supported ZK backends, delivering a seamless and user-friendly development experience.

Wendy Marilú Sánchez Casanova

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar la transición discursiva entre dos modelos de aten- ción al parto en México, con mayor visibilidad durante la pandemia por COVID-19. Se sustenta en el análisis de diversos discursos identificados desde la hipertextualidad, que constituyen una herramienta básica de construcción de ideología, sustento del poder y las prácticas que éste impone. Se examinan argumentos relacionados con el parto hospitalario y, en una apro- ximación a las páginas Web de Mujeres Aliadas, A. C., la Secretaría de Salud de México, el Congreso de la Unión de México, la Organización Mundial de la Salud, la Organización Mun- dial de la Propiedad Intelectual y la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, se distin- guen preocupaciones respecto de ese modelo medicalizado, que desde la violencia epistémica y la superioridad tecnológica, interviene abruptamente en los cuerpos con riesgo de violencia obstétrica. Esto, a diferencia del parto tradicional, que es un conjunto de saberes técnicos ancestrales que priman el acompañamiento durante la gestación, el parto y el posparto, respetando la ciclicidad corporal como una manifestación de la lucha por el territorio del cuerpo.

Annelise Riles

Documents are everywhere in modern life, from the sciences to bureaucracy to law. The production, collection, sharing and even destruction of documents is such a common aspect of modern social life that it usually goes unnoticed. Yet both law and science depend upon the day to day handling of thousands of routine forms, vouchers, tickets, reports, court records, laboratory results, and more. On closer examination, the routine ways documents structure our lives have much to teach us about how truth is produced or politics is done, or how actors maintain their commitment and enthusiasm for the daily routines of modern life. The essays in this book describe practices of documentation in cultural settings ranging from prisons, to scientific laboratories, to the United Nations, to hospitals, to universities, and Fijian death rituals. They describe the powerful role of mundane documenting practices in structuring actors' conceptions of time, for example, or in shaping notions of agency (in ritual contexts), authorship (in the scientific context), even humanity (in interactions between hospital staff and patients). In so doing, the essays show that areas of modern life that seem very distant or different - law and medicine, American hospitals and Fijian rituals - can actually be compared in fresh new ways. Documents are not just features of the modern world; they are also hallmarks of ethnographic research: fieldworkers document social realities by collecting, producing and exchanging documents of their own. The contributors to this volume, all renowned and accomplished ethnographers in the fields of law, anthropology, sociology and science studies, take this point of overlap as an opportunity to reflect on the new challenges to humanistic social science in a world in which the subjects of research increasingly share the professional passions and problems of the researcher.

G. Szmukler

The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is the most up‐to‐date international legal instrument concerning the rights of persons with disabilities. Such persons are taken to include those with serious mental disorders. According to an authoritative interpretation of a crucial Article (Article 12 ‐ Equal recognition before the law) by the UN CRPD Committee, involuntary detention and treatment of people with mental health disabilities are prohibited under the Convention. Both conventional mental health law and “capacity‐based” law are deemed to violate the Convention. However, some other UN bodies are not in full agreement (for example, the UN Human Rights Committee and the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment), while others are less explicitly absolutist (for example, the Human Rights Council). Furthermore, strong criticisms of the position of the CRPD Committee have been mounted from a number of academic quarters. These criticisms center on whether the role of a person's ability to make a decision can be ignored, no matter the circumstances. Much of the above debate turns on the concept of “legal capacity” and the now often‐repeated precept that one must always respect the “will and preferences” of the person with a disability. However, “will and preferences” remains undefined. In this paper, I offer an analysis of “will and preferences” that can clarify interventions that may be acceptable or non‐acceptable under the terms of the UN Convention.

Sarah Kiden, Bernd Stahl, Beverley Townsend et al.

This report presents a comprehensive response to the United Nation's Interim Report on Governing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Humanity. It emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while acknowledging the need for robust governance to mitigate associated risks. The response highlights opportunities for promoting equitable, secure, and inclusive AI ecosystems, which should be supported by investments in infrastructure and multi-stakeholder collaborations across jurisdictions. It also underscores challenges, including societal inequalities exacerbated by AI, ethical concerns, and environmental impacts. Recommendations advocate for legally binding norms, transparency, and multi-layered data governance models, alongside fostering AI literacy and capacity-building initiatives. Internationally, the report calls for harmonising AI governance frameworks with established laws, human rights standards, and regulatory approaches. The report concludes with actionable principles for fostering responsible AI governance through collaboration among governments, industry, academia, and civil society, ensuring the development of AI aligns with universal human values and the public good.

Robert Law

Europa's surface exhibits many regions of complex topography termed 'chaos terrains'. One set of hypotheses for chaos terrain formation requires upward migration of liquid water from perched water bodies within the icy shell formed by convection and tidal heating. However, consideration of the behavior of terrestrial ice sheets suggests the upwards movement of water from englacial water bodies is uncommon. Instead, rapid downwards hydrofracture from supraglacial lakes - unbounded given a sufficient volume of water - can occur in relatively low tensile stress states given a sufficiently deep initial fracture due to the negative relative buoyancy of water. I suggest that downwards, not upwards, fracture may be more reasonable for perched water bodies but show that full hydrofracture is unlikely if the perched water body is located beneath a mechanically strong icy lid. However, full hydrofracture is possible in the event of lid break up over a perched water body and likely in the event of a meteor impact that generates sufficient meltwater and a tensile shock. This provides a possible mechanism for the transfer of biologically important nutrients to the subsurface ocean and the formation of chaos terrains.

Paula Fraga-Lamas, Tiago M. Fernandez-Carames

The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in Defense and National Security faces some limitations that can be addressed with Edge Computing approaches. The Edge Computing and IoT paradigms combined bring potential benefits, since they confront the limitations of traditional centralized cloud computing approaches, which enable easy scalability, real-time applications or mobility support, but whose use poses certain risks in aspects like cybersecurity. This chapter identifies scenarios in which Defense and National Security can leverage Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Edge IoT capabilities to deliver greater survivability to warfighters or first responders, while lowering costs and increasing operational efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, it presents the general design of a Tactical Edge IoT communications architecture, it identifies the open challenges for a widespread adoption and provides research guidelines and some recommendations for enabling cost-effective Edge IoT for Defense and National Security.

Peng Zhao

In order to cope with the task allocation in national economic mobilization, a task allocation planning method based on Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) for national economic mobilization is proposed. An HTN planning algorithm is designed to solve and optimize task allocation, and a method is explored to deal with the resource shortage. Finally, based on a real task allocation case in national economic mobilization, an experimental study verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

L. V. Vereina

INTRODUCTION. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea imposes obligations on states to protect and preserve the marine environment. They are responsible under international law. In order to ensure prompt and adequate compensation for all damage caused by marine pollution, states shall cooperate in implementing existing international law concerning liability and in developing procedures for adequate compensation, such as liability insurance or compensation funds  MATERIALS AND METHODS. In the article the author analyzes international treaties that form the basis of the regime of international legal liability for marine pollution from ships, such as the Oil Pollution Damage Convention 1969, the International Convention on Liability and Compensation for Damage in Connection with the Carriage of Hazardous and Noxious Substances by Sea 1996, the International Convention on Civil Liability for Bunker Fuel Pollution Damage 2001. The research is based on general scientific methods of knowledge (system and structural approaches, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), as well as special methods used in legal science (comparative legal, historical legal and formal dogmatic).  RESEARCH RESULTS. Based on the analysis carried out, the author came to the following research results: Together the three conventions - the CSA, the COW and the Bunker Convention - form a single regime of liability for marine pollution, the source of which are ships, and strive for identity of all definitions in order to avoid inconsistencies in their interpretation.  DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. In the course of the analysis, the author referred to the debatable points expressed in the scientific literature concerning the completeness of the legal regulation of liability for marine pollution from ships. After which the author made a conclusion that, although a significant amount of marine pollution accounts for pollution from ships, the existing international legal mechanisms for regulating liability issues in this area can be regarded as sufficient.

Engseng Ho

Sarah Nykolaishen

!e status of indigenous peoples in international law is a topic of growing interest.1 One area of debate concerns whether there is an international custom that protects the rights of indigenous peoples to their ancestral territories.2 !is paper seeks to add to this literature by examining the effect of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples3 (the “Declaration”), adopted in 2007 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), on customary international law. As a whole, the Declaration reflects the view that indigenous rights should be protected under a specific regime, or that indigenous rights cannot be subsumed under general human rights law.4 !e Declaration reflects a number of significant principles, including the right to self-determination, the importance of consultation and cooperation between states and indigenous peoples, and recognition of the unique relationship between indigenous peoples and their lands and territories.5 Specifically, this paper asks, does the Declaration provide evidence of an existing

Hei Law, Jia Deng

We propose a new approach, Synthetic Optimized Layout with Instance Detection (SOLID), to pretrain object detectors with synthetic images. Our "SOLID" approach consists of two main components: (1) generating synthetic images using a collection of unlabelled 3D models with optimized scene arrangement; (2) pretraining an object detector on "instance detection" task - given a query image depicting an object, detecting all instances of the exact same object in a target image. Our approach does not need any semantic labels for pretraining and allows the use of arbitrary, diverse 3D models. Experiments on COCO show that with optimized data generation and a proper pretraining task, synthetic data can be highly effective data for pretraining object detectors. In particular, pretraining on rendered images achieves performance competitive with pretraining on real images while using significantly less computing resources. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SOLID.

Stacey Law, Yuji Okitani

In this note, we prove some new stability results for plethysm coefficients. As special cases, we verify a conjecture of Wildon, and show the stability of sequences recently predicted by Bessenrodt, Bowman and Paget to be weakly increasing.

Cornelius A. Rietveld, Pankaj C. Patel

Data collected through the National Expert Survey (NES) of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) are widely used to assess the quality and impact of national entrepreneurial ecosystems. By focusing on the measurement of the National Entrepreneurship Context Index (NECI), we argue and show that the subjective nature of the responses of the national experts precludes meaningful cross-country analyses and cross-country rankings. Moreover, we show that the limited precision of the NECI severely constraints the longitudinal assessment of within-country trends. We provide recommendations for the current use of NECI data and suggestions for future NES data collections.

Yann-Meing Law, Daniel Appelö

The Hermite-Taylor method, introduced in 2005 by Goodrich, Hagstrom and Lorenz, is highly efficient and accurate when applied to linear hyperbolic systems on periodic domains. Unfortunately its widespread use has been prevented by the lack of a systematic approach to implementing boundary conditions. In this paper we present the Hermite-Taylor Correction Function method, which provides exactly such a systematic approach for handing boundary conditions. Here we focus on Maxwell's equations but note that the method is easily extended to other hyperbolic problems.

William H. Wiist

The “Part of the Solution” article describes how the food industry has evolved its strategies to respond to critics and government regulation by co-option and appeasement to create a less hostile environment. Rather than focusing research on single industries it would be more efficient and productive to focus on corporate political activities (CPAs) that directly influence democratic institutions and processes having authority over laws, policy, rules and regulations that govern industry. The most influential and direct CPA are election campaign donations, lobbying, and the reverse revolving door (RRD). In the United States those CPA flow from rights of corporations that underlie all industry strategies. The US history of how corporations obtained their rights is described, and research about the affirmative effects of those three CPA is summarized. Health research is needed about those CPA and their effects on health law, policy and regulation in the United States and other nations.

Marcelo L. Urquia, Rosangela F.L. Batista, Viviane Cunha Cardoso et al.

Brazil is one of the top contributors of girl child marriages in the world and one of the United Nations’ members that committed to end child marriage by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. Child marriage is an indicator of gender inequality associated with poor health outcomes. However, the perinatal epidemiology of minor mothers (<18 years) according to marital status has been insufficiently studied. We used 23,163,209 birth registrations (2011–2018) to describe the sociodemographic distribution of births to minor mothers. The association between adverse outcomes and marital status and maternal age was restricted to 7,953,739 births of mothers aged ≤15, 16–17, 18–19, 20–24 years. Multinomial logistic models were used for very (24–31 weeks) and moderately preterm birth (32–36 weeks), and severe (<3rd percentile) and moderately small-for-gestational age (SGA) (3rd to <10th percentile). Logistic models were used for binary outcomes. The proportion of births to minor mothers in the study period was 8.9%, composed of those of single (6.1%), common-law (2.4%) and married girls (0.4%). Births to minor mothers decreased over time (p-value <0.001), were more common in the North Region (13.2%) and among Indigenous (17.4%). Very and moderately preterm birth increased with decreasing age but within each age group, rates were highest among single, followed by common-law and lowest among married mothers. A similar pattern was observed for SGA, low Apgar and late prenatal care initiation. Repeat birth and low age-appropriate education were less common among married compared to single mothers in all age groups, except among ≤15-year-olds [Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR): 2.56; 95% Confidence Interval (95%CI): 2.40, 2.74 and AOR: 1.30; 95%CI: 1.03, 1.64, respectively]. The association between perinatal indicators and marital status among adolescents is strongly modified by decreasing maternal age. Marital status is relevant for the understanding of early pregnancies.

Chiara Ragni

The increasing abuses and human rights’ restrictions whose Afghan women are victims arise the question as to what remedies are provided by international law in order to address this dramatic situation. To answer this question the paper focuses first on the role played by the United Nations, that in 2002 established the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which was entrusted to implement and to monitor the application of human rights in the State. Secondly, it seeks to frame the legal obligations that international law place upon States, and upon Afghanistan in particular, as regards the protection of women’s rights, in order to finally question, both in a de iure condito and in a de iure condendo perspective, the effectiveness of the remedies provided by international law in addressing the continuous and systematic violations of international human rights perpetrated against Afghan women