Hasil untuk "Law of nations"

Ryan Trice, Mintyu Yu, Eric Welp et al.

Indium selenide (In2Se3), a layered chalcogenide with multiple polymorphs, is a promising material for optoelectronic and ferroelectric applications. However, achieving polymorph-pure thin films remains a major challenge due to the complex growth space. In this work, Bayesian Optimization (BO) is successfully leveraged to guide the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of In2Se3 on Al2O3 substrates. By training a predictive Gaussian Process Regressor with sequential learning, we efficiently explored substrate temperature, indium flux, selenium flux, and cracker temperature, reducing experimental trials required for successful synthesis. A γ-In2Se3 film with 91% phase purity was achieved after fewer than ten trials. Attempts to isolate α-In2Se3 were limited by amorphous film formation at low temperatures, indicating that single-step co-deposition is unsuitable for crystalline α-In2Se3 on Al2O3. Overall, this study validates Bayesian Optimization as a powerful approach for phase-selective growth in complex materials systems.

Megan Rådesjö

The Swedish preschool has had a gender equality mandate for over two decades. Research shows, however, that preschool teachers find the gender equality mandate challenging to interpret. The aim of this article is to critically explore the theoretical complexities of the gender equality mandate problem constructions and the subsequent (im)possibilities for interpretation. The gender equality mandate encompasses law and curriculum, which are official procedures established and communicated by governmental bodieslocated in five different versions of curricula, the Education Act (SFS, 2010:567), the Discrimination Act (SFS, 2008:567), and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). This constellation is analysed through a Bacchi-inspired critical policy analysis based on diffraction, where gender equality is framed as an essentially contested empty and floating signifier that is filled with different feminist theoretical problem formulations over time and space. By interpreting the gender equality mandate through various feminist theories, the analysis shows that it can be interpreted to include problem constructions based on inequalities between binary oppositional categories, socially constructed differences between these subject positions, heteronormativity limitations, and intersectional inequalities. These constructions are both based on different feminist theories that contradict and undermine each other while simultaneously leaving some identities unproblematised.

Mircea UDRESCU, Eugen SITEANU

As is known, the phrase "nuclear war" accompanied the division of the world according to ideological criteria, on the one hand the Western world, adept at a liberal economy and democracy, and on the other hand the communist world, adept at a centralized economy and which subordinated the natural freedom of man to an understood necessity. This ideological division of the world lasted for several decades, threatening each other, coexisting in what was called the Cold War, in which the great powers, on the one hand the USA and the NATO military bloc, and on the other hand the USSR and the Warsaw Pact military bloc, threatened each other, but avoided declaring war, because it was considered that a nuclear war would end without a winner, in an apocalyptic ending. The contradictions between the two systems unfolded within the political and diplomatic framework created by the great statesman Theodore Roosevelt, through the existence of the UN and the Security Council, to which all the states of the world related through the cultivation of international law. The Second World War had not yet ended and Theodore Roosevelt was concerned with creating a global organizational framework, designed to ensure world peace, thus laying the foundations of the United Nations. In this process, he convinced two countries to join him at first: the USSR and Great Britain, followed by many others. Immediately after the end of this great world conflagration, the victorious states conceived international institutions designed to regulate important aspects of relations between states, aiming, as appropriate, to consolidate peace and eliminate wars, support the development of world economies to raise the general standard of living, protect the environment, eradicate poverty, respect fundamental human rights, etc., all within the framework of the United Nations. The Security Council, consisting of the USA, USSR, Great Britain, France and China, was meant to jointly provide the forces to deter any attempt to disregard international order. Ideological competition intensified continuously, until the USSR imploded, and the bloc of socialist countries broke away from Soviet tutelage.

Bim Gustavsson, Stacey Law

Let $p$ be any prime. We determine precisely those irreducible characters of symmetric groups which contain at most $p$ distinct linear constituents in their restriction to a Sylow $p$-subgroup, answering a question of Giannelli and Navarro. Moreover, we identify all of the linear constituents of such characters, and in the case $p = 2$ explicitly calculate a new class of Sylow branching coefficients for symmetric groups indexed by so-called almost hook partitions.

Howard Chitimira, Elfas Torerai, Vimbai Jana

Although Zimbabwe has established several institutions to combat money laundering and related crimes, there is a perception that inadequate measures are taken to apprehend offenders responsible for financial crimes. Institutions such as the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC), the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP), the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) have done little to prove that the government of Zimbabwe is resolute in combatting money laundering. On the contrary, it increasingly appears that these institutions are poorly equipped and lack the necessary capacity to enforce and uphold anti-money laundering (AML) measures in Zimbabwe. Further, there appears to be a selective application of the law, with one set of rules for individuals or institutions that are perceived as political adversaries of the incumbent establishment and a different set of rules for the political elite. Consequently, the selective application of the law projects Zimbabwe as a jurisdiction that is somehow tolerant to money laundering, corruption and related financial crimes, thereby lowering and tarnishing the standing of the country in the global economic community of nations. This paper provides a regulatory analysis of the AML role-players in Zimbabwe in order to assess their functions in combatting financial crimes. It also analyses whether these role-players are effective and substantively executing their responsibilities therein. The authors argue that while Zimbabwe is well able to effectively combat money laundering through the even application of the law to all persons regardless of their political or economic standing, it is imperative that its AML institutions operate without fear, favour or prejudice. This is crucial in combatting money laundering and instilling confidence in the general public's perception of AML institutions in Zimbabwe.

J. Alex Hurt, Grant J. Scott, Derek Weitzel et al.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded National Research Platform (NRP) is a hyper-converged cluster of nationally and globally interconnected heterogeneous computing resources. The dominant computing environment of the NRP is the x86 64 instruction set architecture (ISA), often with graphics processing units (GPUs). Researchers across the nation leverage containers and Kubernetes to execute high-throughput computing (HTC) workloads across the heterogeneous cyberinfrastructure with minimal friction and maximum flexibility. As part of the NSF-funded GP-ENGINE project, we stood up the first server with an NVIDIA Grace Hopper AI Chip (GH200), an alternative ARM ISA, for the NRP. This presents challenges, as containers must be specifically built for ARM versus x86 64. Herein, we describe the challenges encountered, as well as our resulting solutions and some relevant performance benchmarks. We specifically compare the GH200 to A100 for computer vision workloads, within compute nodes in the NRP.

Qihua Zhang, Maria Hilse, Wesley Auker et al.

Tin telluride (SnTe) is an IV-VI semiconductor with a topological crystalline insulator band structure, high thermoelectric performance, and in-plane ferroelectricity. Despite its many applications, there has been little work focused on understanding the growth mechanisms of SnTe thin films. In this manuscript, we investigate the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) synthesis of SnTe (111) thin films on InP (111)A substrates. We explore the effect of substrate temperature, Te:Sn flux ratio, and growth rate on the film quality. Using a substrate temperature of 340 °C, a Te:Sn flux ratio of 3, and a growth rate of 0.48 Å/s, fully coalesced and single crystalline SnTe (111) epitaxial layers with x-ray rocking curve full-width-at-half-maxima (FWHM) of 0.09° and root-mean-square surface roughness as low as 0.2 nm have been obtained. Despite the 7.5% lattice mismatch between the SnTe (111) film and the InP (111)A substrate, reciprocal space mapping indicates that the 15 nm SnTe layer is fully relaxed. We show that a periodic interfacial misfit (IMF) dislocation array forms at the SnTe/InP heterointerface, where each IMF dislocation is separated by 14 InP lattice sites/13 SnTe lattice sites, providing rapid strain relaxation and yielding the high quality SnTe layer. This is the first report of an IMF array forming in a rock-salt on zinc-blende material system and at an IV-VI on III-V heterointerface, and highlights the potential for SnTe as a buffer layer for epitaxial telluride film growth. This work represents an important milestone in enabling the heterointegration between IV-VI and III-V semiconductors to create multifunctional devices.

Andreas Bärtschi, Francesco Caravelli, Carleton Coffrin et al.

The emergence of quantum computing technology over the last decade indicates the potential for a transformational impact in the study of quantum mechanical systems. It is natural to presume that such computing technologies would be valuable to large scientific institutions, such as United States national laboratories. However, detailed descriptions of what these institutions would like to use these computers for are limited. To help provide some initial insights into this topic, this report develops detailed use cases of how quantum computing technology could be utilized to enhance a variety of quantum physics research activities at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including quantum magnetic materials, high-temperature superconductivity and nuclear astrophysics simulations. The report discusses how current high-performance computers are used for scientific discovery today and develops detailed descriptions of the types of quantum physics simulations that Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists would like to conduct, if a sufficient computing technology became available. While the report strives to highlight the breadth of potential application areas for quantum computation, this investigation has also indicated that many more use cases exist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which could be documented in similar detail with sufficient time and effort.

Chih-Cheng Huang, Shang-Pin Li, Jiin-Chyuan Mark Lai et al.

On 19 April 2022, in order to overcome a succession of recent global food health and agriculture safety (FHAS) incidents, the Taiwanese government instituted and announced 20 comprehensive Articles under the Taiwanese Food and Agricultural Education Law (TFAEL) for regulating the Taiwanese FHAS in order to completely construct the international strategies under the current global food security challenges of the FAHS. As a result, this research study firstly employs the learning community model (LCM) of the learning theory to measure the implementing depth of the international sustainability practice of the 20 Articles of the Taiwanese FHASE from a learning performance analytical perspective. Then, the social learning theory (SLT) of the educational theory is applied to consolidate the individual behaviors of the relative stakeholders, the organizational management of the relative industries and the socialized consent of the multilateral organization performance assessment network (MOPAN) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN). After completing quantitative and qualitative analyses, the two most valuable conclusions and findings were as follows: (1) Not only Article 12, but also Articles 3, 4 and 5 of the new law can empirically facilitate strategic management for supporting and promoting the Taiwanese FHAS educational policy dialogue at a global, regional and country scale in order to effectively advance the international sustainable compatibility of the TFAEL. (2) Articles 6, 11 and 16 of the new law can completely construct operational management for building normative and standard-setting Taiwanese FHAS educational works in order to efficiently advance the international sustainable compatibility of the TFAEL. Therefore, beyond the analytical results of this research, the international sustainable compatibility of the TFAEL provides a direction for the development of sustainable food systems, food policies, agricultural food markets and food chains in order to overcome the various contemporary global food security challenges.

Vania Lutfi Safira Erlangga, Anisa Izzati, Budi Agus Riswandi et al.

Vaccination patent is associated with exclusive rights that restrict the production, use, and sale of inventions by third parties for a specific period. This factor contributes to the high cost of vaccines, making it challenging to access vaccines in many underdeveloped nations such as Indonesia. The urgency for faster vaccine distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights this issue. However, the patent provisions of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs Agreement) may exacerbate the unequal distribution of vaccines worldwide. This study analyzes the implementation of the flexibility feature of the TRIPs Agreement, and Doha Declaration contained in Law Number 13 of 2016 respecting Patent to achieve a pandemic-free era. It is also necessary to examine the Indonesian patent rules and regulations, the TRIPs Agreement, the Doha Declaration, and other legal documents to examine these issues. The results showed that the patent rules and regulations have adopted flexibility under the TRIPs Agreement and the Doha Declaration. However, the effect on the country’s sluggish pharmaceutical supply chain has not been improved. A patent suspension system on a global scale is required to hasten the transition to a pandemic-free period since the feature of flexibility cannot handle the slow pace of vaccine procurement. The patent suspension system can be implemented through international agreements, such as the Patent Suspension Proposal filed by South Africa and India in October 2020. The suspension is crucial to accelerate the equitable distribution of vaccines and reduce their price.

Sharifah Roziah Binti Mohd Kassim, Shujun Li, Budi Arief

Many CSIRTs, including national CSIRTs, routinely use public data, including open-source intelligence (OSINT) and free tools, which include open-source tools in their work. However, we observed a lack of public information and systematic discussions regarding how national CSIRTs use and perceive public data and free tools in their operational practices. Therefore, this paper provides a systematic literature review (SLR) to comprehensively understand how national CSIRTs use and perceive public data and free tools in facilitating incident responses in operations. Our SLR method followed a three-stage approach: 1) a systematic search to identify relevant publications from websites of pertinent CSIRT organisations, 2) a conventional SLR into the research literature, and 3) synthesise data from stages one and two to answer the research questions. In the first stage, we searched the websites of 100 national CSIRTs and 11 cross-CSIRT organisations to identify relevant information about national CSIRTs. In the second stage, we searched a scientific database (Scopus) to identify relevant research papers. Our primary finding from the SLR is that most discussions concerning public data and free tools by national CSIRTs are incomplete, ad hoc, or fragmented. We discovered a lack of discussions on how the staff of national CSIRTs perceive the usefulness of public data and free tools to facilitate incident responses. Such gaps can prevent us from understanding how national CSIRTs can benefit from public data and free tools and how other organisations, individuals and researchers can help by providing such data and tools to improve national CSIRTs' operation. These findings call for more empirical research on how national CSIRTs use and perceive public data and free tools to improve the overall incident responses at national CSIRTs and other incident response organisations.

Zhengtianye Wang, Saadia Nasir, Yongchen Liu et al.

Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) are engineered materials with a hyperbolic isofrequency surface, enabling a range of novel phenomena and applications including negative refraction, enhanced sensing, and subdiffraction imaging, focusing, and waveguiding. Existing HMMs primarily work in the visible and infrared spectral range due to the inherent properties of their constituent materials. Here we demonstrate a THz-range Dirac HMM using topological insulators (TIs) as the building blocks. We find that the structure houses up to three high-wavevector volume plasmon polariton (VPP) modes, consistent with transfer matrix modeling. The VPPs have mode indices ranging from 126 to 531, 10-100x larger than observed for VPP modes in traditional media while maintaining comparable quality factors. We attribute these properties to the two-dimensional Dirac nature of the electrons occupying the topological insulator surface states. Because these are van der Waals materials, these structures can be grown at a wafer-scale on a variety of substrates, allowing them to be integrated with existing THz structures and enabling next-generation THz optical devices.

Saadia Nasir, Walter J. Smith, Thomas E. Beechem et al.

Bi$_2$Se$_3$ is a widely studied 3D topological insulator having potential applications in optics, electronics, and spintronics. When the thickness of these films decrease to less than approximately 6 nm, the top and bottom surface states couple, resulting in the opening of a small gap at the Dirac point. In the 2D limit, Bi$_2$Se$_3$ may exhibit quantum spin Hall states. However, growing coalesced ultra-thin Bi$_2$Se$_3$ films with a controllable thickness and typical triangular domain morphology in the few nanometer range is challenging. Here, we explore the growth of Bi$_2$Se$_3$ films having thickness down to 4 nm on sapphire substrates using molecular beam epitaxy that were then characterized with Hall measurements, atomic force microscopy, and Raman imaging. We find that substrate pre-treatment -- growing and decomposing a few layers of \BiSe before the actual deposition -- is critical to obtaining a completely coalesced film. In addition, higher growth rates and lower substrate temperatures led to improvement in surface roughness, in contrast to what is observed for conventional epitaxy. Overall, coalesced ultra-thin Bi$_2$Se$_3$ films with lower surface roughness enables thickness-dependent studies across the transition from a 3D-topological insulator to one with gapped surface states in the 2D regime.

Eduardo Jiménez Pineda

This article analyses the possible system of dispute settlement within the future implementation agreement of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction. In order to explain the dispute settlement system foreseen in UNCLOS Part XV, that likely will be adopted by the BBNJ Agreement, its main aspects are addressed in addition to, specially, its reception by the Part VIII of the implementation agreement on straddling fish stocks and highly migratory fish stocks. In this sense, the current terms of the draft agreement point out a new broad reception of the dispute settlement system of the Convention. Finally, taking into account the highly technic character of the disputes in this field, the article reflects on the possible convenience of changing the default mechanism for these disputes from the Annex VII arbitration to a more specialized jurisdictional organ, either the Annex VIII special arbitration or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Daniel Berleant, Venkat Kodali, Richard Segall et al.

Technologies have often been observed to improve exponentially over time. In practice this often means identifying a constant known as the doubling time, describing the time period over which the technology roughly doubles in some measure of performance or of performance per dollar. Moore's law is, classically, the empirical observation that the number of electronic components that can be put on a chip doubles every 18 months to 2 years. Today it is frequently stated as the number of computations available per unit of cost. Generalized to the appropriate doubling time, it describes the rate of advancement in many technologies. A frequently noted competitor to Moore's law is known as Wright's law, which has aeronautical roots. Wright's law (also called power law, experience curve and Henderson's law) relates some quality of a manufactured unit (for Wright, airplanes) to the volume of units manufactured. The Wright's law equation expresses the idea that performance - price or a quality metric - improves according to a power of the number produced, or alternatively stated, improves by a constant percentage for every doubling of the total number produced. Does exploration of outer space conform to Moore's law or Wright's law-like behavior? Our results below are broadly consistent with these laws. This is true for many technologies. Although the two laws can make somewhat different predictions, Sahal found that they converge to the same predictions when manufacturing volume increases exponentially over time. When space exploration transitions into an independent commercial sector, as many people hope and expect, spacecraft technology will then likely enter an era of unambiguously exponential advancement.

Anwesha Law, Ashish Ghosh

Multi-label (ML) classification is an actively researched topic currently, which deals with convoluted and overlapping boundaries that arise due to several labels being active for a particular data instance. We propose a classifier capable of extracting underlying features and introducing non-linearity to the data to handle the complex decision boundaries. A novel neural network model has been developed where the input features are subjected to two transformations adapted from multi-label functional link artificial neural network and autoencoders. First, a functional expansion of the original features are made using basis functions. This is followed by an autoencoder-aided transformation and reduction on the expanded features. This network is capable of improving separability for the multi-label data owing to the two-layer transformation while reducing the expanded feature space to a more manageable amount. This balances the input dimension which leads to a better classification performance even for a limited amount of data. The proposed network has been validated on five ML datasets which shows its superior performance in comparison with six well-established ML classifiers. Furthermore, a single-label variation of the proposed network has also been formulated simultaneously and tested on four relevant datasets against three existing classifiers to establish its effectiveness.

Anwesha Law, Ashish Ghosh

Multi-label (ML) data deals with multiple classes associated with individual samples at the same time. This leads to the co-occurrence of several classes repeatedly, which indicates some existing correlation among them. In this article, the correlation among classes has been explored to improve the classification performance of existing ML classifiers. A novel approach of frequent label-set mining has been proposed to extract these correlated classes from the label-sets of the data. Both co-presence (CP) and co-absence (CA) of classes have been taken into consideration. The rules mined from the ML data has been further used to incorporate class correlation information into existing ML classifiers. The soft scores generated by an ML classifier are modified through a novel approach using the CP-CA rules. A concept of certain and uncertain scores has been defined here, where the proposed method aims to improve the uncertain scores with the help of the certain scores and their corresponding CP-CA rules. This has been experimentally analysed on ten ML datasets for three ML existing classifiers which shows substantial improvement in their overall performance.

Alexander Wilhelm

The blockchain technology - or more generally, the technology of distributed ledgers (DLT) - has been heralded as a ‘game changer’ for the development of African economies. Whilst the focus of the discussion is usually on private sector applications, most notably including digital currencies such as ‘Bitcoin’, blockchain technology could also be used to improve the administration of public services and to strengthen the rule of law. With a view to the latter, this paper outlines the opportunities of DLT for developing nations in particular and offers an analysis of the most pressing legal and factual challenges that African governments need to resolve. The objective is to illustrate solutions which may be suitable for African jurisdictions in particular, hopefully assisting governments across the continent in developing their own tailor-made approach.

Marc T. Law, Jos Stam

In machine learning, data is usually represented in a (flat) Euclidean space where distances between points are along straight lines. Researchers have recently considered more exotic (non-Euclidean) Riemannian manifolds such as hyperbolic space which is well suited for tree-like data. In this paper, we propose a representation living on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold of constant nonzero curvature. It is a generalization of hyperbolic and spherical geometries where the nondegenerate metric tensor need not be positive definite. We provide the necessary learning tools in this geometry and extend gradient-based optimization techniques. More specifically, we provide closed-form expressions for distances via geodesics and define a descent direction to minimize some objective function. Our novel framework is applied to graph representations.

Philippe Hanna, F. Vanclay