Hasil untuk "Law of nations"

Noemi David, Matt Jacobs, Inwon Kim

In this paper we study singular limits of congestion-averse growth models, connecting different models describing the effect of congestion. These models arise in particular in the context of tissue growth. The main ingredient of our analysis is a family of energy evolution equations and their dissipation structures, which are novel and of independent interest. This strategy allows us to consider a larger family of pressure laws as well as proving the joint limit, from a compressible Brinkman's model to the incompressible Darcy's law, where the latter is a Hele-Shaw type free boundary problem.

Pedro Ramonetti, Melissa Floca, Kate O'Laughlin et al.

As demand for AI literacy and data science education grows, there is a critical need for infrastructure that bridges the gap between research data, computational resources, and educational experiences. To address this gap, we developed a first-of-its-kind Education Hub within the National Data Platform. This hub enables seamless connections between collaborative research workspaces, classroom environments, and data challenge settings. Early use cases demonstrate the effectiveness of the platform in supporting complex and resource-intensive educational activities. Ongoing efforts aim to enhance the user experience and expand adoption by educators and learners alike.

Taras K. Oleksyk, Walter W. Wolfsberger, Karishma Chhugani et al.

Genomic approaches have revolutionized medical research, providing valuable insights into human physiology and disease. Despite major benefits from large collections of genomes, the lack of diversity in genomic data represents a significant challenge for advancing biomedical discovery and accessible health solutions worldwide. Establishing a national genomic project is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, as each country presents distinct challenges and opportunities. We identify challenges in the way of obtaining and publishing data from Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) of people in various countries, discuss the progress made by some in their efforts to study their genetic diversity, and assess the most common issues. We recognize that a successful national genome database requires addressing several major issues, including the variable awareness of the recent developments in genomics among government officials, healthcare administrators, and policymakers, the absence of regulations, and ethical considerations, the challenges in securing funding, establishing legal frameworks, and building the necessary infrastructure. By assembling a diverse team of experts across 19 countries, we aim to provide a balanced approach in our recommendations to establish national projects. Our study acknowledges and addresses major intricacies and nuances specific to various settings and regions while presenting diverse opinions of scientists from both high-resource and low-resource countries contributing to a more inclusive and globally relevant framework for advancing genomic research and its applications.

Nina Ashley O. Dela Cruz, Alyssa Cyrielle B. Villanueva, Lovely Tolin et al.

ABSTRACT Micro, small, and medium‐sized enterprises (MSMEs) account for most firms in most economies, particularly in developing nations, and are key contributors to job creation and global economic development. However, the most significant impediment to MSME development in low‐ and middle‐income countries is a lack of access to both investment and working capital financing. Due to a lack of essential track record, appropriate collateral, and credit history, MSMEs are frequently denied business loans by traditional lending institutions. In addition, MSMEs face institutional, structural, and non‐financial factors that further impede access to funding. To address this, both public and private sectors employ indirect and direct finance interventions to help MSMEs in developing and emerging economies enhance and increase their financing needs. Given the importance of MSMEs in the economy, a comprehensive overview and systematic synthesizing of the evidence of the effects of financial access interventions for MSMEs, capturing a wide variety of outcome variables, is useful. The objective of this evidence and gap map (EGM) is to describe the existing evidence on the effects of various interventions dedicated to supporting and improving MSMEs' access to credit, as well as the corresponding firm performance and/or welfare outcomes. An EGM is a systematic evidence product that displays the existing evidence relevant to a specific research question. To better understand the various interventions dedicated to supporting and improving MSMEs' access to credit, as well as their outcomes, we conducted electronic searches in databases using various search strings. This search strategy was supplemented with gray literature searches and systematic review citation tracking to ensure that the research team had identified a significant portion of relevant research works. We included studies that examined interventions aimed at enhancing MSMEs' access to finance in low‐ and middle‐income countries, targeting MSMEs including households, smallholder farmers and single person enterprise, as well as financial institutions/agencies and their staff. This EGM considered five types of interventions: (i) strategy, legislation and regulatory; (ii) financing systems and institutions; (iii) access facilitation; (iv) lending instruments or financial products; and (v) demand‐side programs for financial literacy. On the other hand, the EGM also covered outcome domains for policy environment, financial inclusion, firm performance, and welfare. Both impact evaluations and systematic reviews of relevant interventions for a previously defined target population were included in this EGM, whether they had experimental or non‐experimental designs. We considered studies that were completed or in progress. All eligible studies included a suitable comparison group for interventions. For practical reasons, studies were limited to papers written in English, with no restrictions by publication date. Before‐and‐after study designs with no suitable comparison group were excluded from the study, as well as literature reviews, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and descriptive analyses. The result of our study is outlined in this study article, as well as an interactive map drawn as a matrix of various interventions improving MSMEs' access to finance and their corresponding firm performance and/or welfare outcomes. The preliminary map was produced in March 2022 and after adding supplementary research the updated map and analysis started in April 2022. The final interactive map is available online. The EGM includes 413 studies. One hundred and forty‐seven studies featured interventions that targeted multiple firm sizes, though most (379 studies) analyzed microenterprises, such as households and smallholder farmers. One hundred and nine studies analyzed small and medium enterprises, while seven studies analyzed community groups. Lending instruments/financial products are the most common form of intervention across all firm types, with microenterprises most often receiving the said financial intervention (278 studies). This is followed by systems and organizations (138 studies) that support better access to such financial products and services. Welfare outcomes have the most evidence out of all the outcomes of interest, followed by firm performance and financial inclusion. Welfare outcomes refer to economic, food security and nutrition, health, education, housing, well‐being, and gender outcomes. Among all firm types, welfare outcomes are primarily targeted at microenterprises. With 59 studies, we can say that small businesses have a significantly large number of enterprise performance outcomes. Of the 413 studies, 243 used non‐experimental or quasi‐experimental designs (mainly propensity score matching and instrumental variable approaches), 136 used experimental methods, and 34 were systematic reviews. 175 studies (43%) provided evidence from Sub‐Saharan Africa, 142 studies (35%) from South Asia, 86 studies (21%) from East Asia and the Pacific, 66 studies (16%) from Latin America and the Caribbean, 28 studies (7%) from Europe and Central Asia, and 21 studies (5%) from the Middle East and North Africa. Most of the evidence included covers low‐income (26%) and lower‐middle income countries (66%), and to a lesser extent upper‐middle‐income countries (26%). This map depicts the existing evidence and gaps on the effects of interventions to enhance MSMEs' access to financial services in low‐ and middle‐income countries. Interventions directed at microenterprises with welfare outcomes have a significant number of research outcomes in the literature. SME evaluations have looked at firm performance, with less focus on employment and the welfare effects on owners and employees, including poverty reduction. Microcredit/loans have been the focus of a large number of research papers (238 studies), indicating the field's growing popularity. However, emerging financial interventions such as facilitating access to digital financial services are relatively understudied. Additionally, 192 studies focus on rural or remote populations, 126 studies investigate interventions to the poor and disadvantaged, and 114 papers specifically address interventions targeted to women. Most of the research is conducted in Sub‐Saharan Africa (175 studies) and South Asia (142 studies), so further research in other regions could be conducted to allow a more holistic understanding of the effects of financial inclusion interventions. Future studies should look into strategy, law, and regulation interventions, as well as interventions targeted at SMEs, and examine policy and regulatory environment outcomes, as well as welfare outcomes. Interventions on the demand side and their impact on the policy and regulatory environment, as well as facilitating access, are relatively understudied.

A. V. Guglielmi, B. I. Klain

After the main shock of an earthquake the aftershocks are observed. According to Omori's law, the frequency of aftershocks decreases hyperbolically over time. We noticed that, strictly speaking, Omori's law paradoxically contradicts the law of energy conservation. The contradiction is that the excitation of each aftershock consumes a finite portion of the source's energy, so that the total energy released by the source tends to infinity over time. The paradox is formally theoretical, but its analysis has proved useful. Eliminating the contradiction between Omori's law and the fundamental law of conservation of energy allowed us to further understand the nature of the phenomenological theory of aftershocks. We used the concept of deactivation of a source after the formation of a main rupture in it. We have based the theory on the original aftershock evolution equation, which has the form of a first-order linear differential equation. Two ways to eliminate the paradoxical situation are indicated. Key words: earthquake source, aftershock, evolution equation, deactivation coefficient, inverse problem, Omori epoch, source bifurcation, logistic equation, Hirano-Utsu formula.

Laura Cahier

This contribution analyzes the strategies of resistance led by Indigenous women from the Americas on the United Nations stage, with a particular focus on their forms of participation, their claims, and their demands for rights. In a context where they have long been marginalized in international discussions, it raises the question of how international law can contribute to the emancipation of a social group assigned to a subaltern position like Indigenous women of the Americas. More broadly, this raises the issue of the recognition of pluralism and the adoption of an intercultural approach based on non-domination. This contribution seeks to understand how Indigenous women from the Americas have mobilized to defend their rights within the UN system, and the ways in which they participate in the evolution of international norms and practices through their counter-discourses and counter-practices. Drawing on contributions from subaltern studies and Indigenous studies, this article explores, more specifically, the collective and transcontinental strategies led by Indigenous women representatives and activists from the Americas, and examines their participation in relevant spaces of the United Nations.

Sofik Handoyo

This study examines how public governance, including voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption, affects national environmental performance in various countries. It also looks at how gross national income moderates the relationship between public governance and environmental performance. The findings show that political stability and regulatory quality positively influence environmental performance at the national level. In contrast, voice and accountability, government effectiveness, and the rule of law negatively correlate. Furthermore, in wealthier countries, voice and accountability, government effectiveness, and the rule of law enhance national environmental performance, while political stability and regulatory quality benefits diminish as income increases. These results emphasize the importance of the economic context in the interaction between public governance and environmental performance, indicating that wealthier nations are more capable of leveraging public governance for environmental improvements. The study offers crucial insights for policymakers aiming to align public governance reforms with environmental objectives, particularly in countries at varying economic development stages.

Steven Stalder, Michele Volpi, Nicolas Büttner et al.

Cities around the world face a critical shortage of affordable and decent housing. Despite its critical importance for policy, our ability to effectively monitor and track progress in urban housing is limited. Deep learning-based computer vision methods applied to street-level images have been successful in the measurement of socioeconomic and environmental inequalities but did not fully utilize temporal images to track urban change as time-varying labels are often unavailable. We used self-supervised methods to measure change in London using 15 million street images taken between 2008 and 2021. Our novel adaptation of Barlow Twins, Street2Vec, embeds urban structure while being invariant to seasonal and daily changes without manual annotations. It outperformed generic embeddings, successfully identified point-level change in London's housing supply from street-level images, and distinguished between major and minor change. This capability can provide timely information for urban planning and policy decisions toward more liveable, equitable, and sustainable cities.

B. I. Nefedov

INTRODUCTION. When it comes to regulating cross-border relations, the rules of law of a given state, foreign national laws and international legal norms are/may all be applicable. In their entirety, these norms form a sort of buffer zone between existing legal systems, i.e. create a legal phenomenon that can be called a legal frontier. It is within the framework of this frontier that numerous legal phenomena occur, with the very concept of their existence in recent years being either challenged or blatantly denied.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The provisions of international treaties, the national legislation of Russia and other states, as well as numerous works of Russian and foreign researchers were used as materials for this study. The study relies on the general scientific and special methods as its methodological foundation.RESEARCH RESULTS. The study found that foreign laws do not coincide, applying them to regulate crossborder relations leads to cases where relations of the same category are managed differently even within a single state. All known sources of law serve as the generators of norms that govern cross-border relations, which is not the case for either domestic or international interstate relations. Additionally, new sources of international legal norms have emerged and their objective is to regulate cross-border public relations not specified in Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The article states that significant changes in the theory of general international law (as well as in the general theory of law) are caused by the emergence of self-executing international legal norms designed to regulate cross-border social relations specifically.DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The author comes to the conclusion that the emergence of self-executing international legal norms required a change in the very definition of international law, admitting the impossibility of the existence of any universal theory of the relationship between international and national law, as well as specifying the nature of the object and subject of an international treaty. The use of self-executing international legal norms as regulators of crossborder public relations does not transform these relations into international interstate relations and does not turn their subjects into subjects of international law. These relations remain as cross-border relations, and their subjects have an exclusively cross-border legal standing, regardless of which legal system norm was responsible for regulating them.

Marcos Geraldo Hernández Ruiz

El juez es el único ser humano que, sin querer ser Dios, está obligado a juzgar a sus semejantes como si lo fuera. Pero, a diferencia de Dios, no juzga humanamente por gracia divina, sino que lo hace con la razón empática, que se convierte en su justicia poética. El juez alcanza esta justicia poética ubicándose entre el derecho y la literatura, metamorfoseándose en juez literario, un hombre y personaje jurídico-literario que Dios, a su imagen y semejanza, con justicia divina amaría.

James Grimmelmann

If code is law, then the language of law is a programming language. Lawyers and legal scholars can learn about law by studying programming-language theory, and programming-language tools can be usefully applied to legal problems. This article surveys the history of research on programming languages and law and presents ten promising avenues for future efforts. Its goals are to explain how the combination of programming languages and law is distinctive within the broader field of computer science and law, and to demonstrate with concrete examples the remarkable power of programming-language concepts in this new domain.

Judhariksawan Judhariksawan, Aidir Amin Daud, Edmondus Sadesto Tandungan

<p>Relocation of the national capital of Indonesia to the Borneo region is not only fraught with considerations of the socio-economic, political, and physical environment. The safety factor is also a very important aspect because the capital city is the center of gravity of the country. Nusantara, the new capital city, directly faces the Makassar Strait which has been designated as an archipelagic sea lane. An archipelagic sea lane must be subject to the international law of the sea, especially the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 1982. Foreign voyages and flights have the right of normal mode and continuous passage through archipelagic sea lanes. Therefore, they cannot be blocked. The right of passage is not only granted to merchant ships but also to military ships and even submarines. The extent of the security threat to the capital due to the abovementioned legal regime is analyzed by normative legal research, using a conceptual approach to the legal norms governing the sea lane. This study aims to provide an overview of the legal norms that apply to the Makassar Strait as a consideration in developing a defense and security strategy for the national capital, the archipelago. In conclusion, Nusantara in the Makassar Strait must pay attention to the international law of the sea norms in preparing the defense and security strategy for the new national capital city.</p>

D. V. Ivanov, V. G. Donakanian

INTRODUCTION. Achieving the goals of international legal regulation of a particular area of inter-State relations depends mainly on the existence of an effective dispute settlement mechanism. In the field of international air law, such powers are attributed to the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (hereinafter - ICAO), established under the Convention on International Civil Aviation of 1944 (hereinafter – the Chicago Convention). The Council's activities in this area cannot be called fruitful. Since the establishment of ICAO in 1947, the Council has not issued a single decision on disputes that have been brought before it. States have proved to be reluctant to use the dispute settlement mechanism established under the Chicago system. This is mainly due to the imperfection of the relevant provisions of the Chicago Convention, which for many years have been the object of criticism in international legal doctrine. Moreover, the provisions of the Chicago Convention do not answer the question regarding the legal nature of the Council as a dispute settlement body and the limits of its competence. The issue of the Council's competence has been considered twice by the International Court of Justice of the United Nations (hereinafter - ICJ). The judgments issued by the ICJ have not, in our view, resolved the existing legal problems but instead have contributed to further ambiguity. Furthermore, this topic has become especially relevant in light of the fact that in March 2022 the Netherlands and Austria initiated a dispute settlement procedure in the Council under Article 84 of the Chicago Convention against Russia for the downing of Malaysian civil aircraft in 2014. In these circumstances, the Council's de facto role in resolving international civil aviation disputes needs to be clarified.   MATERIALS AND METHODS. This paper examines the provisions of the Chicago international legal regime governing dispute settlement in the Council. The authors also analyse the established State practice in the application of Chapter XVIII of the Chicago Convention. Particular attention is given to legal doctrine, where several international legal concepts emerge to resolve existing legal problems. The methodological basis consists of general scientific and special research methods, including analysis, synthesis, systematisation, as well as formal-legal, formallogical and critical-legal methods.   RESEARCH RESULTS. The Council as a dispute settlement body has a dual legal nature. This is reflected in the fact that in procedural terms the Сouncil is similar to international judicial bodies in many aspects, but a number of features concerning the composition of the Council and the opportunity to appeal the decision issued prevent it from qualifying as a judicial body. This calls into question the power of the Council to issue legally binding deci-sions and the existence of its jurisdiction per se. State and Council practice also confirms that the Council under Chapter XVIII of the Chicago Convention acts as a mediator, which contrasts with the recent decision of the ICJ on the Qatar Air Blockade case, under which the Council has jurisdiction. Moreover, the Chicago Convention provides sanctions for non-compliance with Council decisions, which does not allow the Council to be considered as a mediator. Equally controversial was the ICJ finding that the Council, in settling disputes arising from the Chicago Convention (the Transit Agreement or other treaties), could examine issues outside their scope.   DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. The unclear legal status of the Council as a dispute settlement body, which was promoted by the controversial decision of the ICJ on the Qatar Air Blockade case, makes the mechanism under Chapter XVIII of the Chicago Convention highly ineffective. It is doubtful that states, consistently seeking legal certainty, would initiate proceedings in the Council under the existing international legal framework. As a result of the analysis of international legal concepts that propose the modernisation of the Chicago Convention dispute settlement mechanism, the authors conclude that either the establishment of a permanent arbitral institution within the structure of ICAO or the modification of the text of Chapter XVIII of the Chicago Convention so that the ICAO Council would act only as a mediator would be the preferable options. The authors share the position of lawyers who point to the need to negotiate new universal international law norms in the field of air law.

Angayar Kanni Ramaiah, Safinaz Mohd Hussein

Objective: The Malaysian Competition Act 2010 (MCA 2010) strictly prohibits anti-competitive practices in the absence of any redeeming virtue that promotes economic efficiency or social benefits whereas its detrimental effect on competition is proportionate to the benefits provided. The   ‘green marketing’ (GM) is about product indorses environmental sustainability policy. Our planet today is confronted with various environmental disasters such as air and water pollution, food shortage, plastic pollution, and deforestation. Furthermore, industrial waste and chemicals are found everywhere. Therefore, it’s extremely pertinent to divert all attention to focus at every level on attaining sustainable environmental policy. The corporations have considered producing and marketing in a more environmentally friendly manner and the consumers are also aware of its importance. The resulting universal war against global warming and environmental protection has developed a reason to incorporate broader non-economic environmental-related policy i.e., the sustainable environmental benefits goals into the anti-competitive exemption policy to resonate with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the   Competition Law and Policy CLP). Hence it is considered arguable, that GM's societal benefits and sustainability objective outweigh its countervailing anticompetitive effects. Methodology: Therefore, the author is resolute that an endorsement for GM as for exclusion as a ‘sustainable benefit’ exemption is relevant to obtain a fair competitive advantage for GM in Malaysia. However, in the endorsement of the GM concepts the discussion will firstly address greenwashing issues before proceeding to the study on inroad of the ‘sustainability exemption policy’ within the CLP generally and specifically in Malaysia. Findings: The research concludes with exemption options concerning specific mergers, horizontal agreements, and state aid exclusion policy under CA2010.

Irakli Nadareishvili, Shota Kakulia

The approach used to investigate cybercrime in developed nations is examined in this article, along with the innovations that might be implemented in Georgia to ensure successful investigations. Detailing the procedures outlined under the Budapest Convention on Computer Crimes, attention is given to the procedural issues that crop up while gathering and presenting electronic evidence in criminal investigations. The conventions individual articles are examined, including those that deal with information requests, and a comparison between the conventions legal provisions and the standards incorporated into Georgian law is made. The article examines the practice of collaboration between developed country law enforcement bodies and Internet service providers. The absence of computer data classification in Georgian law is highlighted, which results in the existence of a single, all-encompassing rule for all forms of electronic information. The paper also covers court rulings on the admissibility of electronic evidence and offers advice on whether it would be wise to clarify or improve the criminal procedure laws. The article explains the need for varied time limits and tactics for getting and maintaining information from internet service providers based on the classification of cybercrimes into distinct crime categories, such as serious, particularly serious, and crimes against national security.

Kody J. H. Law, Vitaly Zankin

This work considers variational Bayesian inference as an inexpensive and scalable alternative to a fully Bayesian approach in the context of sparsity-promoting priors. In particular, the priors considered arise from scale mixtures of Normal distributions with a generalized inverse Gaussian mixing distribution. This includes the variational Bayesian LASSO as an inexpensive and scalable alternative to the Bayesian LASSO introduced in [65]. It also includes a family of priors which more strongly promote sparsity. For linear models the method requires only the iterative solution of deterministic least squares problems. Furthermore, for p unknown covariates the method can be implemented exactly online with a cost of $O(p^3)$ in computation and $O(p^2)$ in memory per iteration -- in other words, the cost per iteration is independent of n, and in principle infinite data can be considered. For large $p$ an approximation is able to achieve promising results for a cost of $O(p)$ per iteration, in both computation and memory. Strategies for hyper-parameter tuning are also considered. The method is implemented for real and simulated data. It is shown that the performance in terms of variable selection and uncertainty quantification of the variational Bayesian LASSO can be comparable to the Bayesian LASSO for problems which are tractable with that method, and for a fraction of the cost. The present method comfortably handles $n = 65536$, $p = 131073$ on a laptop in less than 30 minutes, and $n = 10^5$, $p = 2.1 \times 10^6$ overnight.

Pierre Mazzega, Pierre Mazzega

Do two conventions of international environmental law necessarily endow the same word with the same meaning? A single counterexample is enough to answer in the negative: this is the case of the term “resource” in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Beyond this result, we tackle the questions, raised by the method of analysis implemented, about the semantics of legal texts, a source of interpretative flexibility but also of cognitive amalgamations and confusions of various types. A conceptual graph is associated with each proposition or sentence comprising the term “resource.” Some expressions, especially those of a deontic nature and noun phrases naming a group of interrelated entities or a fact, are encoded in nested graphs. The scope of a term is revealed by the neighbourhood of its uses. Neighbouring expressions, positioned along the paths of conceptual graphs, are ranked owing to their distance from the target expression. Then the neighbours the most contributing to the distributional meaning of the targets are classified in a coarse taxonomy, providing basic ontological traits to “resource” and related expressions in each convention. Although the two conventions rely on the same language, the weak overlap of their respective neighbourhoods of the term “resource” and associated expressions and their contrasted ontological anchorages highlight idiosyncratic meanings and, consequently, divergent orientations and understandings regarding the protection and conservation of resources, especially of living resources. Thus, the complexity of legal texts operates both in the gap between language semantics and cognitive understanding of the concepts used, and in the interpretative flexibility and opportunities for confusion that the texts offer but that the elementary operations of formalisation allow to deconstruct and clarify.

E. Platts, J. Xavier Prochaska, Casey J. Law

We introduce a new technique to constrain the line-of-sight integrated electron density of our Galactic halo $\text{DM}_\text{MW,halo}$ through analysis of the observed dispersion measure distributions of pulsars $\text{DM}_\text{pulsar}$ and fast radio bursts $\text{DM}_\text{FRB}$. We model these distributions, correcting for the Galactic interstellar medium, with kernel density estimation---well-suited to the small data regime---to find lower/upper bounds to the corrected $\text{DM}_\text{pulsar}$/$\text{DM}_\text{FRB}$ distributions: $\max[\text{DM}_\text{pulsar}] \approx 7\pm2 \text{ (stat)} \pm 9 \text{ (sys) pc cm}^{-3}$ and $\min[\text{DM}_\text{FRB}] \approx 63^{+27}_{-21} \text{ (stat)} \pm 9 \text{ (sys) pc cm}^{-3}$. Using bootstrap resampling to estimate uncertainties, we set conservative limits on the Galactic halo dispersion measure $-2 < \text{DM}_\text{MW,halo} < 123 \text{pc cm}^{-3}$ (95\% c.l.). The upper limit is especially conservative because it may include a non-negligible contribution from the FRB host galaxies and a non-zero contribution from the cosmic web. It strongly disfavors models where the Galaxy has retained the majority of its baryons with a density profile tracking the presumed dark matter density profile. Last, we perform Monte Carlo simulations of larger FRB samples to validate our technique and assess the sensitivity of ongoing and future surveys. We recover bounds of several tens $\text{pc cm}^{-3}$ which may be sufficient to test whether the Galaxy has retained a majority of its baryonic mass. We estimate that a sample of several thousand FRBs will significantly tighten constraints on $\text{DM}_\text{MW,halo}$ and offer a valuable complement to other analyses.

Ajay Jasra, Kody J. H. Law, Deng Lu

We consider the problem of estimating a parameter associated to a Bayesian inverse problem. Treating the unknown initial condition as a nuisance parameter, typically one must resort to a numerical approximation of gradient of the log-likelihood and also adopt a discretization of the problem in space and/or time. We develop a new methodology to unbiasedly estimate the gradient of the log-likelihood with respect to the unknown parameter, i.e. the expectation of the estimate has no discretization bias. Such a property is not only useful for estimation in terms of the original stochastic model of interest, but can be used in stochastic gradient algorithms which benefit from unbiased estimates. Under appropriate assumptions, we prove that our estimator is not only unbiased but of finite variance. In addition, when implemented on a single processor, we show that the cost to achieve a given level of error is comparable to multilevel Monte Carlo methods, both practically and theoretically. However, the new algorithm provides the possibility for parallel computation on arbitrarily many processors without any loss of efficiency, asymptotically. In practice, this means any precision can be achieved in a fixed, finite constant time, provided that enough processors are available.

Taís Sofia Cunha de Barros Penteado

This article aims to contribute to the abortion debate in Brazil, by looking deeply at how the equality principle is being mobilized by pro-decriminalization actors in the specific context of ADPF 442, the lawsuit in which the constitutionality of the abortion restriction up to the 12th week is challenged before the Brazilian Supreme Court. We map and classify the different formulations of equality arguments presented by the claimant and other relevant actors. We then discuss one of the formulations – the formulation that characterizes abortion as a means of group subordination - in light of the legal opportunity structure available in Brazil. We argue that while this argument faces a challenge posed by the narrow formulations of the equality principle in general in Brazil, it also opens up a new window for arguing, for being close in formulation to an important equality case ruled by the Supreme Court – ADPF 186, an affirmative action case.