Hasil untuk "Law of Europe"

Giacinto Falco

ABSTRACT This article investigates the relationship between language and civic identity in two interconnected contexts: Classical Athens and Hellenistic-Roman Delos. Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources, it shows how linguistic competence served as a marker of civic inclusion or exclusion. In Athens, mastery of Attic was central to ideological constructions of citizenship and often used polemically, especially against demagogues. In Delos, by contrast, daily interaction among Greeks, Romans, and Easterners gave rise to multilingual practices and hybrid identity negotiations. Greek emerged as a vehicle for social permeability, while Latin reinforced legal distinctions. Adopting the theoretical framework of ‘metrolingualism’, the article argues that language, space, and material culture operated together in shaping civic identity. Yet, this fluidity unfolded within a stable juridical-institutional background that remained largely untouched: despite the multiplicity of voices and interactions, the boundary between citizens and non-citizens, between inclusion and exclusion, continued to be defined and preserved at the institutional level.

David R. Law, Melanie Clarke

The integral-field unit (IFU) spectrometers on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) undersample the nearly diffraction-limited point spread function provided by the telescope optics. This undersampling produces large oscillating spectral artifacts when the data is resampled into regularly-gridded data cubes, which poses a significant challenge for many scientific analyses. We describe here a generalized technique to use cubic basis spline models to interpolate the observed spectral traces onto a higher-resolution grid prior to data cube rectification, which largely eliminates these artifacts in addition to helping reduce biases in point source spectra from clusters of bad pixels. We demonstrate the utility of this adaptive resampling technique for a variety of JWST NIRSpec and MIRI MRS observations ranging from isolated point sources to embedded AGN, crowded stellar fields with diffuse emission, and protostars with rich molecular bands.

Kociubiński Jakub

It is widely agreed that the global economy has entered a phase of heightened uncertainty. Since all downturns and slowdowns involve low aggregate demand, the authorities typically step in by increasing their own spending to protect businesses and jobs. During the Covid pandemic the European Union has witnessed an unprecedented level of State aid measures, under the hastily adopted dedicated temporary framework. Temporary rules have also been adopted to facilitate State aid supporting companies affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which are still in force today (March 2023). The common pattern of crisis responses in turn allows for a more general, non-event-specific, assessment of State aid measures taken to reduce economic disturbances.

Leonie Meyfarth, Marius Nel

Christians taking up Jewish Customs: The Hebrew Roots doctrines evaluated from Acts 10:9–29, Acts 15:1-35, Galatians 2, and Pentecostalist hermeneutics. Numerous Pentecostal and Christian adherents are encountering Hebrew Roots teachings, with a significant global presence, notably in the USA, Israel, Europe, South America, and South Africa. In 2012, the South had a substantial number of adherents. A prominent ministry, 119 ministries, offers an interactive map listing Hebrew Roots ministries worldwide. In South Africa, over 120 such ministries are listed, primarily in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Hebrew Roots proponents claim authenticity by reverting to Jewish and Mosaic roots, advocating adherence to Old Testament precepts, including rituals and customs. This article critically assesses these claims, focusing on key texts such as Acts 10:9-29, Acts 15:1-35, and Galatians 2, in the context of the Mosaic-Hebrew roots movement. This movement argues that non-Jewish Christians should observe the Mosaic laws integral to God’s covenant with Israel. Employing a comparative literature analysis and grammatical-historical exegesis, the study contrasts Pentecostal beliefs with those of the Hebrew Roots movement concerning non-Jewish Christians’ ethical responsibilities regarding the Mosaic laws. The article first outlines the historical evolution of the Hebrew Roots movement, emphasizing its theological foundations. Subsequent sections systematically analyse the scriptural passages, examining their influence on these movements’ doctrines through a Pentecostal hermeneutical lens. One central concern highlighted is the potential for Hebrew Roots teachings to challenge the exclusive role of Christ in salvation by emphasizing adherence to the Old Testament’s legal framework, raising questions about Christ’s divinity. Intradisciplinary/intradisciplinary implications: This research seeks to prompt a critical examination within the field of Dogmatics, specifically with regard to the precise delineation of a Christian’s obligations concerning the Mosaic Law, particularly in the context of the Decalogue.

Kulneva P.V.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the perception of difficult historical experience in bilateral relations by China and Japan, which dates back to the middle of the 19th century when both countries faced strong pressure from the Western world. The chronological framework of the study thus covers the period starting from the “Opium Wars” in China and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, makes a focus on the war of 1937–1945, which is viewed as the culmination of the crisis in bilateral relations, and ends with the current situation, when both countries are still trying to comprehend this difficult period of their history. The purpose of the study is to identify the role of the Western component in the mutual perception of recent historical experience by China and Japan, examining this perception through the prism of the West-East opposition. The first part of the article describes the process of Japan and China, searching for their national identities after facing with the growing pressure from the West in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century. The second part sheds light on the role of the Western component in the formation of historical memory in Japan and China, related to the recent war between them. The study demonstrates significance of the Western factor for understanding the origins of the crisis in Sino-Japanese relations and the assessment of its consequences for each country. It should be definitely taken into consideration for better understanding the current state of Sino-Japanese relations as well as the interpretation of historical past in both countries.

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.

Marvin van Bekkum, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius

Organisations can use artificial intelligence to make decisions about people for a variety of reasons, for instance, to select the best candidates from many job applications. However, AI systems can have discriminatory effects when used for decision-making. To illustrate, an AI system could reject applications of people with a certain ethnicity, while the organisation did not plan such ethnicity discrimination. But in Europe, an organisation runs into a problem when it wants to assess whether its AI system accidentally discriminates based on ethnicity: the organisation may not know the applicants' ethnicity. In principle, the GDPR bans the use of certain 'special categories of data' (sometimes called 'sensitive data'), which include data on ethnicity, religion, and sexual preference. The proposal for an AI Act of the European Commission includes a provision that would enable organisations to use special categories of data for auditing their AI systems. This paper asks whether the GDPR's rules on special categories of personal data hinder the prevention of AI-driven discrimination. We argue that the GDPR does prohibit such use of special category data in many circumstances. We also map out the arguments for and against creating an exception to the GDPR's ban on using special categories of personal data, to enable preventing discrimination by AI systems. The paper discusses European law, but the paper can be relevant outside Europe too, as many policymakers in the world grapple with the tension between privacy and non-discrimination policy.

David Acuna, Marc T Law, Guojun Zhang et al.

The dominant line of work in domain adaptation has focused on learning invariant representations using domain-adversarial training. In this paper, we interpret this approach from a game theoretical perspective. Defining optimal solutions in domain-adversarial training as a local Nash equilibrium, we show that gradient descent in domain-adversarial training can violate the asymptotic convergence guarantees of the optimizer, oftentimes hindering the transfer performance. Our analysis leads us to replace gradient descent with high-order ODE solvers (i.e., Runge-Kutta), for which we derive asymptotic convergence guarantees. This family of optimizers is significantly more stable and allows more aggressive learning rates, leading to high performance gains when used as a drop-in replacement over standard optimizers. Our experiments show that in conjunction with state-of-the-art domain-adversarial methods, we achieve up to 3.5% improvement with less than of half training iterations. Our optimizers are easy to implement, free of additional parameters, and can be plugged into any domain-adversarial framework.

Bárd Petra

The value decline in the EU has manyfold consequences. It jeopardizes the very essence of Europe as a community of values. At the same time it endangers legal principles, such as mutual recognition, which is based on mutual trust presuming that all Member States are based on the rule of law and protect fundamental rights. Once trust is rebutted, Member States' judicial authorities will refuse to cooperate and recognise each other's judgments in order not to become complicit in individual rights violations and not to contradict the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. This paper argues that EU law must allow for such considerations and suspend mutual recognition-based laws not only on a case-by-case basis, as it happens today in practice, but in general with regard to Member States undergoing rule of law decline, in order to uphold the EU's fundamental rights culture, and EU law's equivalency with the Convention's human rights regime.

Gia Zoidze

The article overviews that international organizations play an important role in managing and reforming the security sector. These organizations provide expertise, advice, and knowledge enhancements on security issues; Trainings on financial capacity building issues; Programs and projects on important topics such as technical skills development, security sector management, oversight and conscientiousness. In recent times, a number of studies have been devoted to the prospects of NATO-Georgia relations and its deepening. There are always conversations about the reasons why Georgia needs to join Euro-Atlantic Alliance. However, in this regard, Georgia first needs to give NATO member states some important reasons why they would benefit from Georgia's membership in Euro-Atlantic Alliance. The main reason for this may be the fact that without a secure and stable Black Sea region, the security and stability of Europe is inconceivable. According to the author of the article, the process of rapprochement and eventual accession to NATO, in addition to guaranteeing security, promotes and improves the institutional framework of the economy, the rule of law, effective governance systems, corporate security, and the reduction of uncertainty and externalities, which, in turn, provides stability, reduces political risk, facilitates foreign direct investment and trade. Consequently, liberalizing the country's economy and shifting to market principles reduces social pressures, ensures increased prosperity and the accumulation of wealth. As a result, society becomes more protected and less vulnerable when it comes to various types of external and internal shocks.

Pedro Rueda Ramírez

This paper analyses the distribution channels for law books in the Hispanic Atlantic world, the agents who took part in the circulation of books, and the recipients of consignments of books. The aim is to identify the infrastructure that underpinned the transport of books from Europe to the Spanish Crown’s American territories. In addition, an analysis of the distribution spaces and characteristics of supply provides an overview of the mechanisms that operated in the market for law books in the early modern period. As a result, it has been possible to identify instances of law libraries belonging to Crown and ecclesiastical officials as well as shipments delivered to booksellers, students and holders of civilian or ecclesiastical offices. It has also been possible to demonstrate the presence of pragmatic texts intended for a variety of audiences and to trace consignments bound for judicial officials and notaries, who needed compendiums of the laws and rules in effect in Spain’s overseas possessions.

Vincent Nijman

The illegal wildlife trade has direct relevance for zoo management, animal acquisition and disposition and it has no place in modern zoo management. Zoos must not only act within the law of the country in which it is based, but they should also follow the rules and intentions of international trade regulations and, where relevant, domestic laws of the animal’s country of origin. After its rediscovery in 2012, zoos in Asia and Europe started displaying Bornean earless monitor lizards (Lanthanotus borneensis), the ‘Holy Grail of Herpetology’. Earless monitor lizards have been legally protected in each of its three range countries for over four decades and, over this period, no specimen has ever been legally exported. However, the illicit trade in the species is thriving and individuals become more affordable. Using publicly available data, I present a timeline of how and from where a total of 16 zoos acquired their earless monitor lizards, including from private individuals and non-accredited zoos. Apart from one zoo in Japan (since 2012) and one zoo in the USA (since 2021), all non-range country zoos that currently display the species are based in Europe. Their absence prior to 2021 in US zoos (despite an increasing illegal trade) could be explained as the acquisition of earless monitor lizards would have been in violation of the Lacey Act (1900) that requires buyers to ensure that imported or purchased wildlife has not been taken in violation of any foreign law. While there is no evidence that any of the zoos, their directors or their staff have broken any laws – no-one in the zoo community has been convicted for illegally trading earless monitor lizards – with more zoos speaking out against the illegal wildlife trade, it is imperative that zoos behave in an exemplary manner and set high standards. At present, some zoos do not meet this standard.

Javad Kazemitabar

Benford's law is widely used for fraud-detection nowadays. The underlying assumption for using the law is that a "regular" dataset follows the significant digit phenomenon. In this paper, we address the scenario where a shrewd fraudster manipulates a list of numbers in such a way that still complies with Benford's law. We develop a general family of distributions that provides several degrees of freedom to such a fraudster such as minimum, maximum, mean and size of the manipulated dataset. The conclusion further corroborates the idea that Benford's law should be used with utmost discretion as a means for fraud detection.

As a growing economic power Japan experienced trade conflicts with the European Communities (EC; from 1993 onwards the European Union, EU). Although the British government was criticised by EU partners and domestics groups – politicians, industry, trade unions and public opinion – the UK became Japan’s primary gateway to the European single market. In 1973 Japanese multinationals began constructing manufacturing plants in Britain to reduce exports from Japan, to mitigate export duties and to ease these trade conflicts. Brexit, therefore, poses a serious risk and requires Japan to urgently reconsider and redefine its relations with Britain, the EU and other Member States of the EU. On the other hand, uneasy stand-offs in the Asia-Pacific region might push post-Brexit Britain to cooperate more closely with Japan in security matters. China’s territorial disputes with neighbouring countries and North Korea’s nuclear threat will require Japan and Britain to play a more active role in stabilising the region, not only by conducting joint military drills, but also by increasing collaboration in the arms industry. UK–Japan relations are drifting away from their traditional focus on trade and are expanding into the military field.

Aayush Prakash, Shoubhik Debnath, Jean-Francois Lafleche et al.

Synthetic data is emerging as a promising solution to the scalability issue of supervised deep learning, especially when real data are difficult to acquire or hard to annotate. Synthetic data generation, however, can itself be prohibitively expensive when domain experts have to manually and painstakingly oversee the process. Moreover, neural networks trained on synthetic data often do not perform well on real data because of the domain gap. To solve these challenges, we propose Sim2SG, a self-supervised automatic scene generation technique for matching the distribution of real data. Importantly, Sim2SG does not require supervision from the real-world dataset, thus making it applicable in situations for which such annotations are difficult to obtain. Sim2SG is designed to bridge both the content and appearance gaps, by matching the content of real data, and by matching the features in the source and target domains. We select scene graph (SG) generation as the downstream task, due to the limited availability of labeled datasets. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over leading baselines in reducing the domain gap both qualitatively and quantitatively, on several synthetic datasets as well as the real-world KITTI dataset.

Juan C Quiroz, Liliana Laranjo, Catalin Tufanaru et al.

Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical property of language where word frequency follows a discrete power law distribution. We examined 20,000 medical discharge reports from the MIMIC-III dataset. Methods included splitting the discharge reports into tokens, counting token frequency, fitting power law distributions to the data, and testing whether alternative distributions--lognormal, exponential, stretched exponential, and truncated power law--provided superior fits to the data. Results show that discharge reports are best fit by the truncated power law and lognormal distributions. Our findings suggest that Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis of discharge report text would benefit from using truncated power law and lognormal probability priors.

Koji Azuma, Go Kato

If simple entropy in the Bekenstein-Hawking area law for a Schwarzschild black hole is replaced with 'negative' quantum conditional entropy, which quantifies quantum entanglement, of positive-energy particles of the black hole relative to its outside, a paradox with the original pair-creation picture of Hawking radiation, the first law for black hole mechanics and quantum mechanics is resolved. However, there was no way to judge experimentally which area law is indeed adopted by black holes. Here, with the no-hair conjecture, we derive the perfect picture of a second law of black hole thermodynamics for any black hole from the modified area law, rather than Bekenstein's generalized one from the original area law. The second law is testable with an event horizon telescope, in contrast to Bekenstein's. If this is confirmed, the modified area law could be exalted to the first example of fundamental equations in physics which cannot be described without the concept of quantum information.

Juan Ignacio Perotti, Orlando Vito Billoni

Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed even in ancient untranslated languages. Interestingly, this law seems to be also manifested in music records when several metrics---functioning as words in written texts---are used. Even though music can be regarded as a language, finding an accurate equivalent of the concept of words in music is difficult because it lacks a functional semantic. This raises the question of which is the appropriate choice of Zipfian units in music, which is extensive to other contexts where this law can emerge. In particular, this is still an open question in written texts, where several alternatives have been proposed as Zipfian units besides the canonical use of words. Seeking to validate a natural election of Zipfian units in music, in this work we find that Zipf's law emerges when a combination of chords and notes are chosen as Zipfian units. Our results are grounded on a consistent analysis of the statistical properties of music and texts, complemented with theoretical considerations that combine different reference models, including a simple model inspired in the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm that we have devised to explain the emergence of Zipf's law as the consequence of languages evolving into more efficient forms of communication.

B. Ahmadi, S. Salimi, A. S. Khorashad

The second law of classical thermodynamics, based on the positivity of the entropy production, only holds for deterministic processes. Therefore the Second Law in stochastic quantum thermodynamics may not hold. By making a fundamental connection between thermodynamics and information theory we will introduce a new way of defining the Second Law which holds for both deterministic classical and stochastic quantum thermodynamics. Our work incorporates information well into the Second Law and also provides a thermodynamic operational meaning for negative and positive entropy production.