Hasil untuk "Public law"

Pei Jiang, Yawen Liu, Xuewen Shi et al.

Abstract Urban metro systems play a central role in shaping mobility opportunities and access to essential public services, yet these benefits are not always shared equitably across cities. This study evaluates equitable mobility in Shanghai by examining how metro-based accessibility to public services aligns with actual passenger demand. We develop a multidimensional accessibility index for each station based on travel time to diverse public services and integrate it with passenger flow data to construct a local alignment index. A Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient capture system-wide distributional patterns. The analysis shows clear and persistent inequities: central stations maintain strong alignment between accessibility and demand, while many peripheral stations consistently face high demand but limited access. The system-wide Gini coefficient of 0.348 reflects a notable imbalance in the distribution of accessibility benefits. These results highlight inequitable spatial pattern embedded in the metro network’s spatial design. The study introduces a replicable, behaviour-sensitive framework that links actual mobility patterns with public service accessibility. It also provides actionable evidence for spatial-equity-oriented metro planning, emphasizing the need for targeted improvements in underserved areas and stronger coordination between land-use and transit development. Together, these contributions support more inclusive and equitable urban mobility planning.

Ruta Serpytyte

The fields of HCI and Participatory design have been turning to care ethics as a suitable ethos to approach current polycrisis with. Similar calls for relationality can be witnessed in public administration research and practice, albeit its current logic being built on privatisation and marketisation of services, managerialism and customer-focus; all of which are challenging to combine with care ethics. In this paper I use collaging technique to visually reflect on new ways for public services to adopt and (care-fully) scale participatory design approaches, and how do feminist care ethics fit in the design of public services, where there is a strong presence of neoliberalism.

آيه محمد غنيم احمد, هند مقرض, فيبي راغب

استهدف البحث الحالي تحليلِ العلاقةِ بين التحوُّل الرقمي ودوره في رفع كفاءة الأداء المؤسسي وذلك بوضع البراعة التنظيمية كمتغيرٍ وسيطٍ وذلك كدراسةٍ ميدانيةٍ على قطاع البنوكِ ببورسعيد، واعتمدت الباحثة على المنهج الوصفي التحليلي القائمُ على تفسير العلاقةِ بين المتغيراتِ المُتعلقةِ بالبحث، كما استخدمت الباحثة الاستبيانِ كأداةٍ لجمع البيانات من عينةِ البحث المُتمثِّلة في 265 مفردة من العاملين بقطاع البنوك ببورسعيد، وتم اختبار الفروض من خلالِ الاعتماد على أساليبِ التحليلِ الوصفي التحليلي التي تتناسب مع طبيعة المتغيرات وطبيعة البيانات، واخضعت البيانات للتحليل الإحصائي باستخدام برنامجSPSS ، وجاءت نتائج البحث بأن هناك تأثير ذو دلالة إحصائية لأبعادِ التحوُّل الرقمي (العنصر البشري والتكنولوجيا) على أبعاد البراعة التنظيمية (الاستكشاف والاستغلال)، ووجود تأثير ذو دلالة إحصائية لأبعادِ البراعة التنظيمية (الاسكشاف والاستغلال) على الأداء المؤسسي، كما أن هناك تأثير لأبعادِ التحوُّل الرقمي (العنصر البشري والتكنولوجيا) على الأداء المؤسسي، كما أن البراعة التنظيمية تتوسط العلاقة بين التحوُّل الرقمي والأداء المؤسسي، وجاء البحث بِعِدَّة توصياتٍ جاء أهمها أن المؤسسات يتوجب عليها زيادة الاهتمام بتدريب العنصر البشري على التحوُّل الرقمي لزيادة رفع كفاءة الأداء المؤسسي الخاص بها.

Basem Ezbidi

This article compares Rousseau’s understanding of gentle means to obtain consent with the modern concept of soft power. Examining the phrase ‘to persuade without convincing’, it explores the nature and purpose of the power Rousseau attaches to his Great Legislator whose enigmatic qualities have been correlated with both democratic and authoritarian tendencies. It explores the power of character, religion, and women—to which Rousseau refers in various contexts in his writings—suggests resemblance with the authority Rousseau assigns to the Legislator, and deems its application as Rousseau’s brand of soft power. Yet while there are surface-level parallels, Rousseau’s thought departs significantly from the prevailing connotations of this concept, particularly in terms of its undisclosed goals. Joseph Nye, who adopted the term soft power and identified the conception, recommends soft power as an outward-directed means that utilises culture, values, and ideology to secure dominance under the notion of influence. For Rousseau, it is a defensive, inward-directed instrument that aims to enable the Legislator to carry out his task of fostering and enhancing a people’s authenticity and autonomy without resorting to force.

Katarina Boland, Christopher Starke, Felix Bensmann et al.

Societies worldwide have witnessed growing rifts separating advocates and opponents of vaccinations and other COVID-19 countermeasures. With the rollout of vaccination campaigns, German-speaking regions exhibited much lower vaccination uptake than other European regions. While Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (the DACH region) caught up over time, it remains unclear which factors contributed to these changes. Scrutinizing public discourses can help shed light on the intricacies of vaccine hesitancy and inform policy-makers tasked with making far-reaching decisions: policies need to effectively curb the spread of the virus while respecting fundamental civic liberties and minimizing undesired consequences. This study draws on Twitter data to analyze the topics prevalent in the public discourse. It further maps the topics to different phases of the pandemic and policy changes to identify potential drivers of change in public attention. We use a hybrid pipeline to detect and analyze vaccination-related tweets using topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and a minimum of social scientific domain knowledge to analyze the discourse about vaccinations in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic in the DACH region. We show that skepticism regarding the severity of the COVID-19 virus and towards efficacy and safety of vaccines were among the prevalent topics in the discourse on Twitter but that the most attention was given to debating the theme of freedom and civic liberties. Especially during later phases of the pandemic, when implemented policies restricted the freedom of unvaccinated citizens, increased vaccination uptake could be observed. At the same time, increasingly negative and polarized sentiments emerge in the discourse. This suggests that these policies might have effectively attenuated vaccination hesitancy but were not successfully dispersing citizens' doubts and concerns.

Mariam Moustafa, Mohit Sethi, Tuomas Aura

The adoption of security protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) has significantly improved the state of traffic encryption and integrity protection on the Internet. Despite rigorous analysis, vulnerabilities continue to emerge, sometimes due to fundamental flaws in the protocol specification. This paper examines the security of TLS when using Raw Public Key (RPK) authentication. This mode has not been as extensively studied as X.509 certificates and Pre-Shared Keys (PSK). We develop a formal model of TLS RPK using applied pi calculus and the ProVerif verification tool, revealing that the RPK mode is susceptible to identity misbinding attacks. Our contributions include formal models of TLS RPK with several mechanisms for binding the endpoint identity to its public key, verification results, practical scenarios demonstrating the misbinding attack, and recommendations for mitigating such vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the need for improved security measures in TLS RPK.

Raffaela Kunz, Michael Riegner, Dana Schmalz

La publicación en acceso abierto tiene numerosas ventajas y se dice que es beneficiosa para los derechos humanos a la información, la educación y la ciencia. Sin embargo, la transición hacia ella es lenta, y la disciplina jurídica está rezagada en este aspecto. Además, el Acceso Abierto conlleva nuevos riesgos de exclusión y hegemonía. El objetivo de este artículo es discutir el papel de los blogs, considerados durante mucho tiempo pioneros en el debate, para contribuir a una transformación sostenible del Acceso Abierto en la disciplina jurídica. Como editores y fundadores de Völkerrechtsblog, hemos seguido de cerca los avances en este campo y hemos formado parte de ellos. Tras presentar brevemente Völkerrechtsblog, el artículo aborda la cuestión de cómo los blogs y la publicación digital en Acceso Abierto pueden contribuir a la educación en la disciplina jurídica. El artículo concluye con algunas reflexiones sobre las visiones futuras de los blogs y la publicación sostenible en acceso abierto en el ámbito jurídico.

Pedro T. Nevado-Batalla Moreno

En la actualidad, como tantas veces se ha repetido, no faltan normas que prevean derechos, obligaciones, controles, procedimientos y toda una serie de exigencias y pautas de comportamientos jurídicamente condicionados que aseguren el papel de las Administraciones Públicas como esenciales instrumentos para la gobernanza democrática y la defensa del Estado de Derecho. Sin embargo, parece no evidenciarse, la importancia de acreditar en las prestaciones públicas un elevado perfil de integridad concretado en vectores de ética aplicada que eviten la creciente desafección ciudadana y falta de legitimación, cuando no, el establecimiento de una sistémica y abierta hostilidad hacia las instituciones y Administraciones Públicas. Se trata de una tarea colectiva en la que la responsabilidad propia de los servidores públicos (sean cargos electos o empleados públicos) no basta, necesitando el apoyo de una ciudadanía cuyos valores reflejen una obligada cultura sobre integridad pública.

Adam Zahir, Milan Groshev, Kiril Antevski et al.

The stringent low-latency, high reliability, availability and resilience requirements of 6G use cases will present challenges to cloud providers. Currently, cloud providers lack simple, efficient, and secure implementation of provisioning solutions that meet these challenges. Multi-cloud federation is a promising approach. In this paper, we evaluate the application of private and public blockchain networks for multi-cloud federation. We compare the performance of blockchain-based federation in private and public blockchain networks and their integration with a production-ready orchestration solution. Our results show that the public blockchain needs approximately 91 seconds to complete the federation procedure compared to the 48 seconds in the private blockchain scenario.

Ernestine Großmann, Jonas Sauer, Christian Schulz et al.

We present Arc-Flag TB, a journey planning algorithm for public transit networks which combines Trip-Based Public Transit Routing (TB) with the Arc-Flags speedup technique. Compared to previous attempts to apply Arc-Flags to public transit networks, which saw limited success, our approach uses stronger pruning rules to reduce the search space. Our experiments show that Arc-Flag TB achieves a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude over TB, offering query times of less than a millisecond even on large countrywide networks. Compared to the state-of-the-art speedup technique Trip-Based Public Transit Routing Using Condensed Search Trees (TB-CST), our algorithm achieves similar query times but requires significantly less additional memory. Other state-of-the-art algorithms which achieve even faster query times, e.g., Public Transit Labeling, require enormous memory usage. In contrast, Arc-Flag TB offers a tradeoff between query performance and memory usage due to the fact that the number of regions in the network partition required by our algorithm is a configurable parameter. We also identify an issue in the transfer precomputation of TB that affects both TB-CST and Arc-Flag TB, leading to incorrect answers for some queries. This has not been previously recognized by the author of TB-CST. We provide discussion on how to resolve this issue in the future. Currently, Arc-Flag TB answers 1-6% of queries incorrectly, compared to over 20% for TB-CST on some networks.

Oskar Vågerö, Anders Bråte, Alexandra Wittemann et al.

Across Europe negative public opinion has and may continue to limit the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure required for the transition to net-zero energy systems. Understanding public sentiment and its spatio-temporal variations is as such important for decision-making and socially accepted energy systems. In this study, we apply a sentiment classification model based on a machine learning framework for natural language processing, NorBERT, on data collected from Twitter between 2006 and 2022 to analyse the case of wind power opposition in Norway. From the 68828 tweets with geospatial information, we show how discussions about wind power intensified in 2018/2019 together with a trend of more negative tweets up until 2020, both on a regional level and for Norway as a whole. Furthermore, we find weak geographical clustering in our data, indicating that discussions are country wide and not dominated by specific regional events or developments. Twitter data allows for detailed insight into the temporal nature of public sentiments and extending this research to additional case studies of technologies, countries and sources of data (e.g. newspapers, other social media) may prove important to complement traditional survey research and the understanding of public sentiment.

Wenqian Xing, JungHo Lee, Chong Liu et al.

Black-box optimization (BBO) has become increasingly relevant for tackling complex decision-making problems, especially in public policy domains such as police redistricting. However, its broader application in public policymaking is hindered by the complexity of defining feasible regions and the high-dimensionality of decisions. This paper introduces a novel BBO framework, termed as the Conditional And Generative Black-box Optimization (CageBO). This approach leverages a conditional variational autoencoder to learn the distribution of feasible decisions, enabling a two-way mapping between the original decision space and a simplified, constraint-free latent space. The CageBO efficiently handles the implicit constraints often found in public policy applications, allowing for optimization in the latent space while evaluating objectives in the original space. We validate our method through a case study on large-scale police redistricting problems in Atlanta, Georgia. Our results reveal that our CageBO offers notable improvements in performance and efficiency compared to the baselines.

علاء ابراهيم شحاته حسن الليثي

استهدف هذا البحث قياس تأثير اثر استراتيجية الابتکار علي تعظيم قيمة المنشاة في ضوء التحول الالکتروني وذلک بالتطبيق علي البنوک المقيدة في البورصة المصرية وقد بلغ عدد البنوک المقيدة في البورصة المصرية 13 بنک وهم : مصرف ابوظبي الاسلامي ، وبنک البرکة ، وبنک القاهرة ،و البنک التجاري الدولي ،و بنک کريدي اجريکول مصر،والبنک المصري الخليجي،و البنک المصري لتنمية الصادرات ،وبنک فيصل الاسلامي ، وبنک التعمير والاسکان ، وبنک الکويت الوطني ، وبنک قطر الوطني الاهلي ، وبنک الشرکة المصرفية العربية الدولية ، وبنک قناة السويس . وقد عرض استمارة استبيان علي عدد من العاملين بتلک البنوک للاجابة عليها وذلک لتحقيق هدف البحث . وقد توصل الباحث الي وجود تأثير ايجابي معنوي لابعاد تطبيق استراتيجية الابتکار بأنواعها المختلفة علي تعظيم قيمة المنشأة في ضوء التحول الالکتروني . حيث انه يوجد تأثير معنوي لاستراتيجية الابتکار على قيمة المنشأة کما انه يوجد تأثير معنوي غير مباشر لاستراتيجية الابتکار على تعزيز قيمة المنشأة في ظل توسيط الافصاح المحاسبي.

Mohd Andalusia Masri, Dahlan Ali, Darmawan Darmawan

This research aims to evaluate the police's request to postpone the criminal charge reading of the blasphemy case at the North Jakarta District Court, which was not based on Indonesia's positive law. The request to postpone a trial by the police without a legal basis could be considered a form of police intervention against the trial process, which has legal criminal consequences based on Article 3 Paragraph 2 and 3 of Law Number 48 of 2009 concerning Judicial Power. Meanwhile, the request for a two-week trial postponement by the public prosecutors due to their inability to complete the criminal indictment, as well as considering the request from the police, has created an impression that the public prosecutors have complied with the request of the police. It also injured public trust that demanded a fair and transparent law enforcement process.

Meetha V. Shenoy, Smriti Sridhar, Girish Salaka et al.

Ensuring women’s safety in smart cities is a need of the hour. Even though several legal and technological steps are adopted worldwide, women’s safety continues to be an international concern. Criminal records are maintained by law enforcement agencies and are most often not available to the public in an easily comprehensible form. While some wearable devices and mobile applications are available which are touted to aid in ensuring women’s safety, they utilize limited societal intervention and are not very efficient in ensuring the safety of the women as and when required. Most often the crime response, crime analysis, and crime prevention schemes are not integrated, leading to gaps in ensuring women’s safety. Our major contribution is in developing a holistic system encompassing the three crucial aspects, i.e crime analysis and mapping, crime prevention, and emergency response by leveraging societal participation for women safety management. This work applies the Geographic Information System (GIS) for the identification of hotspots and patterns of crime. The proposed system uses data generated from the mobile application and/or wearable gadget prototyped as a part of this work along with the criminal history records for crime response, analysis, and prevention. The system for the hotspot identification is demonstrated for the Pilani town in the Jhunjhunu district in the state of Rajasthan, India, and can be easily scaled up geographically and utilized as a safety strategy for smart cities. While the common man is provided a cost-effective solution via the developed mobile application or wearable gadget, the various components are integrated into a website for supervisory management and can be utilized by law enforcement agencies.

Andrei Zarafiu, Giulia Șologon

On October 21, 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled in ZX and Spetsializirana prokuratura (Specialized Prosecutor's Office, Bulgaria), application no. C ‑ 282/20, by which it established art. 6 para. (3) of Directive 2012/13 / EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2012 on the right to information in criminal proceedings and the Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union must be interpreted as precluding national legislation which does not provide, after closing the preliminary hearing, for a procedure remedy for the ambiguities and gaps in the content of the indictment, irregularities, which affect the right of the accused person to be provided with detailed information on the indictment. This specific article analyzes the meaningful purpose of the judgment in ZX and the procedural remedies regulated in the Romanian Code of Criminal Procedure applicable to changes in the factual and legal elements of the indictment. In applying the jurisprudence of the ECJ, art. 6 para. (3) of Directive 2012/13 and art. 47 The EU CDF requires Member States to regulate legislation that allows for the legal recourse in court of any ambiguities and gaps in the content of the indictment that affect the right of the accused person to be provided with detailed information on the accusation. At the same time, national law must be interpreted in accordance with European Union law, in the sense that the judge must resort to all procedural means regulated by law in order to ensure that the defendant receives detailed information on the factual and legal grounds of the accusation and may apply properly for the right of defense. Only if national law entails impediments in the activity of the judge to provide such information or to remove any ambiguities and gaps in the indictment, which may compromise the defendant's right to understand the essential elements of the prosecution, he may ensure that the defendant receives the right information on the factual and legal basis of the charge necessary to formulate the defense. In the current regulatory framework, the absence of express provisions to establish on the procedural level a way to remedy the irregularities of the indictment conceives the premise of adopting solutions exclusively in court, without having a normative basis. In the doctrine, two remedies were outlined, the first involving a directly intervention of the prosecutor on procedural acts, which helps in enforcing the order of the judge of the preliminary hearing or the court of physical exclusion of illegal or unfair evidence, without operating a disinvestment of the court. The second remedy involves a restitution of the case either to the prosecutor's office or even to the prosecutor, according to the distinctions evoked during the present study. But where should the restitution be ordered? At the prosecutor's office or at the prosecutor? The nuance is important because it implies differences in the procedural mechanism by which the resumption of criminal prosecution is carried out in the current criminal procedural system. Finally, we consider that remedying the irregularity of the indictment by restituting the case and reactivating the judicial function of criminal prosecution is preferable to the direct intervention of the prosecutor in the trial phase, the representative of the Public Ministry having the possibility to maintain the possibility to redo the procedural documents and to issue a new regulatory indictment. For the arguments extensively developed in this study, the court's order should be a return to the case to the prosecutor and not to the prosecutor's office, as the procedural filter of restitution to the prosecutor's office involves the exclusive power of the chief prosecutor to assess the extent to which it is necessary to resume the criminal investigation (according to the provisions of art. 334 CPC) is, in this case, superfluous. Being given the nature of the incidents that makes impossible for the trial to, in the cases discussed in this article, the direct application of the jurisprudence of the ECJ should lead to a mandatory resumption of the criminal prosecution limited to the need to replace compromised acts that successively set up criminal charges. In conclusion, we note that the remedies proposed by the ECJ judgment in ZX should only operate in the limited context capable of justifying their existence. These should not become mechanisms for circumventing a procedural obligation of the court to resolve the case. Thus, we reiterate that if certain incidents arising during the trial, such as the change of the legal classification of the deed or the exclusion of decisive evidence, do not concern the external aspect of the accusation, but represent internal shortcomings closely related to its validity, the court is obliged to fully perform its function activated by notification and investment, following to rule on an acquittal, as the evidence in the accusation does not meet the minimum standard necessary to engage in criminal liability provided by art. 103 para. (2) CPC, beyond any reasonable doubt. Under these conditions, the remedies presented, regardless of the order of preference established by the interpreter, become incidental insofar as there are ambiguities in the accusation that could impede the proper exercise of the judicial function, not when the accusation is not supported by evidence, capable of proving beyond any reasonable doubt the guilt of the defendant.

Jelena Kostić, Marina Matić Bošković

The public procurement as a process by which governments, as well as other bodies governed by public law, purchase products, services, and work, create the cost to the state budget, and taxpayers. The high value of transactions and close interaction between public officials and businesses expose public procurement to corruption risk. According to the Serbian legislation, violation of public procurement rules can be qualified as misdemeanour or crime. The specific crime of abuse in public procurement has been introduced in the criminal legislation by 2012 amendments to the Criminal Code. In addition to the repressive response to the corruption in public procurement, the potential abuses can also be prevented by other measures. To prevent irregularities and decrease vulnerabilities to corruption, a new Law on Public Procurement was passed in December 2019. Therefore, in this paper, authors analyse criminal provisions aimed to deter possible offenders, but also assessed other non-criminal provisions and the functioning of control mechanisms, such as supreme audit and internal financial control in the Republic of Serbia. In the paper, authors strive to make recommendations for improving the prevention and repression mechanisms against abuse in public procurement procedures.

Yvette Wittenberg, Alice de Boer, Inger Plaisier et al.

Introduction: The European policy emphasis on providing informal care at home will increase contact between caregivers and home care professionals, which makes it more important for them to find satisfying ways to share care. We investigated the opinion of caregivers with various backgrounds on sharing care with home care professionals using an intersectional perspective. Methods: We used data of the Netherlands Institute for Social Research to conduct bivariate and multivariate linear regression analysis (n = 292). We combined four survey questions measuring the caregivers’ opinion on sharing care into a 1-4 scale called “caregiver judgement” (α = 0.69) and used personal characteristics of caregivers and situational characteristics as determinants to discern whether these are related to caregivers’ judgements and to consider the interaction between characteristics in relation to their judgements. Results: Overall, caregivers are quite satisfied about sharing care. Younger caregivers, caregivers who work, higher educated caregivers and those who are confronted with severe care situations are less satisfied about sharing care than others. Caregiving motivations influence the level of satisfaction and people who care for someone at more distance are less satisfied. This also applies to caregivers who care for someone with a mental impairment. Discussions: Other research shows there are gender differences in caregiving situations. These differences were not found in our study. Respondents with other ethnic backgrounds were not included in our study because this group was too small to draw valid conclusions. However, ethnic differences are observed across a wide variety of caregiving research. Conclusions: Various characteristics influence the caregivers’ judgement on sharing care with home care professionals. Caregivers’ personal characteristics explain 19% of the response variable variation, whereas both personal and situational characteristics explain 29%. Caregivers who provide help to people with a mental impairment are at risk of being less satisfied about sharing care compared to other caregivers, especially when they provide care to a parent or child, when they have a paid job or when they are aged between 45 and 64. Lessons learned: Our research adds to the knowledge base of social differences in the opinion of caregivers. This is important, because it clarifies differences in caregivers’ experiences and hence induce knowledge how to pay special attention to those who may experience less satisfaction while sharing care. These insights can help to improve good combinations of informal and formal care, which can prevent caregiver burden and increase quality of care. In our planned follow-up research, we will further discuss the meaning of these findings with caregivers and professionals themselves in order to get a better understanding of its consequences for caregiving practices. Limitations and suggestions for future research: In this study, the number of respondents was not very high. Therefore we should be careful while generalizing results. Using a larger sample size would also allow us to use an even more intersectionality-informed way of identifying social groups, which would enable us to discover other interacting factors that may be present.

YULIA KOROTKOVA

The article is devoted to the coverage of home and Greek experience in providing the academic mobility of students of higher education institutions. It’s found out that several factors contributed to its development in Ukraine, such as: improving the legislative base, signing an agreement on a visa-free regime with Ukraine, improving and applying the mutual recognition procedure for education documents, and Ukraine's accession to the Erasmus + program. It has been stated that the following negative internal processes hinder the activation of academic mobility: the country economic characteristics (the difference between the standard of living in Ukraine and the countries of the European Union), the quality and cost of studying and living, the availability of household services, compliance with European educational standards, insufficient level of foreign language skills, lack of information students get concerning exchange programs, etc. The peculiarities of the realization of the right of Greek universities students to academic mobility are analyzed basing on the example of law faculties of Democritus University of Thrace and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. It has been established that students of Greek universities can take part in the following programs: for studying in foreign partner universities; for participating in various types of practical programs in foreign partner universities. The procedure of students’ participation in practical programs is described in detail, namely the length of practical training, the categories of people who can participate in the relevant programs, the list of documents to be submitted for participation in the program, the criteria for selecting applicants, the size of the scholarship are found out. The emphasis is on the important innovation of relevant programs, which consists in the fact that Erasmus + provides students with free language Internet-support in the study of the appropriate foreign language before and during their stay abroad. The article analyzes the peculiarities of the organization of the master's degree programs in Greek universities together with foreign universities giving the identic diploma of a master's degree. In particular, the master’s program “Specialized Public Law”, organized by the legal department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens together with the University of Montesquieu-Bordeaux IV (France), is described. Taking into account the experience of the Greek universities, the range of issues that need to be resolved in the national system of higher education is highlighted. These include  improving of state financing of exchange programs; comprehensive informing of students about such programs; organization of joint master’s degree programs of home and foreign universities; increasing the level of foreign language communicative competence of students.

Oliver Buckley, Jason R. C. Nurse

There is an increasing shift in technology towards biometric solutions, but one of the biggest barriers to widespread use is the acceptance by the users. In this paper we investigate the understanding, awareness and acceptance of biometrics by the general public. The primary research method was a survey, which had 282 respondents, designed to gauge public opinion around biometrics. Additionally, qualitative data was captured in the form of the participants' definition of the term \textit{biometrics}. We applied thematic analysis as well as an automated Word Vector analysis to this data to provide a deeper insight into the perceptions and understanding of the term. Our results demonstrate that while there is generally a reasonable level of understanding of what biometrics are, this is typically limited to the techniques that are most familiar to participants (e.g., fingerprints or facial recognition). Most notably individuals' awareness overlooks emerging areas such as behavioural biometrics (e.g., gait). This was also apparent when we compared participants' views to definitions provided by official, published sources (e.g., ISO, NIST, OED, DHS). Overall, this article provides unique insight into the perceptions and understanding of biometrics as well as areas where users may lack knowledge on biometric applications.