Search Results (47)

Since the 2022 death of Mahsa Jina Amini in custody of the Guidance Patrol or morality police in Tehran, Iran, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi can also function in the classroom as a comics touching point for human rights discourses around the world and in particular—though not exclusively—those that impact women. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who brought intersectionality to the forefront of cultural and political discourses in 1989, has used the phrase “say her name” to draw attention to the deaths of women and children, especially Black women and children, at the hands of law enforcement officers. Chants of “Say her name, Mahsa Amini”, rang among protesters outside Khalifa International Stadium in Qatar ahead of Iran’s first match of the World Cup 2022 against England. Now in 2025, cultural conversations around feminism and creativity as resistance can turn to the woman, life, freedom movement in Iran. Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye”, meaning “for” in Persian, which was inspired by tweets echoing protesters’ calls for change, became an anthem of the uprising and exists in comic art as well as song. The comics classroom can address the concerns and issues surrounding Amini’s death and the ongoing relevance of Persepolis as a coming-of-age text about living as a woman in Iran. In dialogue with the works of Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Hillary Chute, Sally Munt, and bell hooks, this piece addresses the pedagogy of human rights through comic art as crisis witnessing. With attention to comics material from two members of the Iranian diaspora, Shabnam Adiban and Farid Vahid, from the 2024 collection Woman, Life, Freedom, put together by Satrapi, this piece navigates potential Orientalism and Islamophobia in the Western classroom through engagement with intersectional feminism. Full article

There is a hard relationship between law and techno-science; two powers that shape reality. In principle, these powers shape reality by acting as two poles of a battery, i.e., endowed with opposite charges: techno-science is a mechanism for overcoming the limits that human beings encounter in their relationship with nature; law, on the other hand, reveals its face by imposing limits on human action, which, by nature, is free of certain bonds. From a general point of view, certain unavoidable normative requirements seem clear in the effort to regulate new technological applications. Artificial intelligence poses new questions for legal theory and tests both the responsiveness of the system and the traditional and current conceptual categories. The challenge stems from the need to adapt the law, through normative or hermeneutic evolution, to a reality that is changing at a frenetic pace and with unpredictable mutations. All attempts to regulate AI to date have declared that scientific innovation must be brought within the framework of human rights. However, there is a question, rather a more general, I would even say preliminary, challenge to be faced without epistemic prejudice: do the applications of AI in any way affect the very meaning of the human? AI has a huge potential to improve the human condition (provided we can clarify what ’improve’ means) but, at the same time, increases, in terms of rights, unforeseen and unforeseeable challenges for existing treaties. This is due not only to the crisis of the legal dimension but also to the fact that its impact influences the notion of what we have hitherto conventionally considered as human beings. Full article

In Romans 5, Paul says that prior to law “sin is not counted” (v. 13), and that upon law’s arrival, “the trespass increased” (v. 20). For most interpreters, the law that counted sin and increased the trespass is the law that God revealed to Israel at Sinai. Origen of Alexandria offered significant exegetical objections to this reading and proposed that natural law is in view. I modify Origen’s proposal to align Paul with the early Jewish tradition of Adam’s law, and I argue that “law” in vv. 13a and 20 refers to law’s arrival to Adam. Romans 5:12–21 is Paul’s re-telling of Scripture and chronicles Sin and Death achieving their global reigns. Understood this way, vv. 12–14 and 20–21 tell us what transpired when God’s law came to Adam: Sin and Death united, and they launched and secured their cosmic tyranny. This is Sin and Death’s origin story. Full article

Our paper was inspired by the recent Society 5.0 initiative of the Japanese Government which seeks to create a sustainable human-centric society by putting to work recent advances in technology. One of the key challenges in implementing Society 5.0 is providing trusted and secure services for everyone to use. Motivated by this challenge, this paper makes three contributions that we summarize as follows: Our first main contribution is to propose a novel blockchain and smart contract-based trust and reputation service design to reduce the uncertainty associated with buyer feedback in marketplaces that we expect to see in Society 5.0. Our second contribution is to extend Laplace’s Law of Succession in a way that provides a trust measure in a seller’s future performance in terms of their past reputation scores. Our third main contribution is to illustrate three applications of the proposed trust and reputation service. Here, we begin by discussing an application to a multi-segment marketplace, where a malicious seller may establish a stellar reputation by selling cheap items, only to use their excellent reputation score to defraud buyers in a different market segment. Next, we demonstrate how our trust and reputation service works in the context of sellers with time-varying performance due, say, to overcoming an initial learning curve. We provide a discounting scheme where older reputation scores are given less weight than more recent ones. Finally, we show how to predict trust and reputation far in the future, based on incomplete information. Extensive simulations have confirmed the accuracy of our analytical predictions. Full article

There are possible worlds in which time is circular and finite in duration, forming a loop of, say, 12,000 years. There are also possible worlds in which time is linear and infinite in both directions and in which history is repetitive, consisting of infinitely many 12,000-year epochs, each two of which are exactly alike with respect to all intrinsic, purely qualitative properties. Could one ever have empirical evidence that one inhabits a world of the first kind rather than a world of the second kind? We argue for the affirmative answer, contra Quine, Newton-Smith, and Bergström. Our argument for that conclusion differs from an argument for the same conclusion due to Weir. Weir’s argument is probabilistic and explicitly requires having evidence against determinism. Our argument is a direct appeal to the simplicity of laws, and it involves no probabilistic component. It is modeled on Shoemaker’s argument that one could have evidence of time without change. Full article

Bridgman once reflected on thermodynamics that the laws of thermodynamics were formulated in their present form by the great founders of thermodynamics, Kelvin and Clausius, before all the essential physical facts were in, and there has been no adequate reexamination of the fundamentals since. Thermodynamics still has unknown possibilities waiting to be explored. This paper begins with a brief review of Clausius’s work on the second law of thermodynamics and a reassessment of the content of Clausius’s statement. The review tells that what Clausius originally referred to as the second law of thermodynamics was, in fact, the theorem of equivalence of transformations (TET) in a reversible cycle. On this basis, a new symmetric form of Clausius’s TET is proposed. This theorem says that the two transformations, i.e., the transformation of heat to work and the transformation of work from high pressure to low pressure, should be equivalent in a reversible work-to-heat cycle. New thermodynamic cyclic laws are developed on the basis of the cycle with two work reservoirs (two pressures), which enriches the fundamental of the second law of thermodynamics. Full article

The article deals with the way in which the “theological” as the question of the Biblical G-d’s involvement in the world, as in the Talmuds, and in light of Heidegger’s thought about forgetting and forgetfulness (Verborgenheit and Vergessenheit), becomes a political question about the attitude of the Jew and Israel toward the Heimat. In Heidegger, forgetting is about beings hiding from the view rather than about a psychological or “subjective” process to which forgetting has been reduced in modernity. The Heimat hides from the persons’ life, no matter how strongly the persons strive for their Heimat “subjectively” or politically, Heidegger argues. The essay further detects a residual modernity and subjectivism in Heidegger’s concession to forgetting as only a secondary operation, a loss, in comparison to the primary, “authentic” relationship to the Heimat, which, for him, one can and should hope for. That residual modern subjectivity in Heidegger enables and necessitates a comparison with the roles forgetting plays in relationships between G-d, Israel, and the Land in the two Talmuds as, similarly to Heidegger, dealing with and working against forgetting, if not Being, then the Law of the mutual obligations between G-d and Israel. The resulting analysis distills a conundrum in the Palestinian rabbis. Delivery on Israel’s obligations towards G-d conditions Israel’s arrival to the Land, that is to say Israel’s fully successful exodus from Egypt. Yet, any clear memory of, and delivery on, these obligations, i.e., any humanly delivered testament to the law of G-d, constitutes an acute danger of forgetting masked as a would-be-certitude in the “memory” of the would-be-original law. Regaining the status of a full-fledged, never-tamed primordial power in relationships between G-d and Israel, forgetting, in the Palestinian rabbinic thought, undermines the deployment of logos as a way to formulate the Law fully. Letting the G-d in the world, logos however proves prone to reducing G-d to (a) theos, thus drawing the G-d into disappearance and forgetting. Such a counter-current to the copulation of theos with logos, the primordial power of forgetting operates even before any memory captured in words and images becomes possible. Arriving from antiquity to modernity, this counter-current continues to operate despite the currently prevalent demotion of forgetting to a subjective political act of a person or nation. Full article

Human beings have created numerous laws, sayings and proverbs that still influence behaviors and decision-making processes of people. Some of the laws, sayings or proverbs are used by people to understand the phenomena that may take place in daily life. For example, Murphy’s law states that “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Murphy’s law is helpful for project planning with analysis and the consideration of risk. Similar to Murphy’s law, the old saying “Two heads are better than one” also influences the determination of the ways for people to get jobs done effectively. Although the old saying “Two heads are better than one” has been extensively discussed in different contexts, there is a lack of studies about whether this saying is valid and can be applied in evolutionary computation. Evolutionary computation is an important optimization approach in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we attempt to study the validity of this saying in the context of evolutionary computation approach to the decision making of ridesharing systems with trust constraints. We study the validity of the saying “Two heads are better than one” by developing a series of self-adaptive evolutionary algorithms for solving the optimization problem of ridesharing systems with trust constraints based on the saying, conducting several series of experiments and comparing the effectiveness of these self-adaptive evolutionary algorithms. The new finding is that the old saying “Two heads are better than one” is valid in most cases and hence can be applied to facilitate the development of effective self-adaptive evolutionary algorithms. Our new finding paves the way for developing a better evolutionary computation approach for ridesharing recommendation systems based on sayings created by human beings or human intelligence. Full article

When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law constitutes a people. In Origins, she calls attention to the importance of the rule of law in the emergence of totalitarianism. In On Revolution, she seeks a way of grounding political authority in something other than an Absolute. In the process, Arendt looks to another group of intellectuals who grappled with the nature of authority under conditions of modernity—the Early German Romantics. Romantic fragments are philosophical, poetic, even musical. For Arendt, the most highly valued fragments are historical because these fragments provide not only protection against totalitarianism but also a possible solution to the problem of authority. In this article, I explore Arendt’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a historical fragment. She draws on a phenomenological approach to fragments, found primarily in the work of Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to create a resilient yet malleable basis for authority, thereby grounding political authority in concrete historical events, rather than in human nature. Full article

From the very start of modelling with power-tail distributions, concerns were expressed about the actual applicability of distributions with infinite expectations to real-world distributions, which usually have bounded ranges. Here, we suggest resolving this issue by shifting the analysis from the true convergence in various CLTs to some kind of quasi convergence, where a stable approximation to, say, normalised sums of n i.i.d. random variables (or more generally, in a functional setting, to the processes of random walks), holds for large n, but not “too large” n. If the range of “large n” includes all imaginable applications, the approximation is practically indistinguishable from the true limit. This approach allows us to justify a stable approximation to random walks with bounded jumps and, moreover, it leads to some kind of cascading (quasi) asymptotics, where for different ranges of a small parameter, one can have different stable or light-tail approximations. The author believes that this development might be relevant to all applications of stable laws (and thus of fractional equations), say, in Earth systems, astrophysics, biological transport and finances. Full article

Laws and policies in different jurisdictions provide a range of mechanisms that allow children involved in child protection processes and care proceedings to express their views when decisions that affect them are being made. Whether these mechanisms facilitate children’s involvement and whether they result in children’s views being heard and “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child”, as required by article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is the focus of this article. The law, policy and practice in New South Wales, Australia, are used to provide a contextual illustration of the wider theoretical and practical issues, drawing on international comparisons and research. It is clear there is still some way to go to satisfy the requirements of article 12 in Australia and other jurisdictions. These mechanisms often do not provide the information children need to understand the process, nor do they consistently encourage meaningful participation through trusted advocates who can accurately convey children’s views to those making the decisions. It is generally unclear how children’s views are heard, interpreted, and weighted in decision-making processes. The research findings from a number of countries, however, are clear and consistent that children often feel ‘unheard’ and that they have had few opportunities to say what is important to them. A number of conclusions and practice suggestions are outlined for how the law could better accommodate children’s views. Full article

The Olami, Feder and Christensen (OFC) spring-block model has proven to be a powerful tool for analyzing and comparing synthetic and real earthquakes. This work proposes the possible reproduction of Utsu’s law for earthquakes in the OFC model. Based on our previous works, several simulations characterizing real seismic regions were performed. We located the maximum earthquake in these regions and applied Utsu’s formulae to identify a possible aftershock area and made comparisons between synthetic and real earthquakes. The research compares several equations to calculate the aftershock area and proposes a new one with the available data. Subsequently, the team performed new simulations and chose a mainshock to analyze the behavior of the surrounding events, so as to identify whether they could be catalogued as aftershocks and relate them to the aftershock area previously determined using the formula proposed. Additionally, the spatial location of those events was considered in order to classify them as aftershocks. Finally, we plot the epicenters of the mainshock, and the possible aftershocks comprised in the calculated area resembling the original work of Utsu. Having analyzed the results, it is likely to say that Utsu’s law is reproducible using a spring-block model with a self-organized criticality (SOC) model. Full article

The paper considers the problems of legal regulation and environmental policy in Russia and Kazakhstan related to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The focus of this study is in the plane of studying the features of legislative regulation and the arrangement of political priorities in the two countries in order to determine their similarities and differences. The study intends to assess the current state of the legislative regulation of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Kazakhstan in the context of achieving individual SDGs. Taking into account the object of this study, the assessment of the readiness of countries to achieve the SDGs is carried out within the framework of such criteria as: (1) the current state of the relevant legislation in the field of environmental protection and natural resource management and the analysis of legislative regulation in terms of adaptability to achieve the SDGs, and (2) the role of programmatic-strategic documents in areas corresponding to the SDGs, covering environmental protection and natural resource management. A study of the experience of the Russian Federation gives grounds to say that the fragmented and inconsistent approaches enshrined in policy documents and Russian regulatory legal acts regulating nature management cause duplication of certain provisions of regulatory legal acts. Both Russian and Kazakhstani legislators avoid the universal application of the concept of “sustainable development goals” as a separate category in lawmaking, reserving the right to interpret this term at their own discretion. Formally, in the legislation and strategic and program documents of both countries there is no normative binding justifying the focus on achieving the SDGs, or tools for achieving them. However, on the part of Kazakhstan, strategic documents and national laws and regulations governing sustainable resource management are less diversified and more consistent with each other. The study gives grounds to say that in view of the presence in the Russian legal field of many inconsistent laws and political documents, harmonization of strategic documents related to the achievement of the SDGs is an urgent issue for the Russian Federation. For RK, this problem is less obvious. At the regulatory level, the instruments for achieving the UN SDGs and their indicators are not enshrined in the laws of both countries. References to the defining role of the UN SDGs are absent both in the text of the strategic documents of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Kazakhstan. Full article

As the classic branching process, the Galton-Watson process has obtained intensive attentions in the past decades. However, this model has two idealized assumptions–discrete states and time-homogeneity. In the present paper, we consider a branching process with continuous states, and for any given $n\in \mathbb{N}$, the branching law of every particle in generation n is determined by the population size of generation $n.$ We consider the case that the process is extinct with Probability 1 since in this case the process will be substantially different from the size-dependent branching process with discrete states. We give the extinction rate in the sense of $L^2$ and almost surely by the form of harmonic moments, that is to say, we show how fast $\left\{Z_n^{-1}\right\}$ grows under a group of sufficient conditions. From the result of the present paper, we observe that the extinction rate will be determined by an asymptotic behavior of the mean of the branching law. The results obtained in this paper have the more superiority than the counterpart from the existing literature. Full article

Of the many questions on which our title invites reflection, one in particular has again achieved prominence in the United States: how is a politician who is Roman Catholic expected to vote when a measure purports to legalise what church teaching says is morally wrong? The debate has become increasingly acrimonious, to the point where senior prelates are among those who contend that President Biden and Speaker of the House Pelosi are unfit to receive Holy Communion since they subscribe to the ‘pro-choice’ position of the Democratic Party. The core question has become politicised, its public discussion poisoned by association with toxic elements of the so-called ‘culture wars’, at an impasse that is impairing effective leadership in the US Catholic Church, and an effective Catholic contribution to the common good of American society. I shall argue that this is as unnecessary as it is regrettable, and that a way through the impasse is to be found in mainline Catholic thinking about morality, law, and politics. Full article