How to Write a Judgment: Creative Writing and International Adjudication

This article focuses on the craft of writing as an essential component of judicial practice. After explaining why writing matters and why the legal scholar can rely on creative writing to describe judicial writing, the article focuses on the sentence, the characters, and the plot as the basic units of the text. The law is made of words and basic rules of composition can reveal its deeper mechanisms. Whether to include an adverb to highlight importance, to hide the subject of a sentence to construct an objective truth, or to order the arguments in a favourable structure, writers’ choices reflect the balance of the counteracting interests represented in the judicial proceeding. The article relies both on the close reading of several judgments of international courts and the distant reading of the corpus of decisions of the International Court of Justice, analyzed through computational analysis

Tactile Object Recognition With Recurrent Neural Networks Through a Perceptive Soft Gripper

Soft robot perception integrates information from distributed, multi-modal sensors, broadening their application to active interaction. Our work introduces recurrent learning models for tactile-based object recognition, demonstrating comparable performance in virtual and real-world scenarios. The work focuses on soft grippers, which facilitate adaptation to objects of varying shapes and sizes thanks to passive finger compliance. Our model successfully identifies over sixteen heterogeneous objects. Findings underscore the significance of sensory multi-modality over single. We highlight how spatial distribution and sensory signal dynamics influence overall estimation accuracy, and what the minimal grasp set is to achieve certain recognition

On the Breathability of Epidermal Polymeric-Printed Tattoo Electrodes

Tattoo sensors offer many of the features of next-generation epidermal devices. They are ultrathin and conformable electrodes that have been shown to record high-quality biosignals from the skin. Moreover, they can be fabricated through large-area processing such as printing. Here, we report on printed poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrenesulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) tattoo electrodes breathability. Epidermal devices require a breathable interface to ensure a physiological transepidermal water loss for reduced skin inflammation and discomfort of the user. In this work, we deeply examine the polymeric tattoo sensor’s permeability properties with complementary experiments. By assessing the water permeance, the water-vapor transmission rate, and the impedance spectroscopy of polymeric tattoo electrodes, we show that they are intrinsically breathable, establishing a dry interface with the skin. The stability of such a dry interface is shown through the recording of muscle activity during sport when the sweat rate is much higher. While breathability is often hindered in conventional epidermal sensors, in PEDOT:PSS tattoo electrodes, it lies at the core of a stable sensor performance

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) landraces in Mozambique and neighbouring Southern African countries harbour genetic loci with potential for climate adaptation

Large untapped potential for local climate adaptation is present in plant genetic resources maintained by smallholder farmers in Southern Africa. Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L.Walp.), a staple crop for local farmers in the arid and semiarid regions of Southern Africa, is mostly unexplored by modern breeding approaches. In this paper, we assemble and characterize a collection of 389 cowpea accessions from Southern Africa, mainly landraces, including the entire ex-situ collection from the national Mozambique genebank. We use a genotyping-by-sequencing approach to describe the diversity in the collection and we concurrently characterize historical and projected climate at sampling points of landraces in search of genomic signatures of local adaptation. Our results show unique cowpea diversity in Mozambique, which can be partially put in relation with bioclimatic variation. The genotype-environment association approaches, Latent Factor Mixed Models (LFMM) and partial Redundancy Analysis (pRDA) allowed us to identify 36 genomic loci potentially involved in local climate adaptation. This included a region on chromosome 7 tagging four candidate genes linked to flowering and including a homolog of GIGANTEA, a gene regulating flowering time in response to day length and temperature in Arabidopsis. Finally, we estimated cowpea landraces adaptation to projected climate in the region, highlighting regions of maladaptation in southern Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Our results show that genetic resources maintained by farmers in Southern Africa bear traits for local climate adaptation and may contribute to enhancing the adaptability of cowpea to a shifting climate