590 research outputs found

    The Public Performance Of Sanctions In Insolvency Cases: The Dark, Humiliating, And Ridiculous Side Of The Law Of Debt In The Italian Experience. A Historical Overview Of Shaming Practices

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    This study provides a diachronic comparative overview of how the law of debt has been applied by certain institutions in Italy. Specifically, it offers historical and comparative insights into the public performance of sanctions for insolvency through shaming and customary practices in Roman Imperial Law, in the Middle Ages, and in later periods. The first part of the essay focuses on the Roman bonorum cessio culo nudo super lapidem and on the medieval customary institution called pietra della vergogna (stone of shame), which originates from the Roman model. The second part of the essay analyzes the social function of the zecca and the pittima Veneziana during the Republic of Venice, and of the practice of lu soldate a castighe (no translation is possible). The author uses a functionalist approach to apply some arguments and concepts from the current context to this historical analysis of ancient institutions that we would now consider ridiculous. The article shows that the customary norms that play a crucial regulatory role in online interactions today can also be applied to the public square in the past. One of these tools is shaming. As is the case in contemporary online settings, in the public square in historic periods, shaming practices were used to enforce the rules of civility in a given community. Such practices can be seen as virtuous when they are intended for use as a tool to pursue positive change in forces entrenched in the culture, and thus to address social wrongs considered outside the reach of the law, or to address human rights abuses

    Apport de l’IRM structurelle multimodale dans la chirurgie d’épilepsie : le cas de l’épilepsie insulaire

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    L’épilepsie insulaire (ÉI) est une forme rare d’épilepsie focale qui, en raison des défis liés à son diagnostic, est difficilement cernable. De plus, la prise en charge des patients avec ÉI s’avère complexifiée par le fait que cette pathologie est fréquemment résistante aux médicaments anti-crises. Pour ces cas médico-réfractaires, la chirurgie insulaire est une option viable. Cela dit, les patients subissant une telle intervention développent fréquemment des déficits neurologiques postopératoires; heureusement, la grande majorité de ceux-ci récupèrent complètement et rapidement. Or, le mécanisme sous-tendant ce singulier rétablissement fonctionnel demeure à ce jour mal compris. Deux modalités modernes d’IRM structurelle, soit l’analyse d’épaisseur corticale et la tractographie, ont permis, dans les dernières années, de décrire les altérations architecturales caractéristiques et potentiellement diagnostiques de divers types d’épilepsie ainsi que de caractériser les remodelages plastiques qui suivent la chirurgie de l’épilepsie extra-insulaire. Cependant, à ce jour, aucune étude ne s’est encore penchée sur le cas de l’ÉI. De ce fait, les études qui constituent cette thèse exploitent l’IRM structurelle afin, d’une part, de dépeindre les altérations d’épaisseur du cortex et de connectivité de matière blanche associées à l’ÉI et, d’autre part, de définir les réarrangements de connectivité subséquents à la chirurgie insulaire pour contrôle épileptique. Les deux premières études de cette thèse ont révélé que l’ÉI était associée à un pattern majoritairement ipsilatéral d’atrophie corticale et d’hyperconnectivité impliquant principalement des sous-régions insulaires et des régions connectées à l’insula. De manière intéressante, la topologie de ces changements correspondait, au moins en partie, à celle du réseau épileptique de l’ÉI. Ensuite, la troisième étude visait à décrire, par le biais d’une méta-analyse, l’histoire naturelle postopératoire des patients subissant une chirurgie pour ÉI. Cette analyse a, entre autres, confirmé que cette chirurgie était efficace (66.7% de disparition des crises) et qu’elle était fréquemment accompagnée de complications neurologiques (42.5%) qui, dans la plupart des cas, étaient transitoires (78.7% des complications) et récupéraient entièrement dans les trois mois postopératoires (91.6% des complications transitoires). Finalement, la quatrième étude a révélé que la chirurgie pour ÉI était suivie d’altérations de connectivité diffuses et bilatérales. Notamment, les connexions présentant une augmentation de connectivité concernaient particulièrement des régions localisées soit près de la cavité chirurgicale ou dans l’hémisphère controlatéral à l’intervention. De plus, la majorité de ces renforcements structurels se sont produits dans les six premiers mois suivant la chirurgie, un délai comparable à celui durant lequel la majeure partie de la récupération fonctionnelle postopératoire a été observée dans notre méta-analyse. En somme, nos résultats suggèrent que les altérations morphologiques en lien avec l’ÉI peuvent correspondre à son réseau épileptique sous-jacent. La topologie de ces changements pourrait constituer un biomarqueur structurel diagnostique qui aiderait à la reconnaissance de l’ÉI et, concomitamment, favoriserait possiblement un traitement chirurgical plus adapté et plus efficace. De plus, les augmentations de connectivité postopératoires pourraient correspondre à des réponses neuroplastiques permettant de prendre en charge les fonctions altérées par la chirurgie. Nos constats ont ainsi contribué à la caractérisation des mécanismes étayant la singulière récupération fonctionnelle accompagnant la chirurgie pour ÉI. À plus grande échelle, nos travaux offrent un aperçu du potentiel de l’IRM structurelle à assister au diagnostic de l’épilepsie focale ainsi qu’à participer à la description des changements plastiques subséquents à une résection neurochirurgicale.Insular epilepsy (IE) is a rare type of focal epilepsy that is difficult to diagnose. In addition to the challenging nature of IE detection, management of patients with this condition is complicated by the tendency of insular seizures to be resistant to anti-seizure medications. For such medically refractory cases, insular surgery constitutes a viable and long-lasting therapeutic option. That said, patients who undergo an insular resection for seizure control frequently develop postoperative neurological deficits; fortunately, most of these impairments recover fully and rapidly. While this favorable postoperative course contributes to improving the outcome of IE surgery, the mechanism underlying the functional recovery remains unknown. Two contemporary structural MRI modalities, namely cortical thickness analysis and tractography, have recently been used to describe characteristic structural alterations of focal epilepsies and to elucidate the postoperative plastic remodeling associated with surgery for extra-insular epilepsy. While these analyses added to our understanding of several localization-related epilepsies, none specifically studied IE. In this thesis, we exploit structural MRI techniques to, first, depict the alterations of cortical thickness and white matter connectivity in IE and, second, define the progressive rearrangements that follow insular surgery for epilepsy. The first two studies of the current thesis showed that IE is associated with a primarily ipsilateral pattern of cortical thinning and hyperconnectivity that mainly involves insular subregions and insula-connected regions. Interestingly, the topology of these changes corresponded, at least in part, to the epileptic network of IE. Furthermore, the third study aimed to describe, via a meta-analysis, the postoperative outcome of patients undergoing surgery for IE. Among other findings, the analysis revealed that insular surgery was effective (66.7% seizure freedom rate) but was associated with a significant risk of neurological complications (42.5%) which, in most cases, were transient (78.7% of all complications) and recovered fully within three months (91.6% of transient complications). Finally, the fourth study showed that surgery for IE was followed by a diffuse pattern of bilateral structural connectivity changes. Notably, connections exhibiting an increase in connectivity were specifically located near the surgical cavity and in the contralateral healthy hemisphere. In addition, the majority of the structural strengthening occurred in the first six months following surgery, a time course that is consistent with the short delay during which most of the postoperative functional recovery was observed in our meta-analysis. Our results suggest that the morphological alterations in IE may reflect its underlying epileptic network. The topology of these changes may constitute a structural biomarker that could help diagnose IE more readily and, concomitantly, potentially enable a more targeted and more effective surgical treatment. Moreover, the postoperative increases in connectivity may be compatible with compensatory neuroplastic responses, a process that arose to recoup the functions of the injured insular cortex. Our findings have therefore contributed to the characterization of the driving process that supports the striking functional recovery seen following surgery for IE. On a larger scale, our work provides insights into the potential of structural MRI to assist in the diagnosis of focal epilepsy and to describe plastic changes following neurosurgical resections

    Anticodes and error-correcting for digital data transmission

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    The work reported in this thesis is an investigation in the field of error-control coding. This subject is concerned with increasing the reliability of digital data transmission through a noisy medium, by coding the transmitted data. In this respect, an extension and development of a method for finding optimum and near-optimum codes, using N.m digital arrays known as anticodes, is established and described. The anticodes, which have opposite properties to their complementary related error-control codes, are disjoined fron the original maximal-length code, known as the parent anticode, to leave good linear block codes. The mathematical analysis of the parent anticode and as a result the mathematical analysis of its related anticodes has given some useful insight into the construction of a large number of optimum and near-optimum anticodes resulting respectively in a large number of optimum and near-optimum codes. This work has been devoted to the construction of anticodes from unit basic (small dimension) anticodes by means of various systematic construction and refinement techniques, which simplifies the construction of the associated linear block codes over a wide range of parameters. An extensive list of these anticodes and codes is given in the thesis. The work also has been extended to the construction of anticodes in which the symbols have been chosen from the elements of the finite field GF(q), and, in particular, a large number of optimum and near-optimum codes over GF(3) have been found. This generalises the concept of anticodes into the subject of multilevel codes

    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

    Construction of perfect tensors using biunimodular vectors

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    Dual unitary gates are highly non-local two-qudit unitary gates that have been studied extensively in quantum many-body physics and quantum information in the recent past. A special subset of dual unitary gates consists of rank-four perfect tensors, which are equivalent to highly entangled multipartite pure states called absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states. In this work, numerical and analytical constructions of dual unitary gates and perfect tensors that are diagonal in a special maximally entangled basis are presented. The main ingredient in our construction is a phase-valued (unimodular) two-dimensional array whose discrete Fourier transform is also unimodular. We obtain perfect tensors for several local Hilbert space dimensions, particularly, in dimension six. A perfect tensor in local dimension six is equivalent to an AME state of four qudits, denoted as AME(4,6), and such a state cannot be constructed from existing constructions of AME states based on error-correcting codes and graph states. The existence of AME(4,6) states featured in well-known open problem lists in quantum information, and was settled positively in Phys. Rev. Lett. 128 080507 (2022). We provide an explicit construction of perfect tensors in local dimension six that can be written in terms of controlled unitary gates in the computational basis, making them amenable for quantum circuit implementations.Comment: 10+9 pages, 3+1 Figures. Comments are welcom

    Tailoring structures using stochastic variations of structural parameters.

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    Imperfections, meaning deviations from an idealized structure, can manifest through unintended variations in a structure’s geometry or material properties. Such imperfections affect the stiffness properties and can change the way structures behave under load. The magnitude of these effects determines how reliable and robust a structure is under loading. Minor changes in geometry and material properties can also be added intentionally, creating a more beneficial load response or making a more robust structure. Examples of this are variable stiffness composites, which have varying fiber paths, or structures with thickened patches. The work presented in this thesis aims to introduce a general approach to creating geodesic random fields in finite elements and exploiting these to improve designs. Random fields can be assigned to a material or geometric parameter. Stochastic analysis can then quantify the effects of variations on a structure for a given type of imperfection. Information extracted from the effects of imperfections can also identify areas critical to a structure’s performance. Post-processing stochastic results by computing the correlation between local changes and the structural performance result in a pattern, describing the effects of local changes. Perturbing the ideal deterministic geometry or material distribution of a structure using the pattern of local influences can increase performance. Examples demonstrate the approach by increasing the deterministic (without imperfections applied) linear buckling load, fatigue life, and post-buckling path of structures. Deterministic improvements can have a detrimental effect on the robustness of a structure. Increasing the amplitude of perturbation applied to the original design can improve the robustness of a structure’s response. Robustness analyses on a curved composite panel show that increasing the amplitude of design changes makes a structure less sensitive to variations. The example studied shows that an increase in robustness comes with a relatively small decrease in the deterministic improvement.Imperfektionen, d. h. die Abweichungen von einer idealisierten Struktur, können sich durch unbeabsichtigte Variationen in der Geometrie oder den Materialeigenschaften einer Struktur ergeben. Solche Imperfektionen wirken sich auf die Steifigkeitseigenschaften aus und können das Verhalten von Strukturen unter Last verändern. Das Ausmaß dieser Auswirkungen bestimmt, wie zuverlässig und robust eine Struktur unter Belastung ist. Kleine Änderungen der Geometrie und der Materialeigenschaften können auch absichtlich eingebaut werden, um ein verbessertes Lastverhalten zu erreichen oder eine stabilere Struktur zu schaffen. Beispiele hierfür sind Verbundwerkstoffe mit variabler Steifigkeit, die unterschiedliche Faserverläufe aufweisen, oder Strukturen mit lokalen Verstärkungen. Die in dieser Dissertation vorgestellte Arbeit zielt darauf ab, einen allgemeinen Ansatz zur Erstellung geodätischer Zufallsfelder in Finiten Elementen zu entwickeln und diese zur Verbesserung von Konstruktionen zu nutzen. Zufallsfelder können Material- oder Geometrieparametern zugeordnet werden. Die stochastische Analyse kann dann die Auswirkungen von Variationen auf eine Struktur für eine bestimmte Art von Imperfektion quantifizieren. Die aus den Auswirkungen von Imperfektionen gewonnenen Informationen können auch Bereiche identifizieren, die für das Tragvermögen einer Struktur kritisch sind. Die Auswertung der stochastischen Ergebnisse durch Berechnung der Korrelation zwischen lokalen Veränderungen und Strukturtragvermögen ergibt ein Muster, das die Auswirkungen lokaler Veränderungen beschreibt. Die Perturbation der idealen deterministischen Geometrie oder der Materialverteilung einer Struktur unter Verwendung des Musters der lokalen Einflüsse kann das Tragvermögen erhöhen. Anhand von Beispielen wird der Ansatz durch die Erhöhung der deterministischen (ohne Imperfektionen) linearen Knicklast, der Lebensdauer und des Nachknickverhaltens von Strukturen aufgezeigt. Deterministische Verbesserungen können sich zum Nachteil der Robustheit einer Struktur auswirken. Eine Vergrößerung der Amplitude der auf den ursprünglichen Designentwurf angewendeten Perturbation kann die Robustheit der Reaktion einer Struktur verbessern. Robustheitsanalysen an einer gekrümmten Verbundplatte zeigen, dass eine Struktur durch eine Vergrößerung der Amplitude der Entwurfsänderungen weniger empfindlich gegenüber Abweichungen wird. Das untersuchte Beispiel zeigt, dass eine Erhöhung der Robustheit mit einem relativ geringen Verlust der deterministischen Verbesserung eingeht

    Integrality and cutting planes in semidefinite programming approaches for combinatorial optimization

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    Many real-life decision problems are discrete in nature. To solve such problems as mathematical optimization problems, integrality constraints are commonly incorporated in the model to reflect the choice of finitely many alternatives. At the same time, it is known that semidefinite programming is very suitable for obtaining strong relaxations of combinatorial optimization problems. In this dissertation, we study the interplay between semidefinite programming and integrality, where a special focus is put on the use of cutting-plane methods. Although the notions of integrality and cutting planes are well-studied in linear programming, integer semidefinite programs (ISDPs) are considered only recently. We show that manycombinatorial optimization problems can be modeled as ISDPs. Several theoretical concepts, such as the Chvátal-Gomory closure, total dual integrality and integer Lagrangian duality, are studied for the case of integer semidefinite programming. On the practical side, we introduce an improved branch-and-cut approach for ISDPs and a cutting-plane augmented Lagrangian method for solving semidefinite programs with a large number of cutting planes. Throughout the thesis, we apply our results to a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems, among which the quadratic cycle cover problem, the quadratic traveling salesman problem and the graph partition problem. Our approaches lead to novel, strong and efficient solution strategies for these problems, with the potential to be extended to other problem classes

    Harnessing the Power of Sample Abundance: Theoretical Guarantees and Algorithms for Accelerated One-Bit Sensing

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    One-bit quantization with time-varying sampling thresholds (also known as random dithering) has recently found significant utilization potential in statistical signal processing applications due to its relatively low power consumption and low implementation cost. In addition to such advantages, an attractive feature of one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is their superior sampling rates as compared to their conventional multi-bit counterparts. This characteristic endows one-bit signal processing frameworks with what one may refer to as sample abundance. We show that sample abundance plays a pivotal role in many signal recovery and optimization problems that are formulated as (possibly non-convex) quadratic programs with linear feasibility constraints. Of particular interest to our work are low-rank matrix recovery and compressed sensing applications that take advantage of one-bit quantization. We demonstrate that the sample abundance paradigm allows for the transformation of such problems to merely linear feasibility problems by forming large-scale overdetermined linear systems -- thus removing the need for handling costly optimization constraints and objectives. To make the proposed computational cost savings achievable, we offer enhanced randomized Kaczmarz algorithms to solve these highly overdetermined feasibility problems and provide theoretical guarantees in terms of their convergence, sample size requirements, and overall performance. Several numerical results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2301.0346
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