The Temporal Rivalries of Human Rights

Nation-states\u27 boundaries are produced in time: around official working hours and terms of office, for instance, and in the historicomythic life of the nation. Global human rights practices affirm and depend on nation-states\u27 temporal authority, while also calling that authority into question. In different ways, global markets do likewise. In recent decades, the ubiquity of both finance capital and international human rights law, among other factors, may have encouraged the fracturing of time into intervals of ever-decreasing length. Temporal authority premised on the long-term seems to have declining purchase, even as historicism and futurism abound, discouraging some modes of state-based politics associated with the long-term. In this context, international human rights law advocates seem increasingly preoccupied with the propagation of human rights concerns in real time. This orientation carries some peril, especially vis-&-vis its articulation with the temporalities of global finance capital. Even so, there is still time for political intervention in this uneven temporal terrain. Such intervention may be occasioned, this article argues, by reading international human rights law anachronistically, and reactivating the times and rhythms of the global economy, and of the nation-state, as political questions of the first order

Views on the Past, Present, and Future of Business and Information Systems Engineering

‘‘The times they are a-changin,’’ a famous song title by Bob Dylan, also applies to our profession and our subject of study. Information technology has always been a driver for innovation. The recent years, however, have seen IT-based innovations that truly impact everybody’s lives. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and this trend is continuing at an amazing speed. For a discipline that looks at the design and utilization of information systems these are exciting times. Yet, it is also a time full of challenges. While our discipline has much to contribute, it competes with other disciplines for topics and ideas. Also, the scope of topics studied has become broader and broader, and so have our methods. While initial work in Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) was often rooted in artificial intelligence, database systems, or operations research, the community has adopted new approaches to address new types of problems. Nowadays, we also have a strong group of academics working primarily with empirical methods or methods from microeconomics, to name just a few. This development towards a more multiparadigmatic discipline also had its challenges and there were controversial discussions along the way

Shifting baselines of Europe: new perspectives beyond neoliberalism and nationalism

This book opens the often narrow discourse on the future of Europe and criticises the false dichotomy between nationalism on the one hand and a neoliberal version of Europe on the other. Existing emancipatory projects from across the continent are presented together with reflections on strategies to achieve a democratic Europe beyond the nation state: from the municipal level to the level of transnational media, from technology and counter-surveillance to the systemic change provided by the commons movement and more. The shift towards a new way of thinking and doing politics is possible! With contributions by Etienne Balibar, Ulrike Guérot, Gesine Schwan, Renata Avila, Barbara Spinelli, Andreas Karitzis, Lorenzo Marsili, Jonas Staal, among others, and interviews with city governors from Madrid to Naples

The Critical Challenges from International High-Tech and Computer-Related Crime at the Millennium

The automotive industry stands in front of a great challenge, to decrease its impact on the environment. One important part in succeeding with this is to decrease the structural weight of the body structure and by that the fuel consumption or the required battery power. Carbon fibre composites are by many seen as the only real option when traditional engineering materials are running out of potential for further weight reduction. However, the automotive industry lacks experience working with structural composites and the methods for high volume composite manufacturing are immature. The development of a composite automotive body structure, therefore, needs methods to support and guide the conceptual work to improve the financial and technical results. In this thesis a framework is presented which will provide guidelines for the conceptual phase of the development of an automotive body structure. The framework follows two main paths, one to strive for the ideal material diversity, which also defines an initial partition of the body structure based on the process and material selection. Secondly, a further analysis of the structures are made to evaluate if a more cost and weight efficient solution can be found by a more differential design and by that define the ideal part size. In the case and parameter studies performed, different carbon fibre composite material systems and processes are compared and evaluated. The results show that high performance material system with continuous fibres becomes both more cost and performance effective compared to industrialised discontinuous fibre composites. But also that cycle times, sometimes, are less important than a competitive feedstock cost for a manufacturing process. When further analysing the manufacturing design of the structures it is seen that further partition(s) can become cost effective if the size and complexity is large enough.      QC 20140527</p

The Law of Other States

The question whether courts should consult the laws of "other states" has produced intense controversy. But in some ways, this practice is entirely routine; within the United States, state courts regularly consult the decisions of other state courts in deciding on the common law, the interpretation of statutory law, and even on the meaning of state constitutions. A formal argument in defense of such consultation stems from the Condorcet Jury Theorem, which says that under certain conditions, a widespread belief, accepted by a number of independent actors, is highly likely to be correct. It follows that if a large majority of states make a certain decision based on a certain shared belief, and the states are well motivated, there is good reason to believe that the decision is correct. For the Jury Theorem to apply, however, three conditions must be met: states must be making judgments based on private information; states must be relevantly similar; and states must be making decisions independently, rather than mimicking one another. An understanding of these conditions offers qualified support for the domestic practice of referring to the laws of other states, while also raising some questions about the Supreme Court's reference to the laws of other nations. It is possible, however, to set out the ingredients of an approach that high courts might follow, at least if we make certain assumptions about the legitimate sources of interpretation. Existing practice, at the domestic and international levels, suggests that many courts are now following an implicit Condorcetian logic.