The Annual Report: A Prime Disclosure Document

Hard real-time task models have evolved from periodic models to more sophisticated graph-based ones like the Digraph Real-Time Task Model (DRT) [1]. These models have in common that tasks are sequential in nature and do not allow for forking structures, modeling job releases that occur in parallel within the same task. To capture these, we present a task model that extends the DRT model with the possibility of forking and joining release paths. We are developing an exact schedulability test for EDF on uniprocessor systems with a pseudo-polynomial bound of its runtime.UPMAR

« Going with Coase against Coase : The Dynamic Approach to the Internalization of External Effects »

The article develops R. H. Coase’s insight that the level of transaction costs in the market determines the amount of externalities, thus providing arguments against government intervention. Contrary to Coase, however, we argue that the level of transaction costs cannot be considered as given, and that there is therefore a case for selective and innovative government intervention to reduce such transaction costs. Externalities are approached as intrinsically new and dynamic impacts, whose transaction costs diminish over time, a process that can be accelerated by appropriate government action. In contrast, internalization by means of public intervention through Pigouvian taxation is shown to be epistemologically untenable: if externalities had sufficient information content to allow governments to determine optimal tax levels, these same externalities would already have been fully internalized by the market. The final part of the article proposes two internalization strategies based on a dynamic re-interpretation of the Coasean approach. The first aims at developing feedback mechanisms between generators of externalities and those affected by them through media other than the market. The second seeks to reduce transaction costs in order to extend the domain in which markets can operate effectively by proposing codification strategies for the informational complexities characterizing externalities.External effects, incomplete information, environmental economics, transaction costs, codification, dynamic internalization

The Media as Participants in the International Legal Process

We know what we know about current international events through the media. The media (with their instantaneous transmission of images and sound across great distances) inform us of everything from the train bombings in Madrid and London, to human rights abuses in Darfur, to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Yet the media do not simply communicate raw information; they selectively filter, define and give shape to the events that they cover — in terms of what is happening, whether it is appropriate, and how relevant international actors should and do respond. The media thus are the nerves of the international system, and, as mass communicators, they perform critical functions in the international legal process. The media’s effects on societies and individuals have been studied from a gamut of academic and political angles. In international legal scholarship, however, the media tend to be discussed briefly or in certain limited contexts, such as the use of the media to disseminate propaganda or the regulation and control of the media. There has not been any comprehensive study on the media’s functions in the international legal process. The lack of scholarship in this regard is likely attributable, at least in part, to the facts that the media are unconventional participants, and that they oftentimes operate “behind the scenes” — as messengers for other actors and at deep levels of the public subconscious. If anything, however, these characteristics increase, rather than decrease, the media’s influence. This Article examines that influence. In Part I of this Article, I put in context the question of the media’s influence in the international legal process. That process is characterized by significant communicative gaps that the media help fill. In Part II, I analyze the media’s functions at every stage of the international legal process — from the prescription of international law, to its codification, invocation, application and even termination. In Part III, I address systemic factors that impede media performance, demonstrating that, although the media perform important legal functions, they do not perform those functions perfectly. In Part IV, I consider efforts to minimize these imperfections. I conclude that the media will continue to operate imperfectly but as unique and specialized participants in the international legal process. The goal, then, is to recognize both the media’s functions and their limits so that we, as international scholars and practitioners, can work within that process to achieve desirable legal and policy outcomes

The Network of French Legal Codes

We propose an analysis of the codified Law of France as a structured system. Fifty two legal codes are selected on the basis of explicit legal criteria and considered as vertices with their mutual quotations forming the edges in a network which properties are analyzed relying on graph theory. We find that a group of 10 codes are simultaneously the most citing and the most cited by other codes, and are also strongly connected together so forming a "rich club" sub-graph. Three other code communities are also found that somewhat partition the legal field is distinct thematic sub-domains. The legal interpretation of this partition is opening new untraditional lines of research. We also conjecture that many legal systems are forming such new kind of networks that share some properties in common with small worlds but are far denser. We propose to call "concentrated world"

Control at a distance as self-control: the renewal of the myth of control through technology

This paper draws on socio-institutional research on accounting technology. It underlines the ability of one type of accounting technology (performance measurement technology) to be a base for control at a distance since this technology links together discourse and calculation.accounting; technology; control at a distance

Redundancy in Systems which Entertain a Model of Themselves: Interaction Information and the Self-organization of Anticipation

Mutual information among three or more dimensions (mu-star = - Q) has been considered as interaction information. However, Krippendorff (2009a, 2009b) has shown that this measure cannot be interpreted as a unique property of the interactions and has proposed an alternative measure of interaction information based on iterative approximation of maximum entropies. Q can then be considered as a measure of the difference between interaction information and redundancy generated in a model entertained by an observer. I argue that this provides us with a measure of the imprint of a second-order observing system -- a model entertained by the system itself -- on the underlying information processing. The second-order system communicates meaning hyper-incursively; an observation instantiates this meaning-processing within the information processing. The net results may add to or reduce the prevailing uncertainty. The model is tested empirically for the case where textual organization can be expected to contain intellectual organization in terms of distributions of title words, author names, and cited references