197 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
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
A PRISMA-driven systematic mapping study on system assurance weakeners
Context: An assurance case is a structured hierarchy of claims aiming at
demonstrating that a given mission-critical system supports specific
requirements (e.g., safety, security, privacy). The presence of assurance
weakeners (i.e., assurance deficits, logical fallacies) in assurance cases
reflects insufficient evidence, knowledge, or gaps in reasoning. These
weakeners can undermine confidence in assurance arguments, potentially
hindering the verification of mission-critical system capabilities.
Objectives: As a stepping stone for future research on assurance weakeners,
we aim to initiate the first comprehensive systematic mapping study on this
subject. Methods: We followed the well-established PRISMA 2020 and SEGRESS
guidelines to conduct our systematic mapping study. We searched for primary
studies in five digital libraries and focused on the 2012-2023 publication year
range. Our selection criteria focused on studies addressing assurance weakeners
at the modeling level, resulting in the inclusion of 39 primary studies in our
systematic review.
Results: Our systematic mapping study reports a taxonomy (map) that provides
a uniform categorization of assurance weakeners and approaches proposed to
manage them at the modeling level.
Conclusion: Our study findings suggest that the SACM (Structured Assurance
Case Metamodel) -- a standard specified by the OMG (Object Management Group) --
may be the best specification to capture structured arguments and reason about
their potential assurance weakeners
Women in the History of Science
Women in the History of Science brings together primary sources that highlight women’s involvement in scientific knowledge production around the world. Drawing on texts, images and objects, each primary source is accompanied by an explanatory text, questions to prompt discussion, and a bibliography to aid further research. Arranged by time period, covering 1200 BCE to the twenty-first century, and across 12 inclusive and far-reaching themes, this book is an invaluable companion to students and lecturers alike in exploring women’s history in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, medicine and culture.
While women are too often excluded from traditional narratives of the history of science, this book centres on the voices and experiences of women across a range of domains of knowledge. By questioning our understanding of what science is, where it happens, and who produces scientific knowledge, this book is an aid to liberating the curriculum within schools and universities
The Last Decade in Review: Tracing the Evolution of Safety Assurance Cases through a Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis
Safety assurance is of paramount importance across various domains, including
automotive, aerospace, and nuclear energy, where the reliability and
acceptability of mission-critical systems are imperative. This assurance is
effectively realized through the utilization of Safety Assurance Cases. The use
of safety assurance cases allows for verifying the correctness of the created
systems capabilities, preventing system failure. The latter may result in loss
of life, severe injuries, large-scale environmental damage, property
destruction, and major economic loss. Still, the emergence of complex
technologies such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), characterized by their
heterogeneity, autonomy, machine learning capabilities, and the uncertainty of
their operational environments poses significant challenges for safety
assurance activities. Several papers have tried to propose solutions to tackle
these challenges, but to the best of our knowledge, no secondary study
investigates the trends, patterns, and relationships characterizing the safety
case scientific literature. This makes it difficult to have a holistic view of
the safety case landscape and to identify the most promising future research
directions. In this paper, we, therefore, rely on state-of-the-art bibliometric
tools(e.g., VosViewer) to conduct a bibliometric analysis that allows us to
generate valuable insights, identify key authors and venues, and gain a birds
eye view of the current state of research in the safety assurance area. By
revealing knowledge gaps and highlighting potential avenues for future
research, our analysis provides an essential foundation for researchers,
corporate safety analysts, and regulators seeking to embrace or enhance safety
practices that align with their specific needs and objectives
Addressing uncertainty in the safety assurance of machine-learning
There is increasing interest in the application of machine learning (ML) technologies to safety-critical cyber-physical systems, with the promise of increased levels of autonomy due to their potential for solving complex perception and planning tasks. However, demonstrating the safety of ML is seen as one of the most challenging hurdles to their widespread deployment for such applications. In this paper we explore the factors which make the safety assurance of ML such a challenging task. In particular we address the impact of uncertainty on the confidence in ML safety assurance arguments. We show how this uncertainty is related to complexity in the ML models as well as the inherent complexity of the tasks that they are designed to implement. Based on definitions of uncertainty as well as an exemplary assurance argument structure, we examine typical weaknesses in the argument and how these can be addressed. The analysis combines an understanding of causes of insufficiencies in ML models with a systematic analysis of the types of asserted context, asserted evidence and asserted inference within the assurance argument. This leads to a systematic identification of requirements on the assurance argument structure as well as supporting evidence. We conclude that a combination of qualitative arguments combined with quantitative evidence are required to build a robust argument for safety-related properties of ML functions that is continuously refined to reduce residual and emerging uncertainties in the arguments after the function has been deployed into the target environment
Studies in the Life and Work of Jean Baptiste Andre Dumas (1800-1884): The Period up to 1850.
Jean Baptiste Dumas (1800-188U) was an outstanding experimental chemist who gave a sense of direction to the study of organic chemistry in the second quarter of the 19th century. He did this by framing hypotheses boldly and fruitfully, believing in the simplicity of nature's fundamental relationships and a need for classification as a means of emphasising this. Stress has been placed on the important period of, Dumas' formation in Geneva, his research in physiology and the transition period in Paris where he was drawn to chemical research by appointments at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Athenee.
An interest in industrial chemistry led to his textbook in applied chemistry and to the founding of an industrial journal and school. In the College de France he gave an influential course on chemical philosophy. His election to the Academy in 1832 was followed by appointments to the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, where he gained a reputation as an outstanding professor of chemistry, and a guide for research students, both French and foreign.
His practical contributions to chemistry included procedures for measuring vapour densities, organic nitrogen analysis and accurate determination of atomic weights, to which he was led by Prout's hypothesis. His unique combination of creative intuition, sound judgment, a strong reliance on experimental data and a virtually limitless capacity for work made possible his seminal contributions to the theory of organic chemistry: ethers, amides, substitution, types, a law of fat acids. New compounds were discovered as a result, but more important, he laid the foundations for more general modes of classification, the homologues and types of one of his students, Gerhardt. Dumas was the first to make extensive and successful use of chemical formulae and equations to explain reactions in organic chemistry.
His influence on classification of the elements and atomic theory was profound. This thesis provides the necessary documentation to integrate the various aspects of Dumas' life and work up to 1850, after which he became increasingly involved in national politics and administration
Ruinous Natures: The Approach of Social Timespace
This Dissertation advances across three areas: first, a theory of social timespace that borrows from critical social theories, post-ontological systems theory, and literary critique; second, it proposes a revisioning of sociological ‘methods’ by an historical reproachment: how sociology is a method among others for the study of society and culture, what are called variously the social sciences, and how sociology also has a method of its own developed in the work of the first sociological institutions in the United States, Germany, and France, that is parallel to linguistic structuralism in the same historical period and has mostly been advanced outside the discipline in narrative and discourse analysis; third, the substantive matter of this dissertation concerns a shift in the sociology of the environment to a political ecology, and critique of the latter. The binding theoretic development, mode of analysis, and the object of a political ecology formed in environmental sociology, are configured under the singular term of socioanalysis. The technique of socioanalysis, its eco-environmental object, and theory implied by the practice of socioanalysis are the guiding proposition of this research
Physics and Literature
Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists and literary scholars, the first book to explore together the relations between both fields in depth. Contributors analyze central aspects of literary and scientific thought and representation, and the forms of exchange between them. They clarify how narrative, fiction, metaphor and language interact with models, experiment, measurement and mathematics, across eras and genres
Imagination and Science in Romanticism
How did the idea of the imagination impact Romantic literature and science?2018 Winner, Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize, The International Conference on RomanticismRichard C. Sha argues that scientific understandings of the imagination indelibly shaped literary Romanticism. Challenging the idea that the imagination found a home only on the side of the literary, as a mental vehicle for transcending the worldly materials of the sciences, Sha shows how imagination helped to operationalize both scientific and literary discovery. Essentially, the imagination forced writers to consider the difference between what was possible and impossible while thinking about how that difference could be known. Sha examines how the imagination functioned within physics and chemistry in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, neurology in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas, physiology in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and obstetrics and embryology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He also demonstrates how the imagination was called upon to do aesthetic and scientific work using primary examples taken from the work of scientists and philosophers Davy, Dalton, Faraday, Priestley, Kant, Mary Somerville, Oersted, Marcet, Smellie, Swedenborg, Blumenbach, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Von Baer, among others. Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained
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