"Serenity in overcoming crises": a parochial gloss on the transnational shift in constitutional vocabularies

Along with the rise of the modern normative constitutions at the close of the eighteenth century, constitutionalism started to crystallize into a body of conceptual justifications for the limited government. Whereas constitutional phenomena always have parochial dimensions and connotations, related to the implications of popular sovereignty and the historical origins of various arrangements, the foundational concepts of constitutionalism are in their nature abstract and universalistic. Nonetheless, as long as constitutions reigned a world of nation-states, constitutionalism could serve, within the limited and concrete setting provided by the adherence of debates to state-bound constitutional phenomena, as a an intelligible meta-juridical language for assessing practices. With the contemporary erosion of the nation state came an increasing dilution of the constitutions' jurisdictional capacity to normatively predetermine legal and political evolutions. Conversely, as the locus of crucial decisions shifted, attempts were made to bring institutions and structures located beyond or alongside the classical nation-state in tune with inherited patterns of legal and political legitimacy. This contemporary phenomenon, interchangeably described as "supranational", "transnational", "global" or "international" constitutionalization, determined a detachment of the language of constitutionalism from the concrete context provided by nation state practices and also produced new, quasi-constitutional vocabularies. This article tests, on the basis of a Romanian case study, the capacity of constitutional language, when it is heaved to and abstracted at the cosmopolitan level, to function as a rational framework of reference

Politics as a legal category: a few considerations on the limits of public law adjudication

Public law and political science have a lot in common, since for both disciplines politics is a defining phenomenon and an epistemic category of the highest relevance. What separates starkly the two fields of knowledge is the diametrically opposed position which they adopt towards this common point of reference. Whereas political scientists have more of an inclination to recognize and perhaps celebrate -rather than conceal- politics, public lawyers (save perhaps for the various "legal realist" schools), contrariwise, seek to the utmost to drive a wedge between politics and public law proper. Classical constitutionalist theory and practice coagulated around a number of coherent bright-line foundational distinctions. These distinctions rendered the separation between law and politics easier to both conceptualize and maintain in public law adjudication. The twentieth-century departure of modern state practices from the classical paradigm has created a number of tensions, which pose nowadays various problems and raise a number of important dilemmas regarding the limits and legitimacy of public law adjudication

Automating the Process of Traffic Orientation Through Mobile Devices and Ontologies

Mobile devices are used in all activities undertaken by users and 90% of them have used at least once a mobile device to search for local information navigation and acted on the basis of data. In this material is presented the use of mobile applications for traffic navigation or assistance and how they can contribute to the automation of orientation in traffic through traffic signs. Traffic signs around the globe are very different, even if some countries ratified conventions or adopted common specifications. In addition to that, a part of traffic signs differ from country to country even if they have the same road signal convention. This paper work aims to establish a global knowledge base with traffic signs and traffic rules dictated by them. In this way when a driver travels in foreign countries by car he can be helped by the mobile device in order to recognize the traffic signs. The ontology design is made by using Protégé software together with an RDF/RDFS approach. It uses a class hierarchy with classes like RoadSign and TrafficRule in the top of it. SPAQRL is the query language used to clean the knowledge base. At the beginning it will be populated with traffic signs from Romania. Ontology will be the backend of the mobile application that provides recognition of traffic signs and assists drivers from around the world in traffic navigation. In order to motivate the users to be active in the community and add new signs in the application a gamification approach is used

Interacting with chatbots later in life: A technology acceptance perspective in COVID-19 pandemic situation

IntroductionWithin the technological development path, chatbots are considered an important tool for economic and social entities to become more efficient and to develop customer-centric experiences that mimic human behavior. Although artificial intelligence is increasingly used, there is a lack of empirical studies that aim to understand consumers’ experience with chatbots. Moreover, in a context characterized by constant population aging and an increased life-expectancy, the way aging adults perceive technology becomes of great interest. However, based on the digital divide (unequal access to technology, knowledge, and resources), and since young adults (aged between 18 and 34 years old) are considered to have greater affinity for technology, most of the research is dedicated to their perception. The present paper investigates the way chatbots are perceived by middle-aged and aging adults in Romania.MethodsAn online opinion survey has been conducted. The age-range of the subjects is 40–78 years old, a convenience sampling technique being used (N = 235). The timeframe of the study is May–June 2021. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic is the core context of the research. A covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) has been used to test the theoretical assumptions as it is a procedure used for complex conceptual models and theory testing.ResultsThe results show that while perceived ease of use is explained by the effort, the competence, and the perceive external control in interacting with chatbots, perceived usefulness is supported by the perceived ease of use and subjective norms. Furthermore, individuals are likely to further use chatbots (behavioral intention) if they consider this interaction useful and if the others’ opinion is in favor of using it. Gender and age seem to have no effect on behavioral intention. As studies on chatbots and aging adults are few and are mainly investigating reactions in the healthcare domain, this research is one of the first attempts to better understand the way chatbots in a not domain-specific context are perceived later in life. Likewise, judging from a business perspective, the results can help economic and social organizations to improve and adapt AI-based interaction for the aging customers

Dimitris Dalakoglou, <em>The road: An ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans</em>, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 203

Book review of Dimitris Dalakoglou, The road: An ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 203

Evaluating Google Speech-to-Text API's Performance for Romanian e-Learning Resources

This paper presents a way of performing ASR on multimedia e-learning resources available in Romanian with the usage of the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API. The material presents the history of ASR systems together with the main approaches used by the algorithms behind these systems. The cloud computing providers, that offer ASR solutions via SaaS, are analyzed as well. After performing a short literature review, the author focuses on applying the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API on various video e-learning resources available online on YouTube. By doing this, the resources can be easily indexed and transformed into searchable materials. The WER score is used in order to measure the accuracy of the model and to compare it with similar works. The results are more than satisfying, thus the proposed model can be used as a method of automating the indexing of multimedia e-learning resources

ANALIZA COMPARATIVĂ A PRINCIPALILOR ALGORITMI SaaS PENTRU RECUNOAȘTEREA AUTOMATĂ DE ENTITĂȚI ÎN LIMBA ROMÂNĂ

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the main Name Entity Recognition algorithms available in cloud, applied for texts written in Romanian. The context of this analysis is the one of the semantic web, where the problem of identifying new entities and linking them to existing ontologies persists. There are processes defined that allow the text written in Romanian to be translated in one of the languages supported by the algorithms provided by DBpedia (DBpedia Spotlight), Google (Google Cloud Natural Language API), Microsoft (the NER module from Azure Machine Learning Studio) and IBM (IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding), and afterwards the F1 score is computed in order to identify the optimal process. The article ends with a comparison between the obtained results and the performance achieved by NER algorithms specialized for English or language independent

Numerical Analyses of Plate Loading Test

A numerical simulation of plate loading test, in order to underlines the size effect on settlements and derived values of geotechnical parameters, is shown. The study is based on the comparison between the results obtained by Finite Element Method (FEM) using the Mohr-Coulomb soil model and by some observations from literature. The obtained numerical results revealed that the subgrade reaction coefficient is strictly dependent on parameters like size of the loaded area and loading magnitude, and thus completely general and generic, and not a fundamental material property of soil that can somehow be determined rationally, as often one claims to be