Particle-unstable nuclei in the Hartree-Fock theory

Ground state energies and decay widths of particle unstable nuclei are calculated within the Hartree-Fock approximation by performing a complex scaling of the many-body Hamiltonian. Through this transformation, the wave functions of the resonant states become square integrable. The method is implemented with Skyrme effective interactions. Several Skyrme parametrizations are tested on four unstable nuclei: 10He, 12O, 26O and 28O.Comment: 5 pages, LaTeX, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Is copyright blind to the visual?

This article argues that, with respect to the copyright protection of works of visual art, the general uneasiness that has always pervaded the relationship between copyright law and concepts of creativity produces three anomalous results. One of these is that copyright lacks much in the way of a central concept of 'visual art' and, to the extent that it embraces any concept of the 'visual', it is rooted in the rhetorical discourse of the Renaissance. This means that copyright is poorly equipped to deal with modern developments in the visual arts. Secondly, the pervasive effect of rhetorical discourse appears to have made it particularly difficult for copyright law to strike a meaningful balance between protecting creativity and permitting its use in further creative works. Thirdly, just when rhetorical discourse might have been useful in identifying the significance and materiality of the unique one-off work of visual art, copyright law chooses to ignore its implications

Defining authorship in user-generated content : copyright struggles in The Game of Thrones

The notion of authorship is a core element in antipiracy campaigns accompanying an emerging copyright regime, worldwide. These campaigns are built on discourses that aim to ‘problematize’ the issues of ‘legality’ of content downloading practices, ‘protection’ for content creators and the alleged damage caused to creators’ livelihood by piracy. Under these tensions, fandom both subverts such discourses, through sharing and production practices, and legitimizes industry’s mythology of an ‘original’ author. However, how is the notion of authorship constructed in the cooperative spaces of fandom? The article explores the most popular fandom sites of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that inspires the TV-show Game of Thrones and argues that the notion of authorship is not one-dimensional, but rather consists of attributes that develop across three processes: community building, the creative and the industrial/production process. Here, fandom constructs a figure of the ‘author’ which, although more complex than the one presented by the industry in its copyright/anti-piracy campaigns, maintains the status quo of regulatory frameworks based on the idea of a ‘primary’ creator

“Inventor”

LGBTIQ is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisex, trans, intersex and queer/questioning people. Being an LGBTIQ person is not the prerequisite for acquiring a legal status, because it no longer assigns rights or new duties to those who carry these characteristics. For LGBTIQ people the law creates the conditions to overcome the obstacles to access to the rights and duties that are normally connected to the status that everyone can acquire. LGBTIQ people are taken into consideration in different ways by European law with the aim of pushing all EU Member States to protect them more

Emulating Natural Disturbances for Declining Late- Successional Species: A Case Study of the Consequences for Cerulean Warblers (Setophaga cerulea)

Forest cover in the eastern United States has increased over the past century and while some late-successional species have benefited from this process as expected, others have experienced population declines. These declines may be in part related to contemporary reductions in small-scale forest interior disturbances such as fire, windthrow, and treefalls. To mitigate the negative impacts of disturbance alteration and suppression on some late-successional species, strategies that emulate natural disturbance regimes are often advocated, but large-scale evaluations of these practices are rare. Here, we assessed the consequences of experimental disturbance (using partial timber harvest) on a severely declining late-successional species, the cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulea), across the core of its breeding range in the Appalachian Mountains. We measured numerical (density), physiological (body condition), and demographic (age structure and reproduction) responses to three levels of disturbance and explored the potential impacts of disturbance on source-sink dynamics. Breeding densities of warblers increased one to four years after all canopy disturbances (vs. controls) and males occupying territories on treatment plots were in better condition than those on control plots. However, these beneficial effects of disturbance did not correspond to improvements in reproduction; nest success was lower on all treatment plots than on control plots in the southern region and marginally lower on light disturbance plots in the northern region. Our data suggest that only habitats in the southern region acted as sources, and interior disturbances in this region have the potential to create ecological traps at a local scale, but sources when viewed at broader scales. Thus, cerulean warblers would likely benefit from management that strikes a landscape-level balance between emulating natural disturbances in order to attract individuals into areas where current structure is inappropriate, and limiting anthropogenic disturbance in forests that already possess appropriate structural attributes in order to maintain maximum productivity

Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics:’ Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital art works cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital art works are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis, and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists, but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression

Un élément fini de poutre fissurée application à la dynamique des arbres tournants

International audienceDans ce travail on présente une méthode originale de construction d'un élément fini de poutre affectée de fissurations. La souplesse additionnelle due à la présence des fissures est identifiée à partir de calculs éléments finis tridimensionnels tenant compte des conditions de contact unilatéral entre les lèvres. Cette souplesse est répartie sur toute la longueur de l'élément dont on se propose de construire la matrice de rigidité. La démarche permet un gain considérable en temps de calcul par rapport à la représentation nodale de la section fissurée lors de l'intégration temporelle de systèmes différentiels en dynamique des structures

A Brokering Framework for Assessing Legal Risks in Big Data and the Cloud

“Cloud computing” and “Big Data” are amongst the most hyped-up terms and buzzwords of the moment. After decades in which individuals and companies used to host their data and applications using their own IT infrastructure, the world has seen the stunning transformation of the Internet. Major shifts occurred when these infrastructures began to be outsourced to public Cloud providers to match commercial expectations. Storing, sharing and transferring data and databases over the Internet is convenient, yet legal risks cannot be eliminated. Legal risk is a fast-growing area of research and covers various aspects of law. Current studies and research on Cloud computing legal risk assessment have been, however, limited in scope and focused mainly on security and privacy aspects. There is little systematic research on the risks, threats and impact of the legal issues inherent to database rights and “ownership” rights of data. Database rights seem to be outdated and there is a significant gap in the scientific literature when it comes to the understanding of how to apply its provisions in the Big Data era. This means that we need a whole new framework for understanding, protecting and sharing data in the Cloud. The scheme we propose in this chapter is based on a risk assessment-brokering framework that works side by side with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This proposed framework will provide better control for Cloud users and will go a long way to increase confidence and reinforce trust in Cloud computing transactions