332 research outputs found
A co-original approach towards law-making in the internet age
There is an increasing interest in incorporating significant citizen participation into the law-making process by developing the use of the internet in the public sphere. However, no well-accepted e-participation model has prevailed. This article points out that, to be successful, we need critical reflection of legal theory and we also need further institutional construction based on the theoretical reflection.
Contemporary dominant legal theories demonstrate too strong an internal legal point of view to empower the informal, social normative development on the internet. Regardless of whether we see the law as a body of rules or principles, the social aspect is always part of people’s background and attracts little attention. In this article, it is advocated that the procedural legal paradigm advanced by Jürgen Habermas represents an important breakthrough in this regard.
Further, Habermas’s co-originality thesis reveals a neglected internal relationship between public autonomy and private autonomy. I believe the co-originality theory provides the essential basis on which a connecting infrastructure between the legal and the social could be developed. In terms of the development of the internet to include the public sphere, co-originality can also help us direct the emphasis on the formation of public opinion away from the national legislative level towards the local level; that is, the network of governance.1
This article is divided into two sections. The focus of Part One is to reconstruct the co-originality thesis (section 2, 3). This paper uses the application of discourse in the adjudication theory of Habermas as an example. It argues that Habermas would be more coherent, in terms of his insistence on real communication in his discourse theory, if he allowed his judges to initiate improved interaction with the society. This change is essential if the internal connection between public autonomy and private autonomy in the sense of court adjudication is to be truly enabled.
In order to demonstrate such improved co-original relationships, the empowering character of the state-made law is instrumental in initiating the mobilization of legal intermediaries, both individual and institutional. A mutually enhanced relationship is thus formed; between the formal, official organization and its governance counterpart aided by its associated ‘local’ public sphere. Referring to Susan Sturm, the Harris v Forklift Systems Inc. (1930) decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the field of sexual harassment is used as an example.
Using only one institutional example to illustrate how the co-originality thesis can be improved is not sufficient to rebuild the thesis but this is as much as can be achieved in this article.
In Part Two, the paper examines, still at the institutional level, how Sturm develops an overlooked sense of impartiality, especially in the derivation of social norms; i.e. multi-partiality instead of neutral detachment (section 4). These two ideas should be combined as the criterion for impartiality to evaluate the legitimacy of the joint decision-making processes of both the formal official organization and ‘local’ public sphere.
Sturm’s emphasis on the deployment of intermediaries, both institutional and individual, can also enlighten the discourse theory. Intermediaries are essential for connecting the disassociated social networks, especially when a breakdown of communication occurs due to a lack of data, information, knowledge, or disparity of value orientation, all of which can affect social networks. If intermediaries are used, further communication will not be blocked as a result of the lack of critical data, information, knowledge or misunderstandings due to disparity of value orientation or other causes.
The institutional impact of the newly constructed co-originality thesis is also discussed in Part Two. Landwehr’s work on institutional design and assessment for deliberative interaction is first discussed. This article concludes with an indication of how the ‘local’ public sphere, through e-rulemaking or online dispute resolution, for example, can be constructed in light of the discussion of this article
A new geometric approach to problems in birational geometry
A classical set of birational invariants of a variety are its spaces of
pluricanonical forms and some of their canonically defined subspaces. Each of
these vector spaces admits a typical metric structure which is also
birationally invariant. These vector spaces so metrized will be referred to as
the pseudonormed spaces of the original varieties. A fundamental question is
the following: given two mildly singular projective varieties with some of the
first variety's pseudonormed spaces being isometric to the corresponding ones
of the second variety's, can one construct a birational map between them which
induces these isometries? In this work a positive answer to this question is
given for varieties of general type. This can be thought of as a theorem of
Torelli type for birational equivalence.Comment: 13 pages, to appear in PNA
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Modeling in Confidentiality and Integrity for a Supply Chain Network
Bell-LaPadula Model and Markov Chain Model are used for supply chain networks in the previous literature. However, Bell-LaPadula Model only considers the confidentiality aspect of security. Markov Chain Model is used to simulate the dynamics of the security states. In a typical supply chain network, the integrity of business transactions should be as important as confidentiality of those transactions. The purpose of this paper is to apply Clark-Wilson model to the supply chain network integrity. The major concepts of the Clark-Wilson model such as separation of duty, constrained data items, well-formed transactions, and transform procedures are applied to different situations of a supply chain network
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Simulation of a Two-Category Secured Access Database
Electronic commerce users continually access sensitive information on business databases through the Internet. In order to protect databases from unauthorized access, confidentiality policies must be applied. Confidentiality of the database is often protected by data encryption or proprietary software. It can be protected by a monitoring system using Markov Chain and Bell- LaPadula Models. In this paper, a two category secured access database model by semi-Markov chains is discussed. This paper simulates this simplified two category secured access database model, and issues on security management are also addressed
Fuzzing Deep Learning Compilers with HirGen
Deep Learning (DL) compilers are widely adopted to optimize advanced DL
models for efficient deployment on diverse hardware. Their quality has profound
effect on the quality of compiled DL models. A recent bug study shows that the
optimization of high-level intermediate representation (IR) is the most
error-prone compilation stage. Bugs in this stage are accountable for 44.92% of
the whole collected ones. However, existing testing techniques do not consider
high-level optimization related features (e.g. high-level IR), and are
therefore weak in exposing bugs at this stage. To bridge this gap, we propose
HirGen, an automated testing technique that aims to effectively expose coding
mistakes in the optimization of high-level IR. The design of HirGen includes 1)
three coverage criteria to generate diverse and valid computational graphs; 2)
full use of high-level IRs language features to generate diverse IRs; 3) three
test oracles inspired from both differential testing and metamorphic testing.
HirGen has successfully detected 21 bugs that occur at TVM, with 17 bugs
confirmed and 12 fixed. Further, we construct four baselines using the
state-of-the-art DL compiler fuzzers that can cover the high-level optimization
stage. Our experiment results show that HirGen can detect 10 crashes and
inconsistencies that cannot be detected by the baselines in 48 hours. We
further validate the usefulness of our proposed coverage criteria and test
oracles in evaluation
Brevilin A Induces Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma
Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most common malignant cancers in Southeast Asia and Southern China. Centipeda minima extract (CME) had previously demonstrated anti-cancer effects in human NPC. Brevilin A, a sesquiterpene lactone isolated from C. minima, has been reported to exhibit biological activities. In this study, we investigated its anti-NPC effect and further explored its molecular mechanisms. The effects of brevilin A were tested in the NPC cell lines CNE-1, CNE-2, SUNE-1, HONE1, and C666-1. Effects of brevilin A on cell viability were determined by MTT assay, and cell cycle and apoptosis were detected by flow cytometry. The molecular mechanism of cell cycle regulation and apoptosis were investigated via Western blot. Results showed that brevilin A inhibited NPC cell viability in a concentration- and time-dependent manner. Brevilin A induced cell cycle arrest at G2/M and induced apoptosis. Western blot results demonstrated that brevilin A could down-regulate cyclin D3, cdc2, p-PI3K, p-AKT, p-mTOR, and p-STAT3, while up-regulating cleaved PARP, cleaved caspase 9, and Bax. Regulation of cyclin B1, cdk6, and Bcl-2 expression by brevilin A showed dynamic changes according to dose and time. In the tumor xenograft model, brevilin A could reduce tumor growth, at a similar magnitude to cisplatin. However, notably, whereas cisplatin treatment led to significant weight loss in treated mice, treatment with brevilin A did not, indicating its relative lack of toxicity. Taken together, brevilin A regulated cell cycle, activated the caspase signaling pathway, and inhibited PI3K/AKT/mTOR and STAT3 signaling pathways in vitro, and exhibited similar efficacy to the common chemotherapeutic cisplatin in vivo, without its associated toxicity. These findings provide a framework for the preclinical development of brevilin A as a chemotherapeutic for NPC
Chemical abundances in Sgr A East: evidence for a Type Iax supernova remnant
Recent observations have shown a remarkable diversity of observational
behaviors and explosion mechanisms in thermonuclear supernovae (SNe). An
emerging class of peculiar thermonuclear SNe, called Type Iax, show photometric
and spectroscopic behaviors distinct from normal Type Ia. Their origin remains
highly controversial, but pure turbulent deflagration of white dwarfs (WDs) has
been regarded as the leading formation theory. The large population of Type Iax
indicates the existence of unidentified Galactic Type Iax supernova remnants
(SNRs). We report evidence that SNR Sgr A East in the Galactic center resulted
from a pure turbulent deflagration of a Chandrasekhar-mass carbon-oxygen WD, an
explosion mechanism used for Type Iax SNe. Our X-ray spectroscopic study of Sgr
A East using 3 Ms of Chandra data shows a low ratio of intermediate-mass
elements to Fe and large Mn/Fe and Ni/Fe ratios. This abundance pattern does
not accord with the core-collapse or normal Type Ia models. Sgr A East is thus
the first Galactic SNR for which a likely Type Iax origin has been proposed and
the nearest target for studying this peculiar class. We compared Sgr A East
with the Fe-rich SNRs 3C 397 and W49B, which also have high Mn and Cr
abundances and were claimed to result from deflagration-to-detonation
explosions of Chandrasekhar-mass WDs (although with disputes). Our study shows
that they have distinct abundance patterns. The X-ray spectroscopic studies of
thermonuclear SNRs provide observational evidence for the theories that there
are diverse explosion channels and various metal outputs for Chandrasekhar-mass
WDs.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journa
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