Social rights constitutionalism: an antagonistic endorsement

The article discusses how we might understand solidarity as the organizing concept behind the institutionalization of social rights. I argue that writing solidarity into social rights constitutionalism carries productive tension into constitutional thinking because it disturbs the smooth passage from civil to political and finally to social rights. Marshall's influential argument that social rights are continuous to civil and political rights has become both the grounding assumption in constitutional theory and at the same time the most obvious lie in the constitutional practice of advanced capitalist democracies, clearly belied in EU constitutional practice under austerity. I explore the various attempts to accommodate the continuity of civil, political, and social rights in the face of the contradictory articulation of social democracy and capitalism before undertaking something of a defence of the antinomic significance of social rights constitutionalism, and probing what mileage might be left in ‘exploiting’ the contradiction between capitalist interests and social rights

Prospects for TLRS baseline accuracies in the western USA

One of the main goals of the LAGEOS satellite mission is the detection of regional geotectonic movements. A parametric study with the intention to obtain the optimal baseline precision from dynamic solutions of laser ranging to LAGEOS is presented. The varied parameters are: length of reduced arc, number of tracking stations, data noise and rate, biases, refraction errors, system efficiency, gravity model errors in the value of GM. The baseline precisions are 1-10 cm depending upon the set of parameters adopted. General principles obtained are also presented

Lindahl’s Phenomenology of Legality

This contribution looks at the phenomenological thread that holds together Lindahl’s argument and traces its origin back to Husserl. It asks whether the reliance on the structures of collective intentionality is a necessary component to legal phenomenology and whether it puts Lindahl at odds with other phenomenological approaches such as Marion’s. It also asks whether the notion of ‘a-legality’ can sustain its position as a third value vis-à-vis the code difference of the legal system, in other words whether it can play the role of a ‘rejection value’, or whether it is in-stead committed sooner or later to collapse into the negative pole of the legal/illegal coding of the law

Crise et jugement: Le Conseil d’État grec face à l’austérité

No abstract available

Dynamics and observational signatures from multi-field inflation

In this thesis, we focus on the dynamics and predictions of multi-field models of inflation. In the first three chapters, we introduce the basic elements of modern cosmology with emphasis on the inflationary scenario. In chapter 4 we examine in detail the multi-field dynamics for generic models and briefly discuss observables for models following the gradient flow. We continue in chapter 5 with an investigation of the observational viability of a two-field generalization of the usual α-attractor model. We discover a novel attractor solution that characterizes the late-time dynamics for certain parameter values and which can substantially alter the universal predictions of the single-field model. To better understand the existence of the latter attractor solution, in chapter 6 we study two-field models that admit scaling solutions. We provide an extensive classification of stable late-time solutions and we calculate their stability criteria, which, as we demonstrate, may differ from the standard ones commonly used in the literature. In chapter 7 we show that the late-time dynamics for a plethora of viable models is characterized by the critical points of an effective potential, constructed from the field metric and the potential gradients. These critical points can undergo pitchfork bifurcations explaining previously found phenomena such as geometrical destabilization. Finally, in chapter 8 we investigate predictions at the many-field limit using N-flation as a toy model. We demonstrate that multi-field inflation is prior dependent, and hence non-predictive, even when a notion of universality is present

General solutions to N -field cosmology with exponential potentials

We construct the general analytical solution for the $\mathcal{N}$-field product-exponential potential in an expanding FLRW background. We demonstrate the relevance of this analytical solution in more general contexts for the derivation of estimates for the transitional time between an arbitrary initial state and the slow-roll solutions. In certain cases, these estimates can also be used to demonstrate the non-linear convergence towards the slow-roll solutions. In addition, we extend the solution to include stiff matter as well.Comment: v4: improved discussion, solution generalized to N fields, dynamical systems section left out to match published version; v2: 20+1 pages, 5 figures, corrected typos; v3: small change

Lung Pattern Analysis using Artificial Intelligence for the Diagnosis Support of Interstitial Lung Diseases

Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) is a group of more than 200 chronic lung disorders characterized by inflammation and scarring of the lung tissue that leads to respiratory failure. Although ILD is a heterogeneous group of histologically distinct diseases, most of them exhibit similar clinical presentations and their diagnosis often presents a diagnostic dilemma. Early diagnosis is crucial for making treatment decisions, while misdiagnosis may lead to life-threatening complications. If a final diagnosis cannot be reached with the high resolution computed tomography scan, additional invasive procedures are required (e.g. bronchoalveolar lavage, surgical biopsy). The aim of this PhD thesis was to investigate the components of a computational system that will assist radiologists with the diagnosis of ILDs, while avoiding the dangerous, expensive and time-consuming invasive biopsies. The appropriate interpretation of the available radiological data combined with clinical/biochemical information can provide a reliable diagnosis, able to improve the diagnostic accuracy of the radiologists. In this thesis, we introduce two convolutional neural networks particularly designed for ILDs and a training scheme that employs knowledge transfer from the similar domain of general texture classification for performance enhancement. Moreover, we investigate the clinical relevance of breathing information for disease classification. The breathing information is quantified as a deformation field between inhale-exhale lung images using a novel 3D convolutional neural network for medical image registration. Finally, we design and evaluate the final end-to-end computational system for ILD classification using lung anatomy segmentation algorithms from the literature and the proposed ILD quantification neural networks. Deep learning approaches have been mostly investigated for all the aforementioned steps, while the results demonstrated their potential in analyzing lung images

(Slow-)Twisting inflationary attractors

We explore in detail the dynamics of multi-field inflationary models. We first revisit the two-field case and rederive the coordinate independent expression for the attractor solution with either small or large turn rate, emphasizing the role of isometries for the existence of rapid-turn solutions. Then, for three fields in the slow-twist regime we provide elegant expressions for the attractor solution for generic field-space geometries and potentials and study the behaviour of first order perturbations. For generic $\mathcal{N}$-field models, our method quickly grows in algebraic complexity. We observe that field-space isometries are common in the literature and are able to obtain the attractor solutions and deduce stability for some isometry classes of $\mathcal{N}$-field models. Finally, we apply our discussion to concrete supergravity models. These analyses conclusively demonstrate the existence of $\mathcal{N}>2$ dynamical attractors distinct from the two-field case, and provide tools useful for future studies of their phenomenology in the cosmic microwave background and stochastic gravitational wave spectrum.Comment: 38 pages, 10 figures. v3: improved figures, minor change