ESTABLISHING A DIGITIZATION PROGRAMME FOR NAMIBIA: PROMISES, PITFALLS AND PROGRESS

Digitization has spread world-wide like an infectious disease and no country has been spared. Guidelines, instructions and policies can be found in abundance on the Internet. Nevertheless, it seems that the same mistakes are made again and again. This paper analyses the experiences of the National Archives of Namibia, which has gone through the whole wide array of pitfalls and mistakes. The paper comes to the conclusion that, under African conditions of very limited resources, certain mistakes are unavoidable until the adequate local conditions have been explored and local solutions have been found

Reshaping the Idea of Humanitarian Intervention: Norms, Causal Stories, and the Use of Force Carrie Booth Walling, \u3ci\u3eAll Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention\u3c/i\u3e (University of Pennsylvania Press 2013).

With an ongoing human tragedy unfolding in Syria and the international community unable and unwilling to respond, Carrie Booth Walling’s All Necessary Measures reminds us that in international politics, power is “no longer simply about whose military can win but also about whose story can win.”1 That is, the narratives that shape our understanding of the causes and possible solutions of mass violence inherently shape our willingness to act. In this carefully researched and well-reasoned book, Walling argues that scholars and practitioners must take norms seriously, even in the arena of power politics

Backlash to the European Court of Human Rights: The Case of Russia

Since the end of World War II, the international community has forged human rights accountability systems that have since become increasingly important. The good work done by these international tribunals has come under threat more and more by a process of backlash called tribunal capture, or “the politics of states and individual political leaders seeking to undermine the tribunals by working within the judicialized and legalized landscape of international human rights law” (Hillebrecht). The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is no exception; since its foundation, it has been largely utilized. However, lack of compliance with its rulings remains to be and underlying problem. Russia, a key member state of the institution, has historically demonstrated cases of systematic noncompliance with rulings of the ECtHR, and continues to do so. This study examined the relations between Russia and the COE since the widely condemned annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 in order to better understand the processes and ongoing ramifications of tribunal capture

Certified machine learning: Rigorous a posteriori error bounds for PDE defined PINNs

Prediction error quantification in machine learning has been left out of most methodological investigations of neural networks, for both purely data-driven and physics-informed approaches. Beyond statistical investigations and generic results on the approximation capabilities of neural networks, we present a rigorous upper bound on the prediction error of physics-informed neural networks. This bound can be calculated without the knowledge of the true solution and only with a priori available information about the characteristics of the underlying dynamical system governed by a partial differential equation. We apply this a posteriori error bound exemplarily to four problems: the transport equation, the heat equation, the Navier-Stokes equation and the Klein-Gordon equation

A comparative study of protein synthesis in in vitro systems: from the prokaryotic reconstituted to the eukaryotic extract-based

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cell-free protein synthesis is not only a rapid and high throughput technology to obtain proteins from their genes, but also provides an <it>in vitro </it>platform to study protein translation and folding. A detailed comparison of <it>in vitro </it>protein synthesis in different cell-free systems may provide insights to their biological differences and guidelines for their applications.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Protein synthesis was investigated <it>in vitro </it>in a reconstituted prokaryotic system, a S30 extract-based system and a eukaryotic system. Compared to the S30 system, protein synthesis in the reconstituted system resulted in a reduced yield, and was more cold-sensitive. Supplementing the reconstituted system with fractions from a size-exclusion separation of the S30 extract significantly increased the yield and activity, to a level close to that of the S30 system. Though protein synthesis in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems showed no significant differences for eukaryotic reporter proteins, drastic differences were observed when an artificial fusion protein was synthesized in vitro. The prokaryotic systems failed to synthesize and correctly fold a significant amount of the full-length fusion protein, even when supplemented with the eukaryotic lysate. The active full-length fusion protein was synthesized only in the eukaryotic system.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The reconstituted bacterial system is sufficient but not efficient in protein synthesis. The S30 system by comparison contains additional cellular factors capable of enhancing protein translation and folding. The eukaryotic translation machinery may have evolved from its prokaryotic counterpart in order to translate more complex (difficult-to-translate) templates into active proteins.</p

Continuum limit of lattice quasielectron wavefunctions

Trial states describing anyonic quasiholes in the Laughlin state were found early on, and it is therefore natural to expect that one should also be able to create anyonic quasielectrons. Nevertheless, the existing trial wavefunctions for quasielectrons show behaviors that are not compatible with the expected topological properties or their construction involves ad hoc elements. It was shown, however, that for lattice fractional quantum Hall systems, it is possible to find a relatively simple quasielectron wavefunction that has all the expected properties (2018 New J. Phys. 20 033029). This naturally poses the question: what happens to this wavefunction in the continuum limit? Here we demonstrate that, although one obtains a finite continuum wavefunction when the quasielectron is on top of a lattice site, such a limit of the lattice quasielectron does not exist in general. In particular, if the quasielectron is put anywhere else than on a lattice site, the lattice wavefunction diverges when the continuum limit is approached. The divergence can be removed by projecting the state on the lowest Landau level, but we find that the projected state does also not have the properties expected for anyonic quasielectrons. We hence conclude that the lattice quasielectron wavefunction does not solve the difficulty of finding trial states for anyonic quasielectrons in the continuum

Saisonale Dynamik von Ct und Nt im Boden unter Winterweizen mit nachfolgender Zwischenfrucht

The aim of this work was to study seasonal changes of topsoil Ct and Nt contents in comparison with Ct and Nt mass changes. The survey was carried out under winter rye with succeeding catch crop. A special experimental design was chosen to minimize space/time interactions and prevent disturbance of sampling points at the same time. The observation of mass changes instead of content changes substantially improved the analytical quality of results in this study, which was in line with findings from the literature. It is concluded that considering bulk density should therefore be recommended as a standard procedure in surveys of soil Ct and Nt dynamics

The Judicialization of Peace

As international courts gain in influence, many worry that they will impoverish domestic politics— that they will limit democratic deliberation, undermine domestic institutions, or even thwart crucial political initiatives such as efforts to make peace. Indeed, many states are in the midst of withdrawing, or actively considering withdrawal, from international commitments presided over by international courts. The Article focuses on the currently unfolding Colombian peace process, the first to be negotiated under the watch of not one but two international courts, to show that these concerns misconstrue the way international courts actually work. Throughout four years of peace talks, many predicted that the International Criminal Court and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights would impede peace by demanding prosecution of war criminals. Instead, the 2016 Colombian peace accord opens the way to a far less punitive peace than many of those familiar with the courts and underlying treaties would have deemed possible. The effect of the engagement of the international courts in Colombia has not been to impose rigid conditions from afar, but rather to allow domestic players to reinterpret the content of Colombia’s international legal obligations: the terms of Colombia’s peace were produced through—not despite—the international courts’ ongoing deliberative engagement with the peace process. The Article draws on original empirical data to reveal precisely how the international courts enabled the construction of Colombia’s sui generis peace. The Article thus speaks directly to those voicing concern over the increased involvement of international courts in national politics in general, and in peace and reconciliation in particular. It also contributes to our knowledge about how, precisely, international law comes to influence domestic politics, and how, in turn, domestic politics shape international law

Dynamic Properties of Poverty Targeting

A body of recent studies has compared the ability of proxy-means testing (PMT), a data-driven poverty targeting procedure, and community-based targeting (CBT), a participatory method,to identify consumption-poor households. Motivated by the facts that targeted benefits typically reach beneficiaries with a substantial time lag and that transitions into and out of poverty are frequent, we are first to assess PMT’s and CBT’s performance one and two years subsequent to the targeting exercise. With data from Burkina Faso, we replicate the finding that PMT targets more accurately than CBT with respect to poverty at baseline, by 14 percent. We find that this pattern is reversed for households’ poverty status twelve months later, while both methods perform identically with respect to poverty data collected 30 months after the baseline. We investigate how communities process different kinds of information and identify three properties of CBT that make it forward-looking: implicit weights put on PMT variables that predict future rather than current consumption, accounting for additional household characteristics not included in typical PMTs and processing of additional information unobserved by the researcher