Is the protection of LGBTQI+ people against hate speech and hate crime in the EU a reality? A Case Study of Czechia

openThe thesis aims to explore the European Commission’s initiative to criminalise hate speech and hate crime at the EU level, including the bias-motivated grounds related to the LGBTQI+ community. The focus of the paper is on the current stance of the post-socialist member states and the impact of their historical experience with socialist regimes on their approval of adding hate speech and hate crime to the list of Eurocrimes. The thesis will test the hypothesis that the impact of the socialist past decreases the approval of criminalisation of anti-LGBTQI+ hate speech and hate crime. Such presumption stems from the literature describing post-socialist states as more sensitive to issues of freedom of expression. The single case study of Czechia will offer in-depth insight into this issue. Semi-structured interviews with lawyers, MEPs, representatives of the government, and members of NGOs will shed light on the situation in one of the most relevant post-socialist member states. Therefore, the thesis framework can function as a starting point for further research oriented on post-socialist states. The importance of this topic is proven by data showing a long-term upsurge of hate speech and hate crimes against minorities in various EU member states.The thesis aims to explore the European Commission’s initiative to criminalise hate speech and hate crime at the EU level, including the bias-motivated grounds related to the LGBTQI+ community. The focus of the paper is on the current stance of the post-socialist member states and the impact of their historical experience with socialist regimes on their approval of adding hate speech and hate crime to the list of Eurocrimes. The thesis will test the hypothesis that the impact of the socialist past decreases the approval of criminalisation of anti-LGBTQI+ hate speech and hate crime. Such presumption stems from the literature describing post-socialist states as more sensitive to issues of freedom of expression. The single case study of Czechia will offer in-depth insight into this issue. Semi-structured interviews with lawyers, MEPs, representatives of the government, and members of NGOs will shed light on the situation in one of the most relevant post-socialist member states. Therefore, the thesis framework can function as a starting point for further research oriented on post-socialist states. The importance of this topic is proven by data showing a long-term upsurge of hate speech and hate crimes against minorities in various EU member states

Effects of plantar-flexor muscle fatigue on the magnitude and regularity of center-of-pressure fluctuations

Control of bipedal posture is highly automatized but requires attentional investment, the amount of which varies between participants and with postural constraints, such as plantar-flexor muscle fatigue. Elevated attentional demands for standing with fatigued plantar flexors have been demonstrated using a stimulus–response reaction-time paradigm. Recently, a direct relation between the regularity of center-of-pressure (COP) fluctuations and the amount of attention invested in posture was proposed, according to which more regular COP fluctuations are expected with muscle fatigue than without. To study this prediction, we registered anterior–posterior COP fluctuations for bipedal stance with eyes closed prior to and after a plantar-flexor muscle fatiguing exercise protocol in 16 healthy young adults. We quantified the magnitude of COP fluctuations with conventional posturography and its regularity with sample entropy. The magnitude of COP fluctuations increased significantly with fatigued plantar flexors. In addition, more regular COP fluctuations were observed with fatigued plantar flexors, as evidenced by significantly lower sample entropy values. These findings corroborated our hypotheses. Moreover, COP regularity assisted in qualifying the change in sway magnitude with fatigue. Whereas increased sway is customary taken to reflect impaired postural control, we interpret it as a functional, but attention-demanding adaptation to the alteration of important posture-specific information

Granger Causal Inference in Multivariate Hawkes Processes by Minimum Message Length

Multivariate Hawkes processes (MHPs) are versatile probabilistic tools used to model various real-life phenomena: earthquakes, operations on stock markets, neuronal activity, virus propagation and many others. In this paper, we focus on MHPs with exponential decay kernels and estimate connectivity graphs, which represent the Granger causal relations between their components. We approach this inference problem by proposing an optimization criterion and model selection algorithm based on the minimum message length (MML) principle. MML compares Granger causal models using the Occam's razor principle in the following way: even when models have a comparable goodness-of-fit to the observed data, the one generating the most concise explanation of the data is preferred. While most of the state-of-art methods using lasso-type penalization tend to overfitting in scenarios with short time horizons, the proposed MML-based method achieves high F1 scores in these settings. We conduct a numerical study comparing the proposed algorithm to other related classical and state-of-art methods, where we achieve the highest F1 scores in specific sparse graph settings. We illustrate the proposed method also on G7 sovereign bond data and obtain causal connections, which are in agreement with the expert knowledge available in the literature.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure

Physico-chemical limitations during the electrokinetic treatment of a polluted soil

International audienceThe influence of the ion-exchange solid/liquid reaction on electrokinetic transport phenomena was studied and modelled for a non-permeable porous medium composed of kaolin. Kaolin was selected to model a low-permeable medium, even though it is usually considered to have low ion-exchange capacity and weak selectivity. The influence of this reaction on the characteristic time of the process was demonstrated by studying the lithium (Li +) electrokinetic transport on a sodium (Na +) pre-saturated kaolin. Experimental results were obtained using apparatus developed specifically for the study of the electrokinetic transport and which has been well characterized in previous works. The tests were performed by introducing a solution containing Li + at the anode, and measuring the Na + and Li + concentrations at the cathode outlet. Under operating conditions, local equilibrium is assumed in the medium. The equilibrium isotherm of Li + /Na + exchange was determined by independent experiments on a laboratory column. Ion-exchange equilibrium can be satisfactorily described by a linear isotherm. A theoretical model based on the tanks-in-series model was used for modeling the experimental results of the Li + electrokinetic transport. This model considers electro-migration and electro-osmosis as the only transport mechanisms, and takes into account the solid/liquid reaction by a retardation factor, as is usually the case for linear equilibrium models. The comparison between experimental and theoretical results shows that the chemical solid/liquid reaction at least doubles the characteristic time of the transport

Regularity of Center of Pressure Trajectories in Expert Gymnasts during Bipedal Closed-Eyes Quiet Standing

We compared postural control of expert gymnasts (G) to that of non-gymnasts (NG) during bipedal closed-eyes quiet standing using conventional and nonlinear dynamical measures of center of foot pressure (COP) trajectories. Earlier findings based on COP classical variables showed that gymnasts exhibited a better control of postural balance but only in demanding stances. We examined whether the effect of expertise in Gymnastic can be uncovered in less demanding stances, from the analysis of the dynamic patterns of COP trajectories. Three dependent variables were computed to describe the subject’s postural behavior: the variability of COP displacements (ACoP), the variability of the COP velocities (VCoP) and the sample entropy of COP (SEnCoP) to quantify COP regularity (i.e., predictability). Conventional analysis of COP trajectories showed that NG and G exhibited similar amount and control of postural sway, as indicated by similar ACoP and VCoP values observed in NG and G, respectively. These results suggest that the specialized balance training received by G may not transfer to less challenging balance conditions such as the bipedal eyes-closed stance condition used in the present experiment. Interestingly, nonlinear dynamical analysis of COP trajectories regarding COP regularity showed that G exhibited more irregular COP fluctuations relative to NG, as indicated by the higher SEnCoP values observed for the G than for the NG. The present results showed that a finer-grained analysis of the dynamic patterns of the COP displacements is required to uncover an effect of gymnastic expertise on postural control in nondemanding postural stance. The present findings shed light on the surplus value in the nonlinear dynamical analysis of COP trajectories to gain further insight into the mechanisms involved in the control of bipedal posture

Granger causality for circular variables

In this letter we discuss use of Granger causality to the analyze systems of coupled circular variables, by modifying a recently proposed method for multivariate analysis of causality. We show the application of the proposed approach on several Kuramoto systems, in particular one living on networks built by preferential attachment and a model for the transition from deeply to lightly anaesthetized states. Granger causalities describe the flow of information among variables.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure