\u3cem\u3eImpala v. Commission\u3c/em\u3e: Changing the Tune of European Competition Law

On July 13, 2006, the European Union\u27s Court of First Instance made history in Impala v. Commission, a case which annulled the 2004 decision of the European Commission that cleared the merger between music industry majors Sony and Bertelsmann AG. This was the first time that the Court of First Instance reversed a Commission merger clearance decision. This comment examines the case\u27s internal ramifications for the EU, as well as global ramifications for merger control law generally. This comment concludes that Impala marks a major structural change within the EU. By establishing itself as an authority in competition law, the Court of First Instance has checked the once seemingly boundless authority of the European Commission. Furthermore, Impala is important globally because it represents policy change in European competition law. Particularly, it raises the standard for merger clearance decisions within the EU and encourages third party participation in competition cases. In all, Impala represents a dynamic European competition law

Lost in Cyberspace: A Call for New Legislation to Fill the Black Hole in Information Privacy Law Following \u3cem\u3ePisciotta v. Old National Bancorp\u3c/em\u3e

This Note discusses Pisciotta v. Old National Bancorp, a case decided by the Seventh Circuit, which dealt with the following issue for the first time: whether the costs of credit monitoring spent by consumers whose personal information was wrongfully accessed through a database security breach but who were not victims of identity theft or fraud are compensable damages and thus recoverable under a negligence or breach of contract action against the database owner. The Seventh Circuit was rather definitive in its ruling that the plaintiffs had not suffered the requisite harm to place liability on the database owner, thus causing concern for consumers wishing to bring similar cases. This Note looks at whether Pisciotta could have come out differently, for example, by analogizing the exposure of the plaintiffs’ personal information to toxic exposure in toxic tort cases, and also by questioning the role of the economic loss doctrine in database security breach cases. This Note also assesses what should be done to protect consumers’ privacy interests in light of the difficulties consumers face under current common law, as illustrated in Pisciotta. Specifically, this Note proposes that legislation be enacted to provide for the recovery of credit-monitoring costs by affected consumers of a database security breach

Patriarchy, authority and exclusion from full participation of women in the Orthodox Church

From 1948, when the Orthodox churches became members of the World Council of Churches, the woman question has been debated and researched through various assemblies, consultations and programmes. The general attitude of Orthodox Church hierarchs on the debate of the \u27woman question\u27 is that it is an imposition from the West and therefore any changes for the Church to be active in improving the status of women are not under serious consideration. The question of changing roles in the ministry of women is one of the most contentious issues in the ecumenical movement for the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox member churches have not implemented specific programmes for Orthodox women based on the work of the WCC. This thesis includes analysis of the archives of meetings and documents contributed by Orthodox theologians and historians to discern at what level the recommendations for change were acted upon or ignored. This thesis analyses patriarchy and authority within the Orthodox Church and the influences of culture and tradition upon the status and participation of women. The analysis focuses on data from ecumenical archives; national church documents and statements; traditional Orthodox church theology and history and sacramental practices of the Church. The thesis questions the present understanding that in order to be Orthodox, that is, for \u27right thinking\u27 and \u27correct practice\u27 in the faith of the Orthodox Church, Orthodox men have authority and spiritual leadership for both the sacramental and liturgical life of the church and in turn their rightful authority and headship in the family and community. This thesis focuses on both historical and contemporary elements of human sexuality, ministry and participation of women in the Orthodox Church with reference to selected teachings of the Church Fathers whose attitudes and perceptions were very often to the detriment of women. The Church Fathers continue as guide lines for the Church today with little reference to the context of their times und in contrast to contemporary issues and concerns for women and societal influences of society, imposed and absorbed, that have arisen in the twentieth century. The women\u27s movement in the Orthodox Church is in the infancy stage and very few women have written or researched present day situations; contemporary Orthodox Church historians are not engaged in critical analysis of the liturgical, religious or cultural traditions that place women in gender specific subservient roles and have led to the exclusion and prohibition of women within the fullness of religious life of church communities. Specific contributions of Orthodox women, though not necessarily with a feminist agenda, are analysed in the context of a feminist framework of a \u27hermeneutics of suspicion\u27 in addition to references to the contemporary work of Catholic and Protestant feminist historians and theologians

Near-capacity dirty-paper code design : a source-channel coding approach

This paper examines near-capacity dirty-paper code designs based on source-channel coding. We first point out that the performance loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in our code designs can be broken into the sum of the packing loss from channel coding and a modulo loss, which is a function of the granular loss from source coding and the target dirty-paper coding rate (or SNR). We then examine practical designs by combining trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) with both systematic and nonsystematic irregular repeat-accumulate (IRA) codes. Like previous approaches, we exploit the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart technique for capacity-approaching IRA code design; but unlike previous approaches, we emphasize the role of strong source coding to achieve as much granular gain as possible using TCQ. Instead of systematic doping, we employ two relatively shifted TCQ codebooks, where the shift is optimized (via tuning the EXIT charts) to facilitate the IRA code design. Our designs synergistically combine TCQ with IRA codes so that they work together as well as they do individually. By bringing together TCQ (the best quantizer from the source coding community) and EXIT chart-based IRA code designs (the best from the channel coding community), we are able to approach the theoretical limit of dirty-paper coding. For example, at 0.25 bit per symbol (b/s), our best code design (with 2048-state TCQ) performs only 0.630 dB away from the Shannon capacity

Lost in Cyberspace: A Call for New Legislation to Fill the Black Hole in Information Privacy Law Following \u3cem\u3ePisciotta v. Old National Bancorp\u3c/em\u3e

This Note discusses Pisciotta v. Old National Bancorp, a case decided by the Seventh Circuit, which dealt with the following issue for the first time: whether the costs of credit monitoring spent by consumers whose personal information was wrongfully accessed through a database security breach but who were not victims of identity theft or fraud are compensable damages and thus recoverable under a negligence or breach of contract action against the database owner. The Seventh Circuit was rather definitive in its ruling that the plaintiffs had not suffered the requisite harm to place liability on the database owner, thus causing concern for consumers wishing to bring similar cases. This Note looks at whether Pisciotta could have come out differently, for example, by analogizing the exposure of the plaintiffs’ personal information to toxic exposure in toxic tort cases, and also by questioning the role of the economic loss doctrine in database security breach cases. This Note also assesses what should be done to protect consumers’ privacy interests in light of the difficulties consumers face under current common law, as illustrated in Pisciotta. Specifically, this Note proposes that legislation be enacted to provide for the recovery of credit-monitoring costs by affected consumers of a database security breach

Nested turbo codes for the costa problem

Driven by applications in data-hiding, MIMO broadcast channel coding, precoding for interference cancellation, and transmitter cooperation in wireless networks, Costa coding has lately become a very active research area. In this paper, we first offer code design guidelines in terms of source- channel coding for algebraic binning. We then address practical code design based on nested lattice codes and propose nested turbo codes using turbo-like trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) for source coding and turbo trellis-coded modulation (TTCM) for channel coding. Compared to TCQ, turbo-like TCQ offers structural similarity between the source and channel coding components, leading to more efficient nesting with TTCM and better source coding performance. Due to the difference in effective dimensionality between turbo-like TCQ and TTCM, there is a performance tradeoff between these two components when they are nested together, meaning that the performance of turbo-like TCQ worsens as the TTCM code becomes stronger and vice versa. Optimization of this performance tradeoff leads to our code design that outperforms existing TCQ/TCM and TCQ/TTCM constructions and exhibits a gap of 0.94, 1.42 and 2.65 dB to the Costa capacity at 2.0, 1.0, and 0.5 bits/sample, respectively

On distributed coding, quantization of channel measurements and faster-than-Nyquist signaling

This dissertation considers three different aspects of modern digital communication systems and is therefore divided in three parts. The first part is distributed coding. This part deals with source and source- channel code design issues for digital communication systems with many transmitters and one receiver or with one transmitter and one receiver but with side information at the receiver, which is not available at the transmitter. Such problems are attracting attention lately, as they constitute a way of extending the classical point-to-point communication theory to networks. In this first part of this dissertation, novel source and source-channel codes are designed by converting each of the considered distributed coding problems into an equivalent classical channel coding or classical source-channel coding problem. The proposed schemes come very close to the theoretical limits and thus, are able to exhibit some of the gains predicted by network information theory. In the other two parts of this dissertation classical point-to-point digital com- munication systems are considered. The second part is quantization of coded chan- nel measurements at the receiver. Quantization is a way to limit the accuracy of continuous-valued measurements so that they can be processed in the digital domain. Depending on the desired type of processing of the quantized data, different quantizer design criteria should be used. In this second part of this dissertation, the quantized received values from the channel are processed by the receiver, which tries to recover the transmitted information. An exhaustive comparison of several quantization cri- teria for this case are studied providing illuminating insight for this quantizer design problem. The third part of this dissertation is faster-than-Nyquist signaling. The Nyquist rate in classical point-to-point bandwidth-limited digital communication systems is considered as the maximum transmission rate or signaling rate and is equal to twice the bandwidth of the channel. In this last part of the dissertation, we question this Nyquist rate limitation by transmitting at higher signaling rates through the same bandwidth. By mitigating the incurred interference due to the faster-than-Nyquist rates, gains over Nyquist rate systems are obtained

“New public Management reforms, an empirical study of human resources critical factors, in the context of the Greek Public sector”

This work is an endeavour on the subject of the Critical Success Factors imposed by Human Resources, in the process of reforms, under the context of New Public Management, particularly, as this applies in the Greek Public Sector and more specifically in the cases of ISO implementation. The fundamental issues it attempts to elucidate are the Human Resources policies that must be applied, so that employees become an integral element for the successful implementation of any introduced reforms. Many scholars have pointed out the gap in literature regarding the effect of New Public Management (NPM) reforms on the human factor. Moreover, in the current Greek reality, in the context of the economic recession and the debt crisis, where public administration reforms are mandatory, the thorough examination of the vital issues, pertaining to Human Resources, consists a major priority. The qualitative research method applied with the employees of the reformed organisations has further aspired to ponder and determine what really matters during the transformational process from the employees’ point of view. The conclusions we have reached underpin the importance of Human Resources motivational factors in the reform process, taking into consideration that the employee is the catalyst for any change effort. Some of those factors were found to be also part of the ISO concept per se, thus, their implementation would boost the employees’ morale, while others must be carefully analysed, planned and implemented by all the stakeholders to further facilitate the change process. We have to bear in mind that, especially under the current dire economic environment, quality reforms could be a challenge, as they combine fiscal discipline and at the same time aspire to increase the employees’ and citizens’ satisfaction. This study goes further to suggest that, the implementation of ISO reforms could help all the participants, provided that the decision makers take into serious consideration the Critical Success Factors outlined herewith, that have been extracted from a survey conducted pertinent to our research. This study focused on the reforms/ISO process as implemented by the Intermediate Managing Authority of the Ionian Islands. Further research on the implications from the implementation of NMP doctrines on Human Resources should be conducted in other Greek governmental organisations, in order to reaffirm the results and possibly enhance the suggested model. Conclusively, our ultimate target is to assist decision makers and encourage them to utilise the arguments depicted, towards the successful implementation of NPM doctrines