Pornography is going on-line: the harm principle in Dutch law

The pornography of 19th century Victorian society, Steven Marcus observes in The Other Victorians, gave expression to a fantasy that exactly mirrored the public ideal image of chastity in reverse reflection. As exemplary of Victorian morality, Marcus refers to an 1857 treatise on human sexuality, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, by the physician William Acton. Unlike Freud, Acton maintained that healthy children hardly manifest any sexual feelings. For youngsters who give in to titillations an ill fate awaits: "His intellect has become sluggish and enfeebled, and if his evil habits are persisted in, he may end in becoming a drivelling idiot or a peevish valetudinarian."Department of HE and Training approved lis

Bayesian inference for low-rank Ising networks

Estimating the structure of Ising networks is a notoriously difficult problem. We demonstrate that using a latent variable representation of the Ising network, we can employ a full-data-information approach to uncover the network structure. Thereby, only ignoring information encoded in the prior distribution (of the latent variables). The full-data-information approach avoids having to compute the partition function and is thus computationally feasible, even for networks with many nodes. We illustrate the full-data-information approach with the estimation of dense network

Developing a new national MDMA policy:Results of a multi-decision multi-criterion decision analysis

BACKGROUND: Ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)) has a relatively low harm and low dependence liability but is scheduled on List I of the Dutch Opium Act (‘hard drugs’). Concerns surrounding increasing MDMA-related criminality coupled with the possibly inappropriate scheduling of MDMA initiated a debate to revise the current Dutch ecstasy policy. METHODS: An interdisciplinary group of 18 experts on health, social harms and drug criminality and law enforcement reformulated the science-based Dutch MDMA policy using multi-decision multi-criterion decision analysis (MD-MCDA). The experts collectively formulated policy instruments and rated their effects on 25 outcome criteria, including health, criminality, law enforcement and financial issues, thematically grouped in six clusters. RESULTS: The experts scored the effect of 22 policy instruments, each with between two and seven different mutually exclusive options, on 25 outcome criteria. The optimal policy model was defined by the set of 22 policy instrument options which gave the highest overall score on the 25 outcome criteria. Implementation of the optimal policy model, including regulated MDMA sales, decreases health harms, MDMA-related organised crime and environmental damage, as well as increases state revenues and quality of MDMA products and user information. This model was slightly modified to increase its political feasibility. Sensitivity analyses showed that the outcomes of the current MD-MCDA are robust and independent of variability in weight values. CONCLUSION: The present results provide a feasible and realistic set of policy instrument options to revise the legislation towards a rational MDMA policy that is likely to reduce both adverse (public) health risks and MDMA-related criminal burden

Laïcité in the Low Countries? On Headscarves in a Neutral State

Abstract: The paper compares French and Dutch legal approaches in regulating the use of headscarves in public institutions as examples of divergent liberal legal cultures and national policies towards immigrant minorities. It shows that in France the principle of laïcité or state secularity resulted in a legal prohibition of Islamic headscarves in public schools and other public institutions. In contrast the Dutch legal culture is based on strong notions of tolerance and equality. Muslim women are allowed to a larger degree to wear headscarves in the public sphere, the only exception being a member of the judiciary. The paper advocates an approach of balancing the principles of state neutrality, equality and liberty and to measure a prohibition by using the principles of proportionality and subsidiarity. It proposes a laicity - scale (L-scale) that ranges from the extremes of the private sphere at one end to the judiciary at the other. Such a scale allows differentiation between the case of a female Muslim judge required to abandon her headscarf because her judicial function requires neutrality and the case of a female Muslim teacher in a public school acquainting pupils with cultural and religious diversity by wearing the headscarf as a religious symbol.comparative public policy; constitution building; court politics; diversity/homogeneity; identity; legal culture; minorities; negative integration; normative political theory; pluralism; political culture; comparative law; EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; fundamental/human rights; cohesion policy; France; Netherlands; law

Naar een rationeel xtc-beleid

De stuurgroep van de DenkTank MDMA-beleid publiceerde eind 2020 een rapport over de ontwikkeling van een rationeel MDMA-beleid. Het rapport is gebaseerd op een objectiverende wetenschappelijke benadering die zich losmaakt van ideologische politieke strijd. Uit een vergelijking van verschillende beleidsopties komt een Optimaal Model naar voren dat de minste schade blijkt op te leveren voor mens en maatschappij: regulering van de productie en van de aan- en verkoop van ecstasy, kwaliteitsbewaking, monitoring van het gebruik en een hardere aanpak van de misdaad. Minister van Justitie en Veiligheid Grapperhaus wijst dit model echter rigoureus af. Hij hamert op het gevaar van ‘ondermijning’ door de onderwereld van de legale bovenwereld. Wat pleit er voor en tegen invoering van het optimale model

Turning Simulation into Estimation: Generalized Exchange Algorithms for Exponential Family Models

<div><p>The Single Variable Exchange algorithm is based on a simple idea; any model that can be simulated can be estimated by producing draws from the posterior distribution. We build on this simple idea by framing the Exchange algorithm as a mixture of Metropolis transition kernels and propose strategies that automatically select the more efficient transition kernels. In this manner we achieve significant improvements in convergence rate and autocorrelation of the Markov chain without relying on more than being able to simulate from the model. Our focus will be on statistical models in the Exponential Family and use two simple models from educational measurement to illustrate the contribution.</p></div

Number of rejected samples for the rejection algorithms.

<p>The average number of rejected samples per posterior <i>π</i>(<i>θ</i> ∣ <i>x</i>₊) out of <i>n</i> target distributions in the original Rejection algorithm (solid line) and when rejected values are recycled among the target distributions (points).</p

Acceptance rates of the original SVE and SVE with matching.

<p>The average proportion of accepted points when simultaneously sampling from <i>n</i> target distributions <i>π</i>(<i>θ</i> ∣ <i>x</i>₊) in the original SVE algorithm (solid line) and the proposal matching procedure (points).</p

Acceptance rates for the SVE algorithm with different bin sizes <i>a</i>.

<p>The average proportion of accepted points when proposals are generated until <i>t</i>(<i>x</i>*) falls in the range (<i>t</i>(<i>x</i>) − <i>a</i>, <i>t</i>(<i>x</i>) + <i>a</i>) using <i>a</i> ∈ {∞, 5, 3, 2}. The gray bars reflect both the range (left and right endpoints) and the proportion of accepted points (top).</p

Acceptance rates for the original SVE algorithm and SVE using as proposal.

<p>The average acceptance rate for sampling from posterior distributions <i>π</i>(<i>θ</i> ∣ <i>x</i>₊) when using the original SVE algorithm (left panel) and when using the proposal distribution (right panel).</p