Social Justice in the EU – Index Report 2017 Social Inclusion Monitor Europe. Bertelsmann Stiftung Social Inclusion Monitor Europe 2017

1. Europe is recovering not only economically, but also in the domain of social justice After years of downward movement, an upward trend in the domain of social justice is evident in the broad majority of EU member states. Although far from all member states have regained their pre-crisis levels, the most recent EU Social Justice Index data give cause for hope that the worst is over not just in economic terms, but also from a social perspective. At the top of this year’s Social Justice Index are the northern European states of Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Rounding out the top group are the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, while Greece, despite again posting slight gains this year, remains clearly in last place

The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience

Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper, we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects

measuring and analyzing technical data for social trust between smartphones

Mobiles are nowadays the most relevant communication devices in terms of quantity and flexibility. Like in most MANETs ad-hoc communication between two mobile phones requires mutual trust between the devices. A new way of establishing this trust conducts social trust from technically measurable data (e.g., interaction logs). To explore the relation between social and technical trust, we conduct a large-scale survey with more than 217 Android users and analyze their anonymized call and message logs. We show that a reliable a priori trust value for a mobile system can be derived from common social communication metrics

On an integral variant of incremental input/output-to-state stability and its use as a notion of nonlinear detectability

We propose a time-discounted integral variant of incremental input/output-to-state stability (i-iIOSS) together with an equivalent Lyapunov function characterization. Continuity of the i-iIOSS Lyapunov function is ensured if the system satisfies a certain continuity assumption involving the Osgood condition. We show that the proposed i-iIOSS notion is a necessary condition for the existence of a robustly globally asymptotically stable observer mapping in a time-discounted ``$L^2$-to-$L^\infty$'' sense. In combination, our results provide a general framework for a Lyapunov-based robust stability analysis of observers for continuous-time systems, which in particular is crucial for the use of optimization-based state estimators (such as moving horizon estimation).Comment: replaced with accepted versio

Robust Stability of Suboptimal Moving Horizon Estimation using an Observer-Based Candidate Solution

In this paper, we propose a suboptimal moving horizon estimator for nonlinear systems. For the stability analysis we transfer the "feasibility-implies-stability/robustness" paradigm from model predictive control to the context of moving horizon estimation in the following sense: Using a suitably defined, feasible candidate solution based on the trajectory of an auxiliary observer, robust stability of the proposed suboptimal estimator is inherited independently of the horizon length and even if no optimization is performed.Comment: This work has been submitted to IFAC for possible publicatio

De grafemische buffer : aspecten van een spellingstoornis

A spelling disorder that received much attention recently is the so-called graphemic buffer impairment. Caramazza et al. (1987) presented the first systematic case study of a patient with this disorder. Miceli & Capasso (2006) provide an extensive overview of the relevant literature. This article adds to the literature by describing a Dutch case, i.e. patient BM. We demonstrate how specific features of Dutch and Dutch orthography interact with the graphemic buffer impairment. In addition, we paid special attention to the influence of grapheme position on the patient’s spelling accuracy. For this we used, in contrast with most of the previous literature, the proportional accountability method described in Machtynger & Shallice (2009). We show that by using this method the underlying error distribution can be more optimally captured than with classical methods. The result of this analysis replicates two distributions that have been previously reported in the literature. Finally, attention will be paid to the role of phonology in the described disorder

De grafemische buffer : aspecten van een spellingstoornis

Ce riche volume de 373 pages rassemble les contributions pour un colloque qui fut organisé les 30 novembre et 1 décembre 2012 par le “Centro Studi Sigismondo Castromediano e Gino Rizzo” à Cavallino di Lecce. Le personnage historique de premier plan qui fait l’objet du volume est Sigismondo Castromediano (Cavallino 1811-1895), surnommé le « Bianco Duca », noble de la région des Pouilles, arrêté en 1848 pour activité patriotique au sein de la Giovine Italia, condamné à trente ans de bagne, puis..

Der Handschuh: Melodram für Sprecher und Klavier

Melodram für Sprecher und Klavier nach der berühmten Ballade von Friedrich Schiller, komponiert 2008 für das Duo pianoworte

Improvement of the Digestibility of Sulfated Hyaluronans by Bovine Testicular Hyaluronidase: a UV Spectroscopic and Mass Spectrometric Study

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) such as hyaluronan (HA) and chondroitin sulfate (CS) are important, natural polysaccharides which occur in biological (connective) tissues and have various biotechnological and medical applications. Additionally, there is increasing evidence that chemically (over)sulfated GAGs possess promising properties and are useful as implant coatings. Unfortunately, a detailed characterization of these GAGs is challenging: although mass spectrometry (MS) is one of the most powerful tools to elucidate the structures of (poly)saccharides, MS is not applicable to high mass polysaccharides, but characteristic oligosaccharides are needed. These oligosaccharides are normally generated by enzymatic digestion. However, chemically modified (particularly sulfated) GAGs are extremely refractive to enzymatic digestion. This study focuses on the investigation of the digestibility of GAGs with different degrees of sulfation by bovine testicular hyaluronidase (BTH). It will be shown by using an adapted spectrophotometric assay that all investigated GAGs can be basically digested if the reaction conditions are carefully adjusted. However, the oligosaccharide yield correlates reciprocally with the number of sulfate residues per polymer repeating unit. Finally, matrix-laser desorption and ionization (MALDI) MS will be used to study the released oligosaccharides and their sulfation patterns