Global standards of Constitutional law : epistemology and methodology

Just as it led the philosophy of science to gravitate around scientific practice, the abandonment of all foundationalist aspirations has already begun making political philosophy into an attentive observer of the new ways in which constitutional law is practiced. Yet paradoxically, lawyers and legal scholars are not those who understand this the most clearly. Beyond analyzing the jurisprudence that has emerged from the expansion of constitutional justice, and taking into account the development of international and regional law, the ongoing globalization of constitutional law requires comparing the constitutional laws of individual nations. Following Waldron, the product of this new legal science can be considered as ius gentium. This legal science is not as well established as one might like to think. But it can be developed on the grounds of the practice that consists in ascertaining standards. As abstract types of best “practices” (and especially norms) of constitutional law from around the world, these are only a source of law in a substantive, not a formal, sense. They thus belong to what I should like to call a “second order legal positivity.” In this article I will undertake, both at a methodological and an epistemological level, the development of a model for ascertaining global standards of constitutional law

Duality violations and spectral sum rules

We study the issue of duality violations in the VV-AA vacuum polarization function in the chiral limit. This is done with the help of a model with an expansion in inverse powers of the number of colors, Nc, allowing us to consider resonances with a finite width. Due to these duality violations, the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) and the moments of the spectral function (e.g. the Weinberg sum rules) do not match at finite momentum, and we analyze this difference in detail. We also perform a comparative study of many of the different methods proposed in the literature for the extraction of the OPE parameters and find that, when applied to our model, they all fare quite similarly. In fact, the model strongly suggests that a significant improvement in precision can only be expected after duality violations are included. To this end, we propose a method to parameterize these duality violations. The method works quite well for the model, and we hope that it may also be useful in future determinations of OPE parameters in QCD.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, LateX file. Small changes to match journal versio

Women's reproductive rights in the inter-American system of human rights: conclusions from the Field, June - September 2014

The Inter-American System of Human Rights has proven to be a forum for the advancement of women’s reproductive rights in the Inter-American region. However, the Inter-American System faces significant challenges in promoting structural transformative change that enables women’s enjoyment of their reproductive health rights. This report examines three reproductive rights cases from the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: María Mamerita Mestanza Chávez v. Peru; Paulina Ramirez Jacinto v. Mexico; and Artavia Murillo et al. v. Costa Rica. In the summer of 2014, interviews were conducted with representatives in each of the case study countries, with the objective of the research being two-fold: (1) to understand how each of the cases developed, and the subsequent challenges and advancements; and (2) to learn from these cases in order to suggest recommendations for how actors can make better use of the Inter-American System as one of several avenues for protecting, promoting and fulfilling women’s reproductive rights. The report first discusses challenges in implementing women’s reproductive health rights, and then explores how the Inter-American System can strengthen its work on women’s reproductive health rights

A comparison of global agricultural monitoring systems and current gaps

Global and regional scale agricultural monitoring systems aim to provide up-to-date information regarding food production to different actors and decision makers in support of global and national food security. To help reduce price volatility of the kind experienced between 2007 and 2011, a global system of agricultural monitoring systems is needed to ensure the coordinated flow of information in a timely manner for early warning purposes. A number of systems now exist that fill this role. This paper provides an overview of the eight main global and regional scale agricultural monitoring systems currently in operation and compares them based on the input data and models used, the outputs produced and other characteristics such as the role of the analyst, their interaction with other systems and the geographical scale at which they operate. Despite improvements in access to high resolution satellite imagery over the last decade and the use of numerous remote-sensing based products by the different systems, there are still fundamental gaps. Based on a questionnaire, discussions with the system experts and the literature, we present the main gaps in the data and in the methods. Finally, we propose some recommendations for addressing these gaps through ongoing improvements in remote sensing, harnessing new and innovative data streams and the continued sharing of more and more data

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The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) is a community initiative to collect worldwide data on urban form (i.e., morphology, materials) and function (i.e., use and metabolism). This is achieved through crowdsourcing, which we define here as the collection of data by a bounded crowd, composed of students. In this process, training data for the classification of urban structures into Local Climate Zones (LCZ) are obtained, which are, like most volunteered geographic information initiatives, of unknown quality. In this study, we investigated the quality of 94 crowdsourced training datasets for ten cities, generated by 119 students from six universities. The results showed large discrepancies and the resulting LCZ maps were mostly of poor to moderate quality. This was due to general difficulties in the human interpretation of the (urban) landscape and in the understanding of the LCZ scheme. However, the quality of the LCZ maps improved with the number of training data revisions. As evidence for the wisdom of the crowd, improvements of up to 20% in overall accuracy were found when multiple training datasets were used together to create a single LCZ map. This improvement was greatest for small training datasets, saturating at about ten to fifteen sets

Pathway using WUDAPT's Digital Synthetic City tool towards generating urban canopy parameters for multi-scale urban atmospheric modeling

The WUDAPT (World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools project goal is to capture consistent information on urban form and function for cities worldwide that can support urban weather, climate, hydrology and air quality modeling. These data are provided as urban canopy parameters (UCPs) as used by weather, climate and air quality models to simulate the effects of urban surfaces on the overlying atmosphere. Information is stored with different levels of detail (LOD). With higher LOD greater spatial precision is provided. At the lowest LOD, Local Climate Zones(LCZ) with nominal UCP ranges is provided (order 100 m or more). To describe the spatial heterogeneity present in cities with great specificity at different urban scales we introduce the Digital Synthetic City (DSC) tool to generate UCPs at any desired scale meeting the fit-for-purpose goal of WUDAPT. 3D building and road elements of entire city landscapes are simulated based on readily available data. Comparisons with real-world urban data are very encouraging. It is customized (C-DSC) to incorporate each city's unique building morphologies based on unique types, variations and spatial distribution of building typologies, architecture features, construction materials and distribution of green and pervious surfaces. The C-DSC uses crowdsourcing methods and sampling within city Testbeds from around the world. UCP data can be computed from synthetic images at selected grid sizes and stored such that the coded string provides UCP values for individual grid cells

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection

Corridor Gothic

This article investigates the role of the corridor in Gothic fiction and horror film from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It seeks to establish this transitional space as a crucial locus, by tracing the rise of the corridor as a distinct mode of architectural distribution in domestic and public buildings since the eighteenth century. The article tracks pivotal appearances of the corridor in fiction and film, and in the final phase argues that it has become associated with a specific emotional tenor, less to do with amplified fear and horror and more with emotions of Angst or dread