Imprisonment of Tax Non-payers – an Abuse of Power or a Measure of Legal Discipline?

In the field of taxation there existed many casuistic crimes of Roman criminal law, committed both by tax payers and tax collectors, but non-payment of taxes was not one of them. As a rule taxpayers risked confiscation of property by avoiding the fulfillment of their obligation. There exists some historical evidence, however, which suggests the possibility of imprisonment of taxpayers. Was it possible to inflict criminal punishments in such cases? Legal texts give some reflections to the contrary – Roman emperors prohibited the use of imprisonment in non-criminal matters. The number of these prohibitions indicates, that there were many situations of this kind. It seems that especially in the provinces the governors abused their power and used illegal measures, such as tortures, whipping and imprisonment, to force citizens to pay taxes

Od przypadku do przypadku – czyli o casus na gruncie rzymskiego prawa karnego oraz pism retorycznych Cycerona-

The opinion that Roman jurists were giants in the field of private law and dwarfs in criminal law is nowadays a little bit out of date. However, upon a closer analysis of the use of the term ‘accident’ (casus), such a statement seems to be justified. Casus for Roman jurists was not only, as in the sphere of private law, a pure random fact, but also a culpable human act. It is not hard to guess that their writings and opinions were inconsistent in that field and sometimes suggested quite surprising legal classifications of deeds committed in such a way. In order to understand this paradox it might be helpful to take a closer look at historical regulations of crimes committed unintentionally, including above all homicide, but also rhetorical sources, especially works of Cicero. His writings were a canon for learning rhetoric in later times, as well as inspiration for next generations of Roman jurists. His remarks and specific character of the metaphorical phrase si telum manu fugit quam iecit, constituting a kind of definitional topos of crimes committed unintentionally, can lift the veil of secrecy and enable penetration of Roman jurists’ philosophy of life and their intellectual formation.The opinion that Roman jurists were giants in the field of private law and dwarfs in criminal law is nowadays a little bit out of date. However, upon a closer analysis of the use of the term ‘accident’ (casus), such a statement seems to be justified. Casus for Roman jurists was not only, as in the sphere of private law, a pure random fact, but also a culpable human act. It is not hard to guess that their writings and opinions were inconsistent in that field and sometimes suggested quite surprising legal classifications of deeds committed in such a way. In order to understand this paradox it might be helpful to take a closer look at historical regulations of crimes committed unintentionally, including above all homicide, but also rhetorical sources, especially works of Cicero. His writings were a canon for learning rhetoric in later times, as well as inspiration for next generations of Roman jurists. His remarks and specific character of the metaphorical phrase si telum manu fugit quam iecit, constituting a kind of definitional topos of crimes committed unintentionally, can lift the veil of secrecy and enable penetration of Roman jurists’ philosophy of life and their intellectual formation

Modelowanie prędkości przedzderzeniowej pojazdu przy wykorzystaniu funkcji nieliniowej

W monografii pt. "Modelowanie prędkości przedzderzeniowej pojazdu z wykorzystaniem funkcji nieliniowej" autor porusza problematykę związaną z wyznaczaniem prędkości pojazdów biorących udział w zaistniałym zdarzeniu drogowym w oparciu o modele nieliniowe dla poszczególnych klas. Czynnikiem, który ma decydujący wpływ na wielkość uszkodzeń w wypadku, jest energia kinetyczna. W trakcie przebiegu wypadku następuje rozproszenie energii kinetycznej na skutek następujących po sobie zderzeń elementarnych. W zderzeniach elementarnych energia kinetyczna zamieniana jest w energię zderzenia. Przedstawione w pracy wyniki badań własnych potwierdzają, że modele liniowe nieprecyzyjnie opisują właściwości czołowej strefy zgniotu współczesnych samochodów. Przeglądając interpretację graficzną uzyskanych wyników badań można zauważyć, że model nieliniowy bardzo dokładnie opisuje badany związek przyczynowo-skutkowy. Uzasadnione jest, że będzie on dobrym predyktorem w prognozowaniu badanych wartości w wyznaczaniu prędkości pojazdu. Monografia jest oryginalnym dziełem autora, dotyczącym teorii modelowania prędkości przedzderzeniowej pojazdu i tworzy kompleksowy obraz możliwości wykorzystania modeli nieliniowych dla poszczególnych klas pojazdów, będąc interesującą pozycją zarówno dla naukowców, jak i praktyków.[...] The goal set by the Author is to present the nonlinear method, which will allow to determine the real vehicle velocity in the instant of the collision. Energy lost in the crash corresponds with the difference of kinetic energy before and after the event. It is also equal to work of plastic deformation of both bodies taking part in the collision. Deformed chassis is a information itself about the magnitude of work that caused said deformation. The method will allow for a substantial update of currently used methodic with respect to car structure development and its adjustment to new technological solutions. Effect of the method will be useful for purpose of crash site reconstruction and determining the velocity before the impact

Vehicle Dynamics and Green Electronic Differential for eKart

Today, electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular in our lives. In motorsport, however, they are not as widely used. Formula E, which was created to boost electric motorsport, is not enough to popularize it. Every driver who wants to advance to F1 (highest rank racing series) has to start from karting between the ages of 5 and 8. But, today, gokarts are only powered by combustion engines. In order to provide young drivers with the possibility of racing small green electric vehicles, the so-called eKarts, combustion engines have to be replaced with electric motors. eKarts should offer similar performance to combustion engine go-karts. Therefore, to determine the required power of the electric motors and the capacity of the batteries in eKarts for different age categories, the technical parameters of the different age categories of combustion engine racing go-karts were analyzed. In this chapter, the present Li-ion battery technology makes it possible to construct eKarts for children and junior categories. With the current technology, it is not possible to create an eKart for senior categories (15 and over) in line with the current regulations for go-karts. Chance such green electronics solution with torque vectoring will provide better efficiency of energy consumption and lover impact on natural environment in reduced emission of both noise and greenhouse gases

Cantus vivit lege Romana!

In the 14th-century treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris, the principles of menstrual music are explained by references to ius commune. This article aims to trace their Roman roots and to show that music too is sometimes governed by Roman law.W XIV-wiecznym traktacie Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris zasady muzyki menzuralnej tłumaczone są przez odniesienia do ius commune. Celem artykułu jest prześledzenie rzymskich korzeni tych nawiązań i wykazanie, że i muzyka żyje czasem prawem rzymskim

TRACING ATTACKS ON U-PROVE WITH REVOCATION MECHANISM

Anonymous credential systems have to provide strong privacy protection. A user presenting anonymous credentials may prove his (chosen) attributes without leaking informations about his identity. In this paper we consider U-Prove -- one of the major commercial anonymous credential systems. We show that the efficient revocation mechanism designed for U-Prove enables a system provider to efficiently trace the users\u27 activities. Namely, the Revocation Authority run the system provider may execute the U-Prove protocol in a malicious way so that: (a) the deviations from the protocol remain undetected, (b) the Revocation Authority becomes aware of each single authentication of a user in the whole system and can link them (regardless which attributes are disclosed by the user against the verifiers), (c) can link presentation tokens with the corresponding token issuing procedure (under some conditions). Thereby, the system described in the technical drafts of U-Prove does not protect privacy of a user unless one can unconditionally trust the system provider. In fact, a malicious system provider may convert the Revocation Authority into a ``Big Brother\u27\u27 installation

Quality control assessment of the RNA-Seq data generated from liver and pituitary transcriptome of Hereford bulls using StrandNGS software

Background: Quality control (QC) assessment is the most critical step in the high-throughput RNA-seq data analysis to characterize the in-depth understanding of genome and transcriptome assembling to a given reference genome. It provides not only a quick insight into the RNA-seq data quality to allow early identification of good or bad RNA-seq data samples, but also to verify the alignment QC checks for further essential high-throughput bioinformatics analysis such as, identification of novel genetic variants, differentially expressed genes (DEGs), gene network and metabolic pathways.Method: After isolation of total RNA from liver (n=15) and pituitary gland (n=15) tissues of young Hereford bulls, the pooled total RNA (n=30) were fragmented using GeneRead rRNA depletion kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) and cDNA library preparation were preformed using ScriptSeqTM v2 RNA-Seq library preparation kit (Epicentre, illumina, USA), followed by high-throughput sequencing of combined liver and pituitary transcriptome using MiSeq reagent kit v2 (illumina, USA) to obtain high quality of paired-end RNA-seq reads of 251 base-pairs (bps). In this paper, the QC assessment of obtained RNA-seq raw data as well as post-alignment QC of processed RNA-seq data of combined liver and pituitary transcriptome (n=30) of Hereford bulls were performed using the strand NGS software v1.3 (Agilent; http://www.strand-ngs.com/) data analysis package. The reads were aligned with Bowtie using default settings against both Bull and Cow genome assembly.Results: Using two runs of MiSeq platform, a total of over 60 million paired-end RNA-seq reads were successfully obtained and submitted to NCBI SRA resources (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra?linkname=bioproject_sra_all&from_uid=312148). Library complexity plot results revealed 72.02% of duplicate reads with a low library complexity value of 0.28. The pre-alignment QC analysis of raw RNA-seq data revealed the sequence read lengths ranged from 35-251 bp size with more than 50% of all reads with length over 200bp and 10% of reads below 100bp.Conclusion: By testing the RNA-seq methodology on Illumina platform, two MiSeq sequencing runs yielded significantly high quality of 30 million sequencing reads per single MiSeq run. Our initial pre-alignment and post-alignment analysis of RNA-seq data analysis revealed that mapping of the Hereford liver and pituitary gland transcriptome to reference Bos taurus genome was successfully performed, however, more than 50% of all reads with length over 200bp were recovered. Therefore, obtained results concludes that liver and pituitary transcriptome sequencing with rRNA depletion method is less effective than mRNA RNA-seq method

International Academic Conference Central and Eastern Europe in the International Politics of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 7–8 November 2022, Kraków

Słowo wstępne: "Oddajemy w Państwa ręce księgę abstraktów międzynarodowej konferencji naukowej „Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w polityce międzynarodowej XX i XXI wieku”, która w dniach 7–8 listopada 2022 r. gromadzi w murach Krakowskiej Akademii im. Andrzeja Frycza Modrzewskiego doświadczonych badawczy, doktorantów i studentów z Polski i zagranicy. Konferencja została zorganizowana przez Katedrę Stosunków Międzynarodowych Krakowskiej Akademii im. Andrzeja Frycza Modrzewskiego we współpracy z Instytutem Historii i Archiwistyki Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego im. KEN w Krakowie (współorganizator). Partnerami naukowymi są Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego (organizator pierwszej części konferencji, przeprowadzonej w dniu 26 maja 2022 r.), Katedra Badań nad Obszarem Eurazjatyckim Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Krakowie oraz Instytut Zachodni im. Zygmunta Wojciechowskiego. Celem konferencji jest wniesienie wkładu w dyskusję naukową o historycznych doświadczeniach państw Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej oraz współczesnych wyzwaniach i zagrożeniach, z którymi są konfrontowane rządy i społeczeństwa państw tego regionu."(...)Patronat honorowy Prof. KAAFM dr Klemens Budzowski – Rektor Krakowskiej Akademii im. Andrzeja Frycza Modrzewskiego Oddział Krakowski Polskiego Towarzystwa Studiów Europejskic

Sketches about Roman Criminal Law – damnation to gladiatorial school (damnation in ludum)

Condemnation to the school of gladiators (damnatio in ludum) was one of the most intriguing penalties in Roman Criminal Law. Condemned were sent to ludus to train gladiatorial skills and fight during the games. Of course, its existence was closely connected with ludus, and thus it appeared in public law in I century b.C., after the gladiatorial schools were widely built (at least from 105 b.C. – Val. Max. 2, 3, 2; Cic. Tusc. 2, 41; Plin. Nat. 33, 16). From I century A.D. on, it was definitely quite common penalty (Plin. Epist. 31; lex Petronia de servis). The most important thing however is, that it was not a death penalty – it deprived condemned of liberty, they became slaves, and also they had to stay in ludus, as in the prison (D. 48, 19, 8, 11; P. S. 5, 17, 2), but they did not have to die during the games. Even more, after three years of service they could be liberated from the penalty, and after another two years – regain their freedom (Coll. 11, 7, 4). As it was a general rule in Roman Criminal Law, slaves and humiliores could be condemned in such a way (D. 48, 19, 8, 12; P. S. 5, 23, 4). Damnatio in ludum was very similar to damnatio ad metallum, so one can draw some conclusion on such comparison. Some authors suggest, that criminals were condemned to ludus in cases of sacrilege, arson, homicide, robbery and desertion (thesis based probably on Quint. Decl. Mai. 9, 21 and Flor. 2, 8, 8), but closer analysis of Roman legal regulations shows, that it was a penalty of lesser crimes or mitigation of punishments (D. 48, 13, 7; P. S. 5, 20, 2 and 5; P. S. 5, 23, 4; D. 49, 16, 3, 1; D. 48, 19, 28, 15). Though from one point of view it was a severe penalty, resulting in death sometimes, in general it may be compared with damnatio ad metallum and other non-lethal penalties. The discipline in ludus might have been cruel and hard, but there was also a chance to survive the time of punishment (according to some even in case of loss during games - missio) and regain freedom, not to mention quite good physical care like attention of doctors or massages. Its close connection with gladiatorial games was also the reason of its disappearance from Roman Criminal Law, as late as the end of IV century A.D. (C. Th. 15, 12, 1; C. Th. 9, 40, 8; C. Th. 15, 12, 3)