Isaiah 63

Chris

Ethnic Risk Sharing among the Rural Population in Vietnam - An Experimental Approach

We investigate the impact of mutual support in case of financial losses within a multi-ethnical society in Vietnam by using an experimental approach. We test for the effects of ethnic discrimination with regards to risk sharing by conducting the Solidarity Game based on Selten & Ockenfels (1998). We find no evidence for ethnic discrimination between the groups. But, we can show remarkable differences in behavior when it comes to mutual support in times of idiosyncratic shocks where the richer group showed a rather altruistic behavior of mutual support towards the poorer and the poorer group based their decisions in the experimental lab on past real life experiences

Strafrechtliche Zusammenarbeit und Regionale Kooperation – Ammerkungen zum Verhältnis von Recht und Politik

Rad je podijeljen u četiri dijela. U prvome, autor razmatra odnos prava i politike, prava i moći. Posebno ga zanima na koji se način formira odnos prava i politike u supranacionalnom prostoru Europske unije, u kojoj se mjeri politika treba i smije služiti pravom, a pravo politikom kao instrumentom ostvarivanja svojih ciljeva. I gdje su granice uzajamne instrumentalizacije. U demokratskoj, slobodnoj pravnoj državi pravo ima primat nad politikom, ograničava politiku i daje joj legitimitet. Izvan pravne države, politika ima primat u odnosu na pravo. U drugome dijelu autor izlaže različite pravne prostore u kojima se pravo i politika sučeljavaju: nacionalni pravi prostor, međunarodni pravni prostor i supranacionalni europski pravni prostor. U trećem dijelu izloženi su temelji i granice pravne suradnje i odnos te suradnje prema političkoj suradnji. Kazneni sud za zločine počinjene u bivšoj Jugoslaviji osnovan je isključivo kao neovisan kazneni sud pa je u svome postupanju ograničen na kazneno postupovna sredstva koja mu je na raspolaganje stavio Statut (1993.) i Pravila postupka (1994.) uključujući njihove novele i priznata načela međunarodnog kaznenog prava. U trećemu dijelu autor govori o kritici prekoračenja nadležnosti, uzevši za primjer Europsku uniju, Haški tribunal za bivšu Jugoslaviju, SAD i Stalni međunarodni kazneni sud. Autor ističe da način na koji je Vijeće ministara EU instrumentaliziralo kazneni sud UN-a za unutareuropske političke ciljeve ne predstavlja postupak primjeren europskom pravnom prostoru

Einführung in die Grundlagen des Rechtssystems und die Institutionen der EU

U tekstu autor izlaže temeljna načela europske zajednice/unije. Posebno se ističe uloga Europskog suda koji je svojim odlukama omogućio stvaranje europskog pravnog prostora. Cilj autorovog teksta je otvoriti pitanja o novim europskim institucijama te skrenuti pažnju na novu literaturu u njemačkoj o EU pravu.The paper gives a short overview regarding some basic legal principles and institutions of the European Community/Union. It shows the substantial role of the European Court in step by step forming and more closely integrating what is called the European Space of Law. The aim of the paper is to put the questions arising around public procurement and its necessary reforms into the framework of the European law making process. The relation between European Law and national law of the Member States is essentially determined by legal acts issued by the law making organs of the EC/EU. Among these legal acts the European directives and the way they are either not to the full extent or not in time or not at ali transferred into national law play a special role. To improve the legal position of the European citizens and the protection of their individual rights the European Court developed a new theory of national state responsibility for violating European Law by administrative, judicial and even law making bodies of the Member States. Thus strengthening the integrative effects of the supranational judicial power within the European Union. The paper refers only on some of the numerous actual publications dealing in Germany with European Law to encourage students to further and more intensive work in this field, which is and probably in future will be in dynamic development

Building Bridges Between International Humanitarian and Development Responses to Forced Migration: A Review of Conceptual and Empirical Literature with a Case Study on the Response to the Syria Crisis

DEval and the Swedish Expert Group for Aid Studies (EBA) have jointly published a structured literature review titled "Building Bridges between International Humanitarian and Development Responses to Forced Migration". The study explores how international humanitarian and development responses to forced migration crises can be linked effectively. In a first step, the authors analyze how different concepts of the humanitarian-development nexus characterize the humanitarian-development gap and filter out recommendations on how to overcome this gap. The analysis reveals that the gap is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that consists of different sub-gaps. The literature review organizes these sub-gaps, and the respective recommendations on how to bridge them, into an analytical framework for the systematic analysis of conflict induced migration crises from a perspective of effectively linking humanitarian aid and development cooperation. In a second step, the authors apply this framework to analyze evaluations and evaluative studies on the international response to the Syria crisis. This analysis reveals to what extent (and why or why not) the conceptual recommendations have been translated into action. The findings suggest that in the early years of the Syria crisis - when the focus laid on humanitarian aid - effective linkages between humanitarian assistance and development cooperation were partially established. However, effective coordination and the well-planned integration of humanitarian and development programmes remains a major challenge for both, policy makers and policy implementers. In addition, the overall limited funds of humanitarian assistance still outweigh those of development cooperation. Particularly, long-term programmes to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable groups affected by the conflict suffer from the scarcity of funds. Finally, an important evaluation and knowledge gap remains as existing hypotheses or anecdotal evidence for a better integration of humanitarian assistance and structural development cooperation have hardly been examined systematically. For example, there has so far been no study examining systematically whether joint international strategies that align the humanitarian-development response to the Syria crisis actually contribute to reducing the vulnerability of refugees

Reconstruction of long horizontal-path images under anisoplanatic conditions using multiframe blind deconvolution

All optical systems that operate in or through the atmosphere suffer from turbulence induced image blur. Both military and civilian surveillance, gun sighting, and target identification systems are interested in terrestrial imaging over very long horizontal paths, but atmospheric turbulence can blur the resulting images beyond usefulness. This work explores the mean square error (MSE) performance of a multiframe blind deconvolution (MFBD) technique applied under anisoplanatic conditions for both Gaussian and Poisson noise model assumptions. The technique is evaluated for use in reconstructing images of scenes corrupted by turbulence in long horizontal-path imaging scenarios. Performance is evaluated via the reconstruction of a common object from three sets of simulated turbulence degraded imagery representing low, moderate, and severe turbulence conditions. Each set consisted of 1000 simulated turbulence degraded images. The MSE performance of the estimator is evaluated as a function of the number of images, and the number of Zernike polynomial terms used to characterize the point spread function. A Gaussian noise model-based MFBD algorithm reconstructs objects that showed as much as 40% improvement in MSE with as few as 14 frames and 30 Zernike coefficients used in the reconstruction, despite the presence of anisoplanatism in the data. An MFBD algorithm based on the Poisson noise model required a minimum of 50 frames to achieve significant improvement over the average MSE for the data set. Reconstructed objects show as much as 38% improvement in MSE using 175 frames and 30 Zernike coefficients in the reconstruction

Structured Funds: A balancing act between financial sustainability and development impact

It is estimated that up to 4.5 trillion US dollars in global investment are needed every year to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Innovative financing approaches that aim to increase the involvement of private actors in development finance are therefore increasing in importance. One of these approaches is structured funds. They include different risk categories, in order to meet the needs of different investors. Official donors assume the highest risk category, thus reducing the risk for private investors. So far, only little is known about the development impact of this financing approach, which needs to balance its objectives of financial sustainability and development impact. Against this backdrop, this evaluation examines the alignment of this financing approach with the objectives of German development cooperation, its potential for mobilising private capital, its financial sustainability, and its effects on financial intermediaries (FIs) and the extent to which sub-borrowers are reached. For this purpose a theory-based approach was selected that integrates qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. Based on its findings, the evaluation makes recommendations concerning financial sustainability, political management, donor coordination, mobilising private capital and managing development impact

Target localization and tracking by fusing doppler differentials from cellular emanations with a multi-spectral video tracker

We present an algorithm for fusing data from a constellation of RF sensors detecting cellular emanations with the output of a multi-spectral video tracker to localize and track a target with a specific cell phone. The RF sensors measure the Doppler shift caused by the moving cellular emanation and then Doppler differentials between all sensor pairs are calculated. The multi-spectral video tracker uses a Gaussian mixture model to detect foreground targets and SIFT features to track targets through the video sequence. The data is fused by associating the Doppler differential from the RF sensors with the theoretical Doppler differential computed from the multi-spectral tracker output. The absolute difference and the root-mean-square difference are computed to associate the Doppler differentials from the two sensor systems. Performance of the algorithm was evaluated using synthetically generated datasets of an urban scene with multiple moving vehicles. The presented fusion algorithm correctly associates the cellular emanation with the corresponding video target for low measurement uncertainty and in the presence of favorable motion patterns. For nearly all objects the fusion algorithm has high confidence in associating the emanation with the correct multi-spectral target from the most probable background target