Addressing Heteronormativity: The Not-So-Lost Requirement of Discretion in (Austrian) Asylum Law

In refugee matters concerning sexual orientation, ‘discretion’ reasoning is as commonplace as it is unlawful. In its 2013 ruling in X, Y, and Z, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared that it was unreasonable to expect that asylum seekers should conceal their sexual orientation by being ‘discreet’ in order to avoid persecution, and that such a requirement in domestic refugee status determination procedures would be incompatible with European Union (EU) law. However, this did not put an end to the matter. Discretion reasoning still forms part of the process to determine refugee status in many EU countries. This article examines the persistence of discretion reasoning, using Austria as an example. It argues that, whilst the CJEU definitively banned such reasoning, the court failed to give any indication as to how decision makers should proceed from this point. X, Y, and Z has thus created a legal vacuum, and there is a risk that normative sociocultural concepts like heteronormativity will be applied in such cases. Indeed, despite the CJEU ruling, it is still common in many societies to expect that LGBTIQ people be discreet. As such, decision makers may find themselves imposing a discretion requirement, even if unconsciously. The main aim of the article is to assess the resulting persistence of discretion reasoning through the lens of heteronormativity, and to provide practical suggestions for assessing refugee status in a way that ensures discretion is no longer required.Peer Reviewe

Interval-valued and intuitionistic fuzzy mathematical morphologies as special cases of L-fuzzy mathematical morphology

Mathematical morphology (MM) offers a wide range of tools for image processing and computer vision. MM was originally conceived for the processing of binary images and later extended to gray-scale morphology. Extensions of classical binary morphology to gray-scale morphology include approaches based on fuzzy set theory that give rise to fuzzy mathematical morphology (FMM). From a mathematical point of view, FMM relies on the fact that the class of all fuzzy sets over a certain universe forms a complete lattice. Recall that complete lattices provide for the most general framework in which MM can be conducted. The concept of L-fuzzy set generalizes not only the concept of fuzzy set but also the concepts of interval-valued fuzzy set and Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy set. In addition, the class of L-fuzzy sets forms a complete lattice whenever the underlying set L constitutes a complete lattice. Based on these observations, we develop a general approach towards L-fuzzy mathematical morphology in this paper. Our focus is in particular on the construction of connectives for interval-valued and intuitionistic fuzzy mathematical morphologies that arise as special, isomorphic cases of L-fuzzy MM. As an application of these ideas, we generate a combination of some well-known medical image reconstruction techniques in terms of interval-valued fuzzy image processing

Innovative applications of associative morphological memories for image processing and pattern recognition

Morphological Associative Memories have been proposed for some image denoising applications. They can be applied to other less restricted domains, like image retrieval and hyper spectral image unsupervised segmentation. In this paper we present these applications. In both cases the key idea is that Autoassociative Morphological Memories selective sensitivity to erosive and dilative noise can be applied to detect the morphological independence between patterns. Linear unmixing based on the sets of morphological independent patterns define a feature extraction process that is the basis for the image processing applications. We discuss some experimental results on the fish shape data base and on a synthetic hyperspectral image, including the comparison with other linear feature extraction algorithms (ICA and CCA)

Detecao de Bordas baseada em Morfologia Matemática Fuzzy Intervalar e as Funcoes de Agregacao K

Edge detection is a digital image processing tool. It determines points in a digital image where light intensity suddenly changes. This process applies to a digital image which assumes some degree of uncertainty in the location and intensity of the pixel in the real image. In this work, we propose an edge detection model which consists in capturing this uncertainty in terms of interval images. Then we apply interval-valued fuzzy morphology to calculate the interval-valued erosion and dilation. Finally, we compute the convex combinations of the upper and lower bounds of the interval-valued erosion and dilation image, to obtain a morphological erosion and dilation respectively, and thus an edge image.A deteccao de bordas é uma ferramenta de processamento digital de imagenes. Ela determina pontos de uma imagem digital onde a intensidade da luz muda repentinamente. Esse processo aplica-se a uma imagem digital a qual supoe algum grau de incerteza na localizacao e na intensidade do pixel da imagem real. Neste trabalho, é proposto um modelo de detecao de bordas que consiste na captura dessa incerteza em termos de imagens intervalares, para depois aplicar a erosao e dilatacao intervalar fuzzy. Finalmente, por meio de uma combinacao convexa sobre os limites superiores e inferiores da erosao e a dilatacao intervalar, sao obtidas a erosao e a dilatacao morfológica respectivamente, com as quais se faz possível produzir uma imagem borda

Socio-Cultural, Organizational, and Community Level Influences on Physical Activity Levels of Latino Preschool-Age Children: A Qualitative Study

Objectives: As more children grow up in families with immigrant parents of Latino origin, there is a need to understand key influences on physical activity behaviors of young Latino children to prevent obesity in this high-risk group.Design: We conducted six focus groups with low-income Latina mothers (N = 33) whose preschool-aged children (2-5 years) were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program in Rhode Island. Data was analyzed using content analysis to identify recurrent themes.Results: Despite understanding the importance of physical activity for overall health, physical activity was not a top priority for the Latino mothers participating in the focus groups. Mothers reported facing numerous barriers to establishing and maintaining healthful physical activity habits for their preschool-aged children and themselves, particularly financial and socio-cultural barriers. Analyses revealed that Latina mothers perceive the WIC as a program focused on the development and maintenance of healthy eating habits and nutritional status of children and not physical activity.Conclusions: Recognizing the importance of socioeconomic position and the influence of cultural factors on physical activity is essential if effective prevention and intervention programs for Latino families and their children are to be designed. Study findings emphasize the importance of the family as a central unit of change and suggest that successful interventions to promote physical activity of low-income Latino preschool children must take into account the needs and constraints of the family unit as a whole. The WIC program has the potential to be a venue for promoting awareness of and educating low-income Latino parents about the importance of helping their children develop and maintain early healthful physical activity habits. The WIC program can also play an important role in facilitating access and creating programs and services that provide increased opportunities for physical activity of young children and their families

Influence of thermal history on the structure and properties of silicate glasses

We studied a set of float glass samples prepared with different fictive temperature by previous annealing around the glass transition temperature. We compared the results to previous measurements on a series of amorphous silica samples, also prepared with different fictive temperature. We showed that the modifications on the structure at a local scale are very small, the changes of physical properties are moderate but the changes on density fluctuations at a nanometer scale are rather large: 12 and 20% in float glass and silica, for relative changes of fictive temperature equal to 13 and 25% respectively. Local order and mechanical properties of silica vary in the opposite way compared to float glass (anomalous behavior) but the density fluctuations in both glasses increase with temperature and fictive temperature

Acoustic damping and dispersion in vitreous germanium oxide

New Brillouin scattering measurements of velocity and attenuation of sound in the hypersonic regime are presented. The data are analyzed together with the literature results at sonic and ultrasonic frequencies. As usual, thermally activated relaxation of structural entities describes the attenuation at sonic and ultrasonic frequencies. As already shown in vitreous silica, we conclude that the damping by network viscosity, resulting from relaxation of thermal phonons, must be taken into account to describe the attenuation at hypersonic frequencies. In addition, the bare velocity obtained by subtracting to the experimental data the effect of the two above mechanisms is constant for temperatures below 250 K, but increases almost linearly above, up to the glass transition temperature. This might indicate the presence of a progressive local polyamorphic transition, as already suggested for vitreous silica.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

A brief community linkage intervention for veterans with a persistent mental illness and a co-occurring substance abuse disorder

Objective: Individuals with co-occurring psychiatric and substance abuse problems often exhibit poor outpatient treatment engagement and re-hospitalization following discharge from acute psychiatric services. Although case management can improve treatment engagement and reduce attrition, these services are often delivered indefinitely, limiting the availability of treatment slots. In an effort to reduce re-hospitalization rates and improve outcomes during the transition from inpatient to outpatient treatment, we developed and evaluated Time-Limited Case Management (TLC), an eight-week integrated mental health and substance abuse augmentation intervention. Method: Sixty-five dually diagnosed veterans admitted to inpatient psychiatric treatment were included in the program evaluation, 32 who received the TLC service in addition to Treatment as Usual (TAU) that began during inpatient treatment and continued after the transition to outpatient services, and a comparison group of 33 who received only TAU without transitional support provided through the TLC augmentation service. Results: The TLC group had fewer days and episodes of hospitalization at two and six month post-study entry. Furthermore, the TLC group exhibited greater improvements on the Global Assessment of Functioning from baseline to the six-month follow-up. Conclusion: TLC appears to be an effective transitional augmentation service with benefits that persist beyond the eight weeks of the program. Future research should include a larger and more rigorously controlled trial to confirm the efficacy and unique contributions of the intervention