The capital punishment controversy in Hungary: fragments on the issues of deterrent effect and wrongful convictions

Although the death penalty has been abolished in the majority of the European countries by now (it is only applied in Belarus, while Russia can be considered a so-called de facto abolitionist state, where this sanction exists in theory, but no execution has taken place in the last fifteen years and, according to the current situation, will not take place anymore), the debates concerning capital punishment keep arising. In many European countries leading politicians argue or have recently argued in favour of reinstatement of the death penalty. The debate related to capital punishment keeps arising in Hungary as well, especially after brutal murders. Various politicians stated that, according to their personal opinion, the reinstatement of the death penalty would be expedient or proper, or that it should not have been abolished in the first place. The present paper deals with this contemporary discussion, with special regard to the issues of deterrent effect and wrongful convictions

Animal Protection and Animal 'Rights' in Hungary

In Hungary, the first Act on Animal Protection, which aimed at handling and respecting animals as living creatures capable of feelings and suffering and thus deserving and entitled to protection, was adopted in 1998. Based on this, the Act contains several regulations which ensure that animals are protected against all possible kinds of avoidable physical or mental harm. Furthermore, it prohibits and imposes sanctions for any treatment that causes animals unnecessary suffering. The present study, outlooking at the end of this paper to the case for whether animals can have subjective rights, undertakes to focus on such regulations with the intent of verifying that the current Hungarian regulation harmonizes with modern European trends; in fact, to a certain extent (e.g. by applying criminal sanctions for animal torturing), it even provides guidelines for those trends

The deterrent effect of the death penalty from an econometric point of view

The present paper deals with whether the death penalty deters murderers from committing capital crimes. It examines this matter on the basis of those empirical investigations conducted in the last two decades by, primarily, American economists and criminologists. These analyses presented in my study attempted to reveal using different statistical methods whether people’s strong belief in that capital punishment can prevent committing a certain sum of nonnegligent manslaughters in the future through the potential perpetrators’ fear of being executed if arrested is indeed corroborated by empirical studies. In my essay I examine this issue in three chapters. In the first and the second one I review some of those partial researches made in the last two decades in this field in the United States; the third chapter surveys those studies conducted by one of the most famous and most influential contemporary econometrists, Joanna M. Shepherd; and, in the end, the fourth chapter introduces some critiques and extensions of Shepherd’s results. As a conclusion I state that there is still not irrefutable evidence either that capital punishment does certainly have or that it undoubtedly does not have any deterrent effect

Ranking Projects in Multi-Criteria Environment

In the construction industry, the way the company manages its projects is a fundamental issue. IT tools supporting project portfolio management have become widely available and widely used, however, some of their processes still significantly need to be refined and made more accurate. Choosing the right project is a vital element of their way to success or failure. This also means that when a building project becomes value-destroying, it has to be suspended, or even stopped. Making such decisions is vitally important for the company. The paper presents an integrated project prioritization model, which includes both financial and non-financial criteria. The conceptual idea is to integrate the financial element with the most widely used non-financial points of view that are already applied, tested and published in the relevant literature separately. The authors go over the steps of PPM one by one and in addition to the ranking of the outlined projects, also briefly summarize the basics of monitoring

On the mass-coupling relation of multi-scale quantum integrable models

We determine exactly the mass-coupling relation for the simplest multi-scale quantum integrable model, the homogenous sine-Gordon model with two independent mass-scales. We first reformulate its perturbed coset CFT description in terms of the perturbation of a projected product of minimal models. This representation enables us to identify conserved tensor currents on the UV side. These UV operators are then mapped via form factor perturbation theory to operators on the IR side, which are characterized by their form factors. The relation between the UV and IR operators is given in terms of the sought-for mass-coupling relation. By generalizing the $\Theta$ sum rule Ward identity we are able to derive differential equations for the mass-coupling relation, which we solve in terms of hypergeometric functions. We check these results against the data obtained by numerically solving the thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz equations, and find a complete agreement.Comment: 55 pages, 9 figures, reference added, minor changes, published versio

Random Fourier signature features

Tensor algebras give rise to one of the most powerful measures of similarity for sequences of arbitrary length called the signature kernel accompanied with attractive theoretical guarantees from stochastic analysis. Previous algorithms to compute the signature kernel scale quadratically in terms of the length and the number of the sequences. To mitigate this severe computational bottleneck, we develop a random Fourier feature-based acceleration of the signature kernel acting on the inherently non-Euclidean domain of sequences. We show uniform approximation guarantees for the proposed unbiased estimator of the signature kernel, while keeping its computation linear in the sequence length and number. In addition, combined with recent advances on tensor projections, we derive two even more scalable time series features with favourable concentration properties and computational complexity both in time and memory. Our empirical results show that the reduction in computational cost comes at a negligible price in terms of accuracy on moderate-sized datasets, and it enables one to scale to large datasets up to a million time series

How does the market react to your order flow?

We present an empirical study of the intertwined behaviour of members in a financial market. Exploiting a database where the broker that initiates an order book event can be identified, we decompose the correlation and response functions into contributions coming from different market participants and study how their behaviour is interconnected. We find evidence that (1) brokers are very heterogeneous in liquidity provision -- some are consistently liquidity providers while others are consistently liquidity takers. (2) The behaviour of brokers is strongly conditioned on the actions of {\it other} brokers. In contrast brokers are only weakly influenced by the impact of their own previous orders. (3) The total impact of market orders is the result of a subtle compensation between the same broker pushing the price in one direction and the liquidity provision of other brokers pushing it in the opposite direction. These results enforce the picture of market dynamics being the result of the competition between heterogeneous participants interacting to form a complicated market ecology.Comment: 22 pages, 5+9 figure