The Winter’s Tale of Corruption: The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the Impending Shift to Winter, and Potential Legal Actions against FIFA

Hosting rights for the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament have been awarded to Qatar through a process that many alleged was corrupt. The climate in Qatar during the summer, when the tournament is traditionally held, is extremely hot, leading many in FIFA to consider potentially moving the tournament to the winter months. This move would have a major financial impact on professional soccer leagues in Europe and throughout the world, as well as on broadcasters and business partners. This Comment explores how a legal case could be brought against FIFA for its decision to award the tournament to Qatar. This Comment discusses the judicial bodies that could hear the case—FIFA’s internal judicial bodies, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Swiss Federal Tribunal—and analyzes how this case regarding the 2022 hosting rights would likely proceed in those judicial bodies. It ultimately concludes that given governing rules and precedent there is little likelihood that a case against FIFA could be successful

Cyber Deterrence: Is a Deterrence Model Practical in Cyberspace?

Student Contribution: After reconsidering massive retaliation versus escalation dominance concepts from nuclear deterrence, escalation dominance, investing in capability to respond proportionally at each level of cyber attack, may be the most practical and effective military strategy for strengthening cyber deterrence

The Winter’s Tale of Corruption: The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the Impending Shift to Winter, and Potential Legal Actions against FIFA

Hosting rights for the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament have been awarded to Qatar through a process that many alleged was corrupt. The climate in Qatar during the summer, when the tournament is traditionally held, is extremely hot, leading many in FIFA to consider potentially moving the tournament to the winter months. This move would have a major financial impact on professional soccer leagues in Europe and throughout the world, as well as on broadcasters and business partners. This Comment explores how a legal case could be brought against FIFA for its decision to award the tournament to Qatar. This Comment discusses the judicial bodies that could hear the case—FIFA’s internal judicial bodies, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Swiss Federal Tribunal—and analyzes how this case regarding the 2022 hosting rights would likely proceed in those judicial bodies. It ultimately concludes that given governing rules and precedent there is little likelihood that a case against FIFA could be successful

Gigantomachy in Aeneid 2

The Gigantomachy, and corollary Titanomachy and Typhonomachy, are battles between cosmic forces striving to establish universal supremacy. Allusions and references to these conflicts appear in various forms of literature, both poetry and prose, throughout antiquity from as early as Homer. Philip Hardie has shown the extensive presence of the theme in the Aeneid, predominantly in the final four books of the epic, and demonstrated that its use contributes significantly to a larger cosmological design of linking the struggles of individuals and civilizations to the mythological battle for the control of the cosmos. A similar pattern, hitherto unexplored, is employed in Book 2, where allusions to and echoes of these divine conflicts appear at strategic moments to aggrandize and elevate the destruction of Troy to the cosmic level. Vergil was commissioned to compose a new creation myth for Rome, yet the origins of their state sprang from destruction, both in the civil wars at the end of the Republic and more distantly in the fall of Troy and destruction of the previous Italian civilizations. The cosmic struggles between the Olympians and the Giants, Titans, and Typhoeus provided a close mythological analogy for Vergil to draw from. In many ways these de-creationist forces are seeking a reversal of cosmogony and threaten to turn the cosmos back to chaos before ending in a reaffirmation of order. The Giants\u27 close connection to the cosmogony, both chronologically and thematically, makes them particularly apt for the poem\u27s lofty subject, the creation of Rome. Therefore, Vergil alludes to these mythological passages highly familiar to the reader in order to create a cosmological structure in the epic, one of almost universal destruction leading to renewed creation, for which there is no clear antecedent in the Greco-Roman tradition

Obesity and socioeconomic gradient

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Economics from the NOVA – School of Business and EconomicsThis work project studies the determinants of body weight for Portuguese population with special incidence in the socioeconomic dimension through a comparison between 2006 and 2012. More specifically how is body weight influenced by a set of socioeconomic variables that may vary throughout the years. In other words, we set out to understand if socioeconomic status (SES) is a real contributor regarding weight. This study entails a thorough analysis of these variables with the intention of understand which of them remain significant and have real impact on the weight of a human body. Literature points to a confirmation of this real impact of SES status in the body weight and, according to our results, income represents the strongest variable to explain changes in human body weight, coinciding with previous findings. In quantitative terms, an increase of 250€ in the household net income for 2012 is translated into an increase of 0.272 in the BMI. Data used was provided by National Health Institute (INSA) along with National Institute of Statistics (INE) and also collected through a survey

The production of prosodic focus and contour in dialogue

Computer programs designed to converse with humans in natural language provide a framework against which to test supra-sentential theories of language production and interpretation. This thesis seeks to flesh out, in terms of a computer model, two basic assumptions concerning prosody-that speakers use intonation to convey intention, or attitude, and that prosodic prominence serves to convey conceptual prommence. A model of an information-providing agent in is proposed, based on an analysis of a corpus of spontaneous dialogues. This uses an architecture of communicating processes, which perform interpretation, application-specific planning, repair, and the production of output. Dialogue acts are then defined as feature bundles corresponding to significant events. A corpus of read dialogues is analysed in terms of these features, and using conventional intonational labelling. Correlations between the two are examined. Prosodic prominence is examined at three levels. At the level of surface encoding, re-use of substrings and structural parallelism can reduce processing for the speaker, and the listener. At the level of conceptual planning, similar benefits exist, given that speakers and listeners assume a common discourse model wherever possible. At these levels use is made of a short-term buffer of recent forms. A speaker may additionally use contrastive prominence to draw the listener's attention to disparities. Finally, at the level of intentions, a speaker wish to highlight certain information, regardless of accessibility. Prosodic focus is represented relationally, rather than via a simple binary-valued feature. This has the advantage of facilitating the mapping between levels; it also renders straightforward the notion of focus as the product of a number of potentially conflicting influences. Those parts of the theory concerned with discourse representation, language generation, and prosodic focus have been implemented as part of the Sundial dialogue system. In this system, discoursal and pragmatic decisions affecting prosody are converted to annotations on a text string, for realisation by a rule-based synthesizer

Liquefaction-Induced Lateral Ground Displacement

Ground displacements generated by liquefaction-induced lateral spread are a severe threat to engineered construction. During past earthquakes, lateral spread displacements have pulled apart or sheared shallow and deep foundations of buildings, severed pipelines and other structures and utilities that transect the ground displacement zone, buckled bridges or other structures constructed across the toe, and toppled retaining walls, bulkheads, etc. that lie in the path of the spreading ground. This paper presents a method for estimating probable free-field lateral displacements at sites susceptible to liquefaction. Free-field ground displacements are those that are not impeded by structural resistance, ground modification, or a natural boundary

Nonlinear simulations of magnetic Taylor-Couette flow with current-free helical magnetic fields

The magnetorotational instability (MRI) in cylindrical Taylor-Couette flow with external helical magnetic field is simulated for infinite and finite aspect ratios. We solve the MHD equations in their small Prandtl number limit and confirm with time-dependent nonlinear simulations that the additional toroidal component of the magnetic field reduces the critical Reynolds number from $O(10^6)$ (axial field only) to $O(10^3)$ for liquid metals with their small magnetic Prandtl number. Computing the saturated state we obtain velocity amplitudes which help designing proper experimental setups. Experiments with liquid gallium require axial field $\sim 50$ Gauss and axial current $\sim 4$ kA for the toroidal field. It is sufficient that the vertical velocity $u_z$ of the flow can be measured with a precision of 0.1mm/s. We also show that the endplates enclosing the cylinders do not destroy the traveling wave instability which can be observed as presented in earlier studies. For TC containers without and with endplates the angular momentum transport of the MRI instability is shown as to be outwards.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figure