DERECHO INTERNACIONAL Y FONDOS BUITRE: EN BUSCA DE SOLUCIONES ALTERNATIVAS

In recent years, there has been growing concern among politicians, the academic world and the general public about the aggressive strategies implemented by 'vulture funds' in sovereign debt markets and their negative effects, especially on the economies of developing countries. In the absence of an international mechanism for the restructuring of sovereign debt, developing countries with financial difficulties and their private creditors must negotiate in good faith to forge a fair and viable restructuring agreement. At the same time, more coordinated action is needed to discourage vulture fund strategies. The use of voluntary codes, the use of Collective Action Clauses with characteristics of aggregation and, as a last resort, the introduction of carefully drafted national legislation against vulture funds should constitute the key elements of such coordinated action.En los últimos años ha crecido la preocupación entre entes políticos, el mundo académico y el público en general sobre las estrategias agresivas implementadas por los ‘fondos buitre’ (‘vulture funds’) en los mercados de deuda soberana y sus efectos negativos, especialmente notorios en las economías de países en desarrollo. En ausencia de un mecanismo internacional para la reestructuración de las deudas soberanas, los países en desarrollo con dificultades financieras y sus acreedores privados deben negociar de buena fe para forjar un acuerdo de reestructuración justo y viable. Al mismo tiempo, se necesita una acción más coordinada para desalentar las estrategias de los fondos buitre. El uso de códigos voluntarios internacionales, el uso de cláusulas de acción colectiva (CAC) con características de agregación y, como último recurso, la introducción de una legislación nacional contra los fondos buitres cuidadosamente redactada debe constituir los elementos clave de tal acción coordinad

CAUSES OF BULLYING, DIFFERENT REASONS FOR BULLYING AND CHARACTERISTICS - IDENTITY OF THE VICTIMS ACCORDING TO THE BULLIES (HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS)

The research presents the results from the completion of a questionnaire exclusively by the participants of the study who have been perpetrators of acts of bullying. The results showed that the bullies to a small extent acknowledged that they became bullies because they felt powerful, because they like to dominate/oppress others, because they wanted recognition of their authority from their classmates, because they were afraid of becoming victims and because they had had previously been victims of bullying (in all cases the average value is equal to 2.0). Also, the results showed that the most important reason that pushed the bullies to bully was some particular characteristic of the victim (Mean=3.0, SD=1.0) and to a lesser extent identity -ethnicity, race, sexual orientation- (Mean=2.0, SD=1.0, Mean=2.0, SD=1.0, Mean=2.0, SD=1.0) respectively. According to the perpetrators, they bullied more often boys (Mean=3.0, SD=2.0), and students of their school (Mean=3.0, SD=2.0). Finally, it emerged that the most frequent form of bullying was derogatory comments (Mean=3.0, SD=2.0) followed by physical violence (Mean=2.0, SD=1.0).  Article visualizations

VICTIMIZATION OF STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES OR ADHD (ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER)

The primary research objective of this research has been to investigate the relationship between the victimization of high school students and the existence of learning difficulties and ADHD. 700 students participated (with and without ADHD) who attended Gymnasiums of Western Thessaloniki in which integration departments operated. Participants anonymously completed a questionnaire on bullying. The results we quote here refer to the second part of the questionnaire that is completed only by those students who were victimized. According to the research activity so far, it was expected and finally confirmed that the variable existence of learning difficulties / ADHD is a predictor of the participation of these students in bullying incidents and even with the role of the victim [each increase in the percentage by one point (i.e. by 1 [each increase in the percentage by one point (i.e. by 1%) of the factor of learning disabilities and of the dep with a diagnosis the average value of the variable of a person falling victim to bullying increases by 1.21 points (p<0.001)].  Article visualizations

Towards Explainability in Monocular Depth Estimation

The estimation of depth in two-dimensional images has long been a challenging and extensively studied subject in computer vision. Recently, significant progress has been made with the emergence of Deep Learning-based approaches, which have proven highly successful. This paper focuses on the explainability in monocular depth estimation methods, in terms of how humans perceive depth. This preliminary study emphasizes on one of the most significant visual cues, the relative size, which is prominent in almost all viewed images. We designed a specific experiment to mimic the experiments in humans and have tested state-of-the-art methods to indirectly assess the explainability in the context defined. In addition, we observed that measuring the accuracy required further attention and a particular approach is proposed to this end. The results show that a mean accuracy of around 77% across methods is achieved, with some of the methods performing markedly better, thus, indirectly revealing their corresponding potential to uncover monocular depth cues, like relative size

Defect detection using weakly supervised learning

In many real-world scenarios, obtaining large amounts of labeled data can be a daunting task. Weakly supervised learning techniques have gained significant attention in recent years as an alternative to traditional supervised learning, as they enable training models using only a limited amount of labeled data. In this paper, the performance of a weakly supervised classifier to its fully supervised counterpart is compared on the task of defect detection. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of images containing defects, and evaluate the two classifiers based on their accuracy, precision, and recall. Our results show that the weakly supervised classifier achieves comparable performance to the supervised classifier, while requiring significantly less labeled data

Impact of Hepatitis B Exposure on Sustained Virological Response Rates of Highly Viremic Chronic Hepatitis C Patients

Aim. To evaluate the impact of hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc) seropositivity in sustained virological response (SVR) rates in treatment-naïve, chronic hepatitis C (CHC) patients with high pretreatment viral load (>800000 IU/mL). Methods. 185 consecutive CHC patients (14.4% cirrhotics, 70.2% prior intravenous drug users) treated with pegylated interferon-a2b plus ribavirin, for 24 or 48 weeks based on viral genotype, were retrospectively analyzed. SVR was confirmed by undetectable serum HCV-RNA six months after the end of treatment schedule. Results. Thirty percent of CHC/HBsAg-negative patients were anti-HBc-positive. Anti-HBc positivity was more prevalent in cirrhotic, compared to noncirrhotic patients (76.9% versus 19.5%, P < .05). Serum HBV-DNA was detected in the minority of anti-HBc-positive patients (1.97%). Overall, 62.1% of patients exhibited SVR, while 28.6% did not; 71.4% of non-SVRs were infected with genotype 1. In the univariate analysis, the anti-HBc positivity was negatively associated with treatment outcome (P = .065). In the multivariate model, only the advanced stage of liver disease (P = .015) and genotype-1 HCV infection (P = .003), but not anti-HBc-status (P = .726), proved to be independent predictors of non-SVR. Conclusion. Serum anti-HBc positivity does not affect the SVR rates in treatment-naïve CHC patients with high pretreatment viral load, receiving the currently approved combination treatment

Модель инновационной инструктирующей системы электронного обучения, ориентированной на греческую аудиторию

Currently, electronic forms of education are two types: using autonomous, standalone tools for learning and, using network technology, where the process of education is performed by the professor through content and learning process management systems. The main purpose of this paper is to describe the current status and to present the architecture of an intelligent tutoring system for learning Russian language from ethno methodological point of view. We propose the development of a new system model for e-learning, adapted to the ethnical and individual characteristics of Greek students, so in such a way it supports more effective optimization of the received educational material, when teaching Russian as a foreign language.В настоящее время электронные формы обучения имеют два основных вида: с использованием автономных электронных средств обучения и с использованием сетевых технологий, где управление процессом обучения осуществляется преподавателем через системы управления контентом и посредством системы управления обучением. Основная цель этой статьи - описание архитектуры интеллектуальной, инструктирующей системы электронного языкового образования в этнометодическом аспекте. Предлагаем новую модель электронного образования, адаптированной к индивидуальным особенностям греческих обучающихся, что способствует более эффективной оптимизации усвоения учебного материала, при обучении русского языка как иностранного

Expression dynamics of a cellular metabolic network

Toward the goal of understanding system properties of biological networks, we investigate the global and local regulation of gene expression in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolic network. Our results demonstrate predominance of local gene regulation in metabolism. Metabolic genes display significant coexpression on distances smaller than the average network distance, a behavior supported by the distribution of transcription factor binding sites in the metabolic network and genome context associations. Positive gene coexpression decreases monotonically with distance in the network, while negative coexpression is strongest at intermediate network distances. We show that basic topological motifs of the metabolic network exhibit statistically significant differences in coexpression behavior