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Who’s slapping whom? Strategic lawsuits against public participation, a growing threat to freedom of speech or dividends for hard-nosed law firms representing unpopular clients?
Get PDFStrategic lawsuits against public participation – or Slapps are abusive lawsuits pursued with the purpose of shutting down acts of public participation. These legal actions are usually directed against individual journalists, whistleblowers, activists and academics who speak out on matters of public interest. Claimants filing Slapp-lawsuits are usually international Russian billionaires and oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich, who sued journalist Catherine Belon over her best-selling book, Putin’s People in 2021. Belton had alleged that he had bought Chelsea Football Club on Vladimir Putin’s orders. Abramovich was one of three Russian tycoons who initiated libel proceedings against Belton and publishers HarperCollins, together with the Russian state oil company Rosneft. The talk includes how law firms often send overly aggressive, intimidating or threatening correspondence to individuals and businesses, threatening with an intended course of action, with labels such as 'strictly private and confidential', 'not for publication' or 'without prejudice'. It will be explained that such exaggerated claims and threatening letters are not legally valid. A cross-party coalition of MPs has called for the change in the law since November 2022 to prevent the use of court processes to silence investigative journalists and whistleblowers in Slapps actions, led by Conservative MP David Davis. In January 2023, the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications and Digital called for the creation of a new Slapps defence fund paid for by wrongdoers. They also called for more action from the solicitor’s regulator (SRA) and multi-million pound increases in fining powers to deter abusive lawsuits, and greater oversight of law firms using ‘black PR’ and private intelligence agencies to harass journalists. Following the King’s Speech on 7 November 2023, the UK Parliament introduced a couple of clauses into the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, namely section 194 ‘strategic litigation against public participation’ with a requirement to make rules of court in relation to Slapps, and section 195 with a court’s power to strike out Slapps claims, however only associated with economic crime. The Media Bill announced by King Charles III made no mention of Slapps
Gattungswesen and universality: Feuerbach, Marx and German idealism
Get PDFThe concept Gattungswesen, while evidently central to Marx’s early thought, has received surprisingly little detailed philosophical examination. An obstacle to progress when it comes to understanding the concept is a tendency to miss the import of the dimension of universality that Marx says is crucial to the concept. It has often been assumed that Marx must have in mind membership of the human species, where this is considered as one species among others. But an examination of the concept Gattung as it figures in Hegel (in particular in his Philosophy of Nature) and in particular as it passes to Marx through Feuerbach helps to reveal that a generality of a different order is involved. I trace this trajectory, giving special attention to early writings by Feuerbach (characterized by an uncompromising Hegelianism) that have been largely ignored, and show how a full appreciation of the generality of the Gattung can help with seeming puzzles that present themselves in the interpretation of the Marx of the early 1840s
Neither Eastern nor Western: Patterns of independence and interdependence in Mediterranean societies.
Get PDFAre Small Medium Enterprises Cyber Aware?
Get PDFTechnology has become a pivotal point in our society, this dependency is becoming increasingly more critical on a daily basis. This ranges from people to businesses and on a larger scale government organisations who are now increasingly focusing on becoming more cyber resilient. This paper intends to provide an overview as to why a comprehensive knowledge management framework is necessity for SMEs on tackling cyber and cyber-enabled crimes. The paper explores new sources of data to reliably understand the importance as to why such a framework is required. This type of system can pave the way for SME’s to devise their cyber strategy and to be able to respond efficiently to cyber-related incidents. One of the cyber weakness and vulnerabilities for the SME’s are through their interactivity and or engagement with their suppliers and customers. Namely the interactions which take place via their respective internet sites, email communications, ports (using external devices, USB, CD drive, SD cards etc.…) or the router (The use of their WIFI systems). The benefits of this framework model will be primarily to educate SME’s in becoming more cyber resilient and provide them with the knowledge, awareness and techniques to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities in their computer networks, devices and internet usage
Review on Quantum Computing for Lattice Field Theory
Get PDFIn these proceedings, we review recent advances in applying quantum computing to lattice field
theory. Quantum computing offers the prospect to simulate lattice field theories in parameter
regimes that are largely inaccessible with the conventional Monte Carlo approach, such as the
sign-problem afflicted regimes of finite baryon density, topological terms, and out-of-equilibrium
dynamics. First proof-of-concept quantum computations of lattice gauge theories in (1+1)
dimensions have been accomplished, and first resource-efficient quantum algorithms for lattice
gauge theories in (1+1) and (2+1) dimensions have been developed. The path towards quantum
computations of (3+1)-dimensional lattice gauge theories, including Lattice QCD, requires many
incremental steps of improving both quantum hardware and quantum algorithms. After reviewing
these requirements and recent advances, we discuss the main challenges and future directions
Social and asocial learning in zebrafish are encoded by a shared brain network that is differentially modulated by local activation
Get PDFSocial and asocial learning in zebrafish are encoded by a shared brain network that is differentially modulated by local activatio
Evolutionarily conserved role of oxytocin in social fear contagion in zebrafish
Get PDFEmotional contagion is the most ancestral form of empathy. We tested to what extent the proximate mechanisms of emotional contagion are evolutionarily conserved by assessing the role of oxytocin, known to regulate empathic behaviors in mammals, in social fear contagion in zebrafish. Using oxytocin and oxytocin receptor mutants, we show that oxytocin is both necessary and sufficient for observer zebrafish to imitate the distressed behavior of conspecific demonstrators. The brain regions associated with emotional contagion in zebrafish are homologous to those involved in the same process in rodents (e.g., striatum, lateral septum), receiving direct projections from oxytocinergic neurons located in the pre-optic area. Together, our results support an evolutionary conserved role for oxytocin as a key regulator of basic empathic behaviors across vertebrates
Necessary and sufficient conditions for exact closures of epidemic equations on configuration model networks
Get PDFWe prove that it is possible to obtain the exact closure of SIR pairwise epidemic equations on a configuration model network if and only if the degree distribution follows a Poisson, binomial, or negative binomial distribution. The proof relies on establishing the equivalence, for these specific degree distributions, between the closed pairwise model and a dynamical survival analysis (DSA) model that was previously shown to be exact. Specifically, we demonstrate that the DSA model is equivalent to the well-known edge-based Volz model. Using this result, we also provide reductions of the closed pairwise and Volz models to a single equation that involves only susceptibles. This equation has a useful statistical interpretation in terms of times to infection. We provide some numerical examples to illustrate our results