1,721,022 research outputs found
Distributed ledgers, EOP, and debt recovery mechanisms: a new technology for civil procedure
Full text linkThe delay of payments in commercial transactions persists as a pressing problem for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the European Union, it increases financial costs, contributes to the lack of liquidity and can even lead to bankruptcy. While the EU took several steps in addressing this issue, results have been lacking so far. This article explores the implementation of a distributed ledger (DL) system based on blockchain technology to improve the standard of evidence for the European order of payment (EOP) and to pave the way to an automated assessment of claims under art. 8 of the Reg. 1896/2006. By leveraging a modular approach and combining the properties of distributed ledgers with smart contracts, such a system could lead to harmonization of redress procedures and move beyond the two models of payment order procedure in member states, and, ultimately, pave the way to an e-justice system at the European level. It is argued that such a system improves the standard of the evidence required for issuing EOP by providing formal control of the evidence submitted to the courts together with the form pursuant to art. 7 Reg. 1896/2006. Lastly, this is the first step in establishing a system that could (a) reduce inefficiencies (b) reduce the risk of errors (c) reduce the costs of access to the judicial system (d) establish an automatic e-order of payment procedure (e) improve accessibility for SMEs thereby improving their competitiveness and (f) contribute to the establishment of the single market
Why blockchains need the law: Secondary rules as the missing piece of blockchain governance
No full textGovernance issues limit blockchains’ ability to evolve and face unforeseen challenges. It seems possible to argue that this impasse is because most blockchains lack meta-rules. This work considers blockchains as a socio-technical system of rules, in order to draw a comparison with legal systems. Following the comparison, one finds that most blockchains lack what, in legal theory, are considered secondary rules. That is, the meta-rule of the system.
This works examines the relevant concepts and provides their definitions, then proceeds to outline concrete example of the failure of governance among popular blockchains before drawing the parallelism with legal systems and argue that secondary rules might solve some of the issues of the governance of blockchains.
Secondary rules are the necessary infrastructure for building sound governance structures and a necessary condition for blockchains to succeed as a new mode of governance. The conclusion provides future research directions
A 130-nm CMOS 0.007 mm2 Ring-Oscillator-Based Self-Calibrating IR-UWB Transmitter Using an Asynchronous Logic Duty-Cycled PLL
No full textWe present a 0.007 mm2 impulse-radio ultrawide- band transmitter (TX) based on a ring oscillator capable of synthesizing pulses with both controlled center frequency and bandwidth using a single duty-cycling/trigger reference input. The TX embeds a single-phase charge-pump phase-locked loop (PLL), implemented with asynchronous logic, with 55 logic elements overall. The system, including radio frequency output buffers, consumes measured 30-45 pJ/pulse with a measured efficiency of ∼47% at 285 MHz center frequency and Vdd in the range of 0.97-1.17 V. At 1.2V supply, the 130 nm CMOS TX tolerates ±10% Vdd variation, maintaining robust lock and controlled power spectral density (PSD) at 300 MHz center frequency, −19 dBm radiated power at 1 MHz pulse-repetition frequency, and a fractional bandwidth of 0.23. At 300 MHz, the system achieves a measured 100 ps RMS jitter, and without output buffers, the sole PLL logic occupies an active silicon area of 0.0045 mm
“Io onestamente oggi non vorrei nascere maschio”. Il caso Marco Crepaldi
Full text linkMarco Crepaldi is a social psychologist who runs channels on YouTube and Twitch, where he talks about male issues, such as body shaming, violence against men, social isolation, and feminism. In June 2020 he made some controversial statements on the social difficulties experienced by straight white males, which caused a large, polarized debate on social media. This article reconstructs the main lines of Crepaldi’s argument and proposes a discourse analysis of the interactions related to the case in a particularly active Facebook group, called IMDI, Il Meglio Di Internet (‘The Best of the Internet’). The aim of this article is to investigate the discursive constructions of masculinity pre-sented by Crepaldi and those that emerged in the Facebook group conversations, in or-der to understand the interpretative repertoires at play within these discourses, how they are structured around particular ideological dilemmas and what different subject positions the participants take up
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
NanoCube: A Low-Cost, Modular, and High-Performance Embedded System for Adaptive Fabrication and Characterization of Nanogaps
No full textThis paper presents an embedded modular system, NanoCube, able to repeatedly fabricate a pair of nanometric ter- minal probes (nanogaps) using the electromigration-induced break junction and capable to characterize them for low-cost molecu- lar electronic devices and biomolecular sensing. NanoCube imple- ments a flexible control loop which predicts both temperature and current and efficiently manages the electrical stimulation applied to ad hoc PCB cartridges, including a silicon chip with gold wire probes to be electromigrated. The modular and flexible system em- beds the core circuits devoted to nanogap fabrication, signal condi- tioning and measurement, and the microprogrammed subsystems. NanoCube runs a real-time Linux operating system, with a fully customizable electromigration algorithm which considers fabrica- tion history to adaptively improve performance. After 250 fabri- cation runs the system is shown to be able to fabricate nanogaps under 3 nm with 29% yield, and with 53% yield if we consider gaps under 10 nm. To validate the system, experiments using the fabricated nanogaps with bonded oligothiophene molecules were run, verifying the theory of molecular conductio
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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