1,721,046 research outputs found
The evolution of of sedimentary basins in passive continental margins: West Iberia as an example
No full textItalian Constitutional Court and social rights in times of crisis: in search of a balance between principles and values of contemporary constitutionalism
No full textNon si può ignorare che tutti i tribunali costituzionali sono oggi chiamati a giocare una partita difficilissima, quando giudicano della legittimità di norme che incidono negativamente sui diritti sociali. La Corte costituzionale italiana, durante l’attuale crisi, è stata investita da un numero sempre maggiore di questioni di legittimità riguardanti le misure che hanno colpito diverse categorie di soggetti (i pensionati, i dipendenti pubblici non contrattualizzati, i magistrati e, genericamente, i contribuenti), incidendo sensibilmente sui loro diritti economici e sociali. Le sue decisioni non sono apparse sempre cristalline, per i diversi regimi che ne sono derivati nella distribuzione dei sacrifici e per l’alone di politicità che le contraddistingue inevitabilmente, soprattutto quando essa fa riferimento alla crisi economica o ad elementi di economia politica per poter giungere a decisioni volte, nella maggior parte dei casi, a “salvare” norme che altrimenti sarebbero state soggette a dichiarazioni d’incostituzionalità. In alcuni casi si tratta di norme che comprimono diritti sociali, salvate in virtù della necessità di contenere i costi; in altri si tratta di decisioni che si possono definire “stato-centriche”, adottate cioè a detrimento dell’autonomia degli enti territoriali competenti, adducendo la necessità di minori spese e di maggiore efficienza; in altri, ancora, la Corte modula gli effetti delle proprie decisioni per limitare il loro presunto impatto sull’economia del Paese. Sicché, alla fine, si potrebbe forse dubitare del suo ruolo imparziale. Alla luce di tale giurisprudenza in tempi di crisi, l’auspicio è comunque che la Corte si lasci coinvolgere sul piano interpretativo anche da quelle istanze internazionali che, come il Comitato Europeo dei Diritti Sociali, avvalorano il principio di non regressione dei diritti sociali pure durante le crisi e non si appiattiscono, in particolare, sul concetto di tutela del solo «contenuto minimo», essenziale, dei diritti sociali coinvolti, spingendosi, per di più, a considerare gli effetti cumulativi delle misure d’austerità sulla popolazione più debole. Tale orientamento interpretativo rappresenta ormai un punto di riferimento imprescindibile anche per le Corti costituzionali che vogliono trovare le formule ermeneutiche più appropriate per massimizzare la protezione dei diritti in questione, attraverso il bilanciamento (talvolta ineguale) dei principî costituzionali e, allo stesso tempo, tra i diritti e i principî implicati.Nowadays it cannot be ignored that all constitutional courts play a difficult role when they consider the constitutionality of norms that have a negative impact on social rights. In the context of the current economic crisis, the Italian Constitutional Court received a progressively higher number of constitutional complaints concerning measures affecting various categories of subjects (pensioners, civil servants, magistrates and, more generally, taxpayers) which had a significant impact on their economic and social rights. These decisions have not always been clear, because of the various regimes that have resulted in the distribution of the burden of the crisis and due to the political character of the measures, particularly when referring to the economic crisis or to the economic policies that, in most cases, tried to "save" norms that otherwise would have been declared unconstitutional. In some cases, the Constitutional Court determined the constitutionality of retrogressive social norms with the justification of the need to reduce public spending and have better efficiency; in other situations, the Court modulated the effects of its own decisions to limit their supposed impact on the country's economy. These decisions lead us to somehow doubt his impartial role. The interpretation of international bodies which, as the European Committee of Social Rights, affirms the principle of non-regression of social rights in times of crisis, does not rely on the concept of “minimal content” of recognized social rights and takes into account the cumulative effects of austerity measures on the weakest populations, is now an essential reference even for constitutional courts wishing to find the most appropriate hermeneutic formulas to maximize the protection of the rights in question, through the (sometimes unequal) balancing of constitutional principles and, at the same time, between the rights and principles involved
People’s Will before Judicial Review of (Un)Constitutional Amendments
No full textIn modern time, constitutions usually contain rules about constitutional amendments, and in certain circumstances, “we, the people” are called to propose and/or approve any constitutional change. There is an uneasy relationship between substantive limits on amendments and democracy because, as demonstrated, democratic constitutions undermine people involvement in the constitutional amendment processes. The paper aims to analyse the role of the people in the constitution-making or constitution-amendment processes. On the one side, it seeks to answer whether the constitutional procedures enable people to entrench good or bad constitutional changes, as well as the features of unamendability clauses, which limit the people participation in those processes. On the other side, the paper considers the serious constitutional law problem behind the judicial review of constitutional amendments when (or better, if) the people have the last word in such processes
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
The tectonic evolution of the Gulf of Cadiz-SW Portugal’s offshore and the seismogenesis of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake: the achievements of SWIM project
No full textVariations 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
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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