Collective Entity Research Articles

UKRAINE – A MARITIME STATE: A CONCEPT OF LEGAL PERSONHOOD IN THE CONTEXT OF LEGAL (MARITIME) DOCTRINE

The article researches the concept of legal personhood in the context of Legal (Maritime) Doctrine of Ukraine as a maritime state. The author points out the existence of various scientific studies that concern definition, context, and depth of the legal personhood notion. However, there is no single generally accepted meaning of it. This greatly complicates the formation of the legal personhood concept in the context of Legal (Maritime) Doctrine of Ukraine as a maritime state. The above said, according to the author, should be regarded as a lack of legal justification, namely the want of legal general theoretical basis for its formation and implementation, including conceptual legal provisions. This defines the relevance of the study conducted in the article. According to the results, the author forms meaning of the definition, context, and depth of the state’s legal personhood notion. He concludes that Ukraine, after joining United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982, as an independent and sovereign state acquired certain rights, duties, and responsibilities in the sphere of marine environment development. Thus, it acquired (as a particular collective law entity with general and special capacity) sectoral ‘maritime’ (including international maritime) capacity (as a subject of legal maritime relations, including ‘state-participant’ of the Convention status). It also acquired provisions of the full-fledged participant of the international maritime law (a legal order for the seas and oceans) for realization of the state functions (its social purposes main vectors, tasks, and goals) in the process of marine environment development as an object of state influence and delictual capacity (tort) as an ability to bear legal responsibility for illegal actions and its negative consequences, in particular, to be a defendant in law suits in international (international maritime) jurisdictional bodies. The author marks the scientific necessity and proposes to include the legal personhood concept in the process of formation and implementation of Legal (Maritime) Doctrine of Ukraine as a maritime state.

PEDAGOGICAL CONDITIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE OF THE COLLEGE STUDENT COMMUNITY

The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the development and improvement of the experience of spiritual life and spiritual maturation of students is especially important in the period of their professional and personal development, when they are ready to accumulate human experience and master the world in knowledge, values and meanings. The purpose of the article: to substantiate the pedagogical conditions for the development of organizational culture of the college student community in a multicultural environment. To implement the tasks, research methods were used: analysis of documentary and scientific sources – in order to determine the components of the organizational culture of the student community and highlight the properties that characterize the student community as a «collective entity»; systematization and grouping of information material – to identify features of the multicultural educational environment of the college; generalizations – to formulate conclusions. It is determined that the organizational culture of the student community is a subculture of the organizational culture of the college as a whole, which is a system of material and spiritual values, assumptions, beliefs, expectations, norms and patterns of behavior that share and support most students, and define their actions and interactions within and outside the community, in daily activities and future careers. It is emphasized that the formation of the organizational culture of the student community of the college, which carries out educational activities in a multicultural environment, is special. The pedagogical potential of the multicultural educational environment of the college is characterized as a dynamic education, which is characterized by a set of educational, upbringing, communicative and reflective resources, aimed at enriching the spiritual experience of students representing different ethnic, religious and socio-economic groups, their assimilation of general cultural and national values and successful socialization in society. The factors influencing the spiritual enrichment of the student and the organizational culture of the student community are identified: psychological, pedagogical and multicultural.

Charakter prawny regulaminów przewozu osób w publicznym transporcie zbiorowym

Rules of a carriage of persons in public collective transport are acts regulating the rights and obligations of entities providing public collective transport services and persons using these services. Due to the fact that they are unilaterally established by the organizers of collective public transport and entities providing transport services as part of their public tasks, the question arises whether these regulations should be treated as activities in the sphere of private law or in the field of public administration. The doctrine and case-law is convinced that the regulations in question are a pattern of contract in the meaning of civil law. This position, although supported by valid arguments, does not fully take into account the specificity of collective public transport, which is a public activity carried out by public administration entities and private persons entrusted with performing public tasks. Therefore, it seems reasonable to start a discussion on the need to apply to the regulations of public transport collective legal structures based not only on civil law, but also on administrative law.

Covid-19, capitalism and political elites: The real threat to humanity

It has been more than a year since the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, one of the largest cities in China. The global tsunami that followed took the bourgeois regimes across the globe by surprise heralding a new era of socioeconomic misery, suggesting that this multifaceted crisis could become the worst crisis in the history of capitalism. The inability of the current political system to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent from the very outset, hence exposing – in the most emphatic manner – the ills of the dominant market economy. In this opinion paper, we argue that society, as a global collective entity, has been reduced to an entity that obeys orders and dances to the rhythm set by international organizations. Furthermore, the severely restricted political and social rights might be a dress rehearsal of what the future holds for humanity.

The “Con” in Conspiracy: Racial Violence as Political Assassination in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog

Abstract This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-prize winning play Topdog/Underdog (1999) mobilizes a conspiracy theory concept of anti-black violence in America. The highly discursive play depicts a pair of black brothers named Lincoln and Booth as they banter, argue, and compete with each other over games of three-card monte. In the final scene of the play, the brothers fulfil the destiny inscribed in their names: Booth shoots and kills his brother Lincoln after a dispute over their meager inheritance. The play frames this final act of brutal fratricide as a form of political assassination in order to activate the rescaling that comes with a conspiracy theory lexicon: Topdog/Underdog formulates a generative and radically resistant conspiratorial conception of anti-black violence that ultimately enables a genuine confrontation with the origins and structures of racialized oppression. The play thus belongs to a lineage of works by black writers that have wielded a paranoid aesthetic in order to galvanize a revolutionary opposition to the structures of racial oppression. This tradition includes authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and, most explicitly, John A. Williams, whose novel The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) emerges in the article as a precedent for the conspiratorial racial politics of Parks’s play. In its own interpretation of paranoid anti-racist critique, Topdog/Underdog elaborates a concept of conspiracy without intentionality whose hierarchies, despite being beyond the parameters of any single individual or collective entity’s agency, can nonetheless be undermined and, ultimately, toppled.

Reinforcement Learning–based Collective Entity Alignment with Adaptive Features

Entity alignment (EA) is the task of identifying the entities that refer to the same real-world object but are located in different knowledge graphs (KGs). For entities to be aligned, existing EA solutions treat them separately and generate alignment results as ranked lists of entities on the other side. Nevertheless, this decision-making paradigm fails to take into account the interdependence among entities. Although some recent efforts mitigate this issue by imposing the 1-to-1 constraint on the alignment process, they still cannot adequately model the underlying interdependence and the results tend to be sub-optimal. To fill in this gap, in this work, we delve into the dynamics of the decision-making process, and offer a reinforcement learning (RL)–based model to align entities collectively. Under the RL framework, we devise the coherence and exclusiveness constraints to characterize the interdependence and restrict collective alignment. Additionally, to generate more precise inputs to the RL framework, we employ representative features to capture different aspects of the similarity between entities in heterogeneous KGs, which are integrated by an adaptive feature fusion strategy. Our proposal is evaluated on both cross-lingual and mono-lingual EA benchmarks and compared against state-of-the-art solutions. The empirical results verify its effectiveness and superiority.

Private International Law, Global Value Chains and the externalities of transnational production: towards alignment?

ABSTRACT Global value chains (‘GVCs’) have become a basic operative unit of economic production. Their development over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has resulted in immense creation of wealth while linking together individuals, companies and economies across the world. But GVCs are also a major cause for environmental degradation, carbon emissions and human rights abuses—the ‘externalities’ of global production that are not captured by existing regulatory frameworks. This paper examines the role of private international law (‘PIL’) in mapping GVCs into specific jurisdictions. The analysis suggests that PIL, focused on individual entities, does not allow a systematic legal approach to GVCs, which are collective entities. This lack of a systematic approach exacerbates the externalities of global production. However, the budding legal operationalisation of GVCs provides a functional-analytical lens to understand, systematise, critique and develop the role of PIL as a fundamental transnational constituent in ordering global production in relation to GVCs and beyond.

What it Might Be like to Be a Group Agent

Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophical Studies 172: 1697–1721, 2015) argues that yes, collective entities (including the United States, taken as a whole), may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer (Philosophia 43: 1047–1057, 2015), Tononi and Koch (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370: 20140167–20140167, 2015) , and List (Nous 52: 295–319, 2018) reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 403–416, 2009). I argue here that List’s rejection is too quick, and that groups can, at least in principle, display the kind of informational integration we might think is necessary for consciousness. However, group consciousness will likely differ substantially from the individual experiences that give rise to it. This requires the defender of group consciousness to face up to a similar combination problem as the panpsychist.

Conceptual Distinction and Overlaps Between Law Enforcement and the Conduct of Hostilities

Forces involved in contemporary military operations are often called upon to assume functions both of law enforcement and of hostilities, each of which are governed by different legal standards. It is therefore important to distinguish between these two concepts, identify potential overlaps between them, and determine how the respective legal paradigms governing each type of operation interrelate. The generic concept of law enforcement can be defined for the purposes of operational law as comprising all territorial and extraterritorial measures taken by a State or other collective entity to maintain or restore public security, law and order or to otherwise exercise its authority or power over individuals, objects, or territory. The rules and principles of international law governing the conduct of law enforcement activities form the legal paradigm of law enforcement.

PREPARATION OF FUTURE TEACHERS FOR USING MEDIA SPACE IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS OF PRESCHOOL EDUCATION INSTITUTION

The study identifies the relevance of effective professional training of future teachers in the field of preschool education, in particular, the preparation for using media space in the educational process of preschool education institution. The content of one of the main concepts of the study — “media space”, which is defined by us as the space of a set of individual, collective entities, social institutions in the production, existence, circulation of audiovisual (electronic) information, is clarified. Modern media space includes television (terrestrial, cable, satellite, etc.), radio, printed media, movies and videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs, e-mail, computer channels and the Internet. The content of the basic concept of the study “readiness of teachers for using the media space in the educational process of preschool education institution”, which we consider as a holistic integrative, rather embedded in content personality quality, which is a set of values, motives, knowledge, skills, personal professional qualities that determine the effectiveness of the use of media space in the educational process of preschool education institution. The peculiarities of the organization of media space in the conditions of preschool education institution are outlined. On the basis of the analysis of curricula and work programs of educational disciplines of a number of Ukrainian universities, the state of formation of researched readiness of future teachers in the field of preschool education in the conditions of university pedagogical training is investigated. Based on the analysis of the educational activities of teachers of preschool education, the features of their readiness regarding the use of media space in the educational process of preschool education have been studied. The need for further improvement of the educational process to form the readiness of future teachers to use the media space in the educational process of preschool education institution and optimize their independent activities in order to effectively develop the studied professional quality.

Group Belief

Beliefs are commonly attributed to groups or collective entities. But what is the nature of group belief? Summativism and nonsummativism are two main rival views regarding the nature of group belief. On the one hand, summativism holds that, necessarily, a group g has a belief B only if at least one individual i is both a member of g and has B. On the other hand, non-summativism holds that it is possible for a group g to have a belief B even if no member of g has B. My aim in this paper is to consider whether divergence arguments for non-summativism and against summativism about group belief are sound. Such divergence arguments aim to show that there can be a divergence between belief at the group level and the corresponding belief at the individual level. I will argue that these divergence arguments do not decisively defeat a minimal version of summativism. In order to accomplish this goal, I have the following plan: In section 2, I will analyze the structure of two important counterexamples against the summativist view, which are based on divergence arguments. Such counterexamples are based on the idea that a group decides to adopt a particular group belief, even if none of its members holds the belief in question. However, in section 3, I will show that these counterexamples fail, because they can be explained without the need to posit group beliefs. More specifically, I argue that in these apparent counterexamples, we have only a ‘group acceptance’ phenomenon and not a ‘group belief’ phenomenon. For this conclusion, I advance two arguments: in subsection 3.1, I formulate an argument from doxastic involuntarism, and in subsection 3.2, I develop an argument from truth connection. Thus, summativism is not defeated by divergence arguments. Lastly, in section 4, I will conclude with some advantages of summativism.

Cultural and Aesthetic Needs as Components of the Communicative Activity

The article considers the types of needs of the individual in the field of culture and art as a communicative component of modern society, namely, the cultural and aesthetic needs, which are based on the dissemination of social information. Social information in society is the most important condition for maintaining the activities of individual and collective entities at the level of modern requirements, goals and objectives of the individual. In the modern world, the interaction of cultures is the basis of social development and is of paramount importance, occupying a leading place in the value orientations of people. The information space creates a favorable field for the formation of personality, but also becomes an area of actual reality in which targeted influence and management of human interests, needs, beliefs and views are conducted. The basic needs of people in the field of culture and art can be considered as a way classification of their communicative activity. Developed cultural and aesthetic information needs absorb many of the highest human needs: in building a universal picture of the world and knowing those sides and phenomena that most interest a person in self-knowledge, self-education; in discussing the crucial issues of human being; in communication and self-expression in the development of their human forces and abilities.

Beijing Convention and Beijing Protocol. Changes in the International and Legal Model for Combatting Aviation Terrorism

The article deals with the issue of the Beijing reform of international criminal aviation law. The author analyses the relevant applicable international law and confronts it with the new legal regulations adopted at the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) conference in Beijing in 2010. As a result, the author states that the basic change involves the expansion of the catalogue of acts subject to criminalisation as well as the expansion of the circle of persons participating in or supporting actions involving the commission of acts that pose a threat to the safety of civil aviation; the system also specifies the responsibility of collective entities (the so-called ‘Al Qaeda’ clause). The author is deeply convinced that the development of the Tokyo-Hague-Montreal-Beijing system, which is part of the whole international legal system of combatting terrorism, including its financing, is fully justified. The new regulations also make this system more coherent. It is also worth adding that the adoption of the Beijing Convention and the Beijing Protocol is part of the implementation of the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy adopted by the United Nations.

Early childhood development—a determinant of health and quality of life in the modern society. study design and influencing factors

The research focus of thе study is on the importance of early childhood development (ECD) as a determinant of health and the quality of life in the modern society. The study design reflects the authors' expertise regarding the research stages that in their logical sequence will result in the development of a standardized instrument with practical application. The factors influencing the study’s design and duration are investigated and presented. The ultimate scientific goal is to create a united preventive environment for early childhood development by achieving integration and coordination of individuals and collective entities (parents–children–specialists) in the community.

Incorporation and the Morality of Profit in the Business of Cultural Activism

Typical scholarly analyses of ethnic incorporation draw on cases where older, preexisting political entities and their forms of citizenship become the basis for new entrepreneurial corporate identities structured around a set of legal profit-making practices. But what about the cases of ethnic incorporation where ethnicity articulates with legal incorporation without any such prior collective political entity to graft onto? This article draws on ethnographic research with indigenous Mapuche cultural activists to describe and analyze the place of private for-profit and not-for-profit associations in the State-sponsored market for indigenous cultural development work in Chile. Examining the dilemmas that Mapuche activists in Chile face as they pursue legal incorporation in order to access public funds and provide a firmer economic footing to their organizations, it explores the ways that activists negotiate the moral controversies surrounding the place of money, and private-law organizations, in the pursuit of Mapuche collective interests.

Corporate Criminality and Individual Criminal Responsibility in International Law: Removing the Hurdles from the International Criminal Court’s Approach to Perpetration through Control of a Collective Entity

Abstract This article discusses the International Criminal Court’s (icc) understanding of the notion of collective criminality and its application in identifying the perpetrators of international crimes committed through the activities of a corporation. It analyses the Court’s current approach to the notion of control in interpreting Art. 25(3)(a) of the icc Statute and explains why it cannot prove useful against individuals within non-state collective entities. In this direction, it suggests a more flexible theory of control and it applies it in the context of corporate criminality to identify the responsibility of company directors as perpetrators of international crimes through their corporation’s activities.

Cut-off Values and Clinical Utility of Surrogate Markers for Insulin Resistance and Beta-Cell Function to Identify Metabolic Syndrome and Its Components among Southern Indian Adults.

BackgroundInsulin resistance (IR) is a collective clinical entity that exacerbates metabolic syndrome (MetS). As the gold-standard test to quantify IR involves intravenous insulin loading and repeated blood glucose monitoring, many indices have been developed for IR assessment for convenience. This study tested the ideal cut-off values and clinical utility of IR indices in identifying MetS.MethodsWe recruited 150 subjects, 75 MetS patients and 75 healthy controls, then obtained written informed consent to participate in this study. We collected fasting blood samples for glucose and lipid profiles and calculated nineteen indices of IR and insulin secretion using validated formulae. We determined the precision of these IR indices using the area under the curve (AUC) in a receiver operating characteristic analysis.ResultsSubjects with MetS have significantly higher IR coupled with lower insulin sensitivity and beta-cell function than controls. Among the surrogate markers of IR tested, the homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), HOMA-adiponectin (HOMA-AD), triglyceride-glucose (TyG) index, HOMA-1%S (insulin sensitivity), quantitative insulin sensitivity check index (QUICKI), McAuley index, single-point insulin sensitivity estimator (SPISE), and HOMA-2%B (beta-cell function) showed the highest AUC values for detecting MetS.ConclusionOur study results suggest that the ideal cut-off and AUC values identified for HOMA-IR, HOMA-AD, the TyG index, HOMA-1%S, QUICKI, the McAuley index, SPISE, and HOMA-2%B offer a clinical approach to the early detection and risk stratification for MetS among people in southern India.

LoG: a locally-global model for entity disambiguation

Entity disambiguation (ED) aims to link textual mentions in a document to the correct named entities in a knowledge base (KB). Although global ED models usually outperform local models by collectively linking mentions based on the topical coherence assumption, they may still incur incorrect entity assignment when a document contains multiple topics. Therefore, we propose a Locally-Global model (LoG) for ED which extracts global features locally, i.e., among a limited number of neighboring mentions, to combine the respective superiority of both models. In particular, we derive mention neighbors according to the syntactic distance on a dependency parse tree, and propose a tree connection method CoSimTC to measure the cross-tree distance between mentions. We also recognize the importance of keywords in a document for collective entity disambiguation, which reveal the central topic information of the document. Hence, we propose a keyword extraction method Sent2Word to detect keywords of each document. Furthermore, we extend the Graph Attention Network (GAT) to integrate both local and global features to produce a discriminative representation for each candidate entity. Our experimental results on six widely-adopted public datasets demonstrate better performance compared with state-of-the-art ED approaches. The high efficiency of the LoG model further verifies its feasibility in practice.

The Glass Funnel: A Tool to Analyse the Gender Regime of Healthcare Education and Work

ABSTRACT The concepts glass escalator and glass ceiling have been widely used in studies of gender and organisations. In this paper we propose a novel metaphor to describe and analyse gender segregation and discrimination, that of a glass funnel. This concept does not relate to men and women as groups in the sense of fixed collective entities, but rather shows how taken-for-granted distinctions between men and women are reiterated and promote men in a way that downgrades women. However, as gender intersects with other power structures, both men and women can be propelled downwards through the funnelling motion made up of a market-oriented devaluation of the healthcare profession. Through an empirical investigation of the community of practice and gender regime of an upper secondary healthcare education programme in Sweden, we develop the glass funnel concept, an analytical tool aiming to open up for intersectional analyses of healthcare education and work.

Client-server application framework based on an object-oriented network model

The relationship between the business layer and the underlying data access layers is considered. The disadvantages of the traditional approach based on the relational database and the data access layer (DAO/ORM) are analyzed. A document-oriented database with built above it an object-oriented network model of data presentation is proposed. The integration with the business layer, automatic assembly of business objects using Java reflection without additional specifications, polymorphic storage and transfer of business entities in collections of the document-oriented database is supported.