Framework Condition Research Articles

Optimal scheduling of zero-carbon park considering variational characteristics of hydrogen energy storage systems

Zero-carbon parks have broad prospects in carbon neutralization. As an energy hub, hydrogen energy storage plays an important role in zero-carbon parks. However, the nonlinear characteristics of hydrogen energy storage systems (HESSs) have a significant impact on the system economy. Therefore, considering the variable working condition characteristics of HESSs, a hybrid operation method is proposed for HESS, to support the efficient and economic operation of zero-carbon parks, by analyzing the operating principle of a zero-carbon park with HESS, the system structure framework and variable condition linearization model of the equipment in HESS are established. Moreover, considering the energy output characteristics of hydrogen energy storage equipment under variable working conditions, a multimodule hybrid operation strategy is proposed for electrolytic and fuel cells, effectively meeting the thermoelectric load demand of zero- carbon parks in different scenarios. Finally, the economy of the proposed hybrid operation strategy was verified in typical scenarios, using a zero-carbon park embedded with a HESS.

Operational Technology resilience in the 2023 draft delegated act on cybersecurity for the power sector—An EU policy process analysis

The EU’s 2020 Cybersecurity Strategy promotes cybersecurity as essential for building a resilient, green, and digital Europe. Cleaner energy sources such as wind and solar are more volatile and thus need digital integration with Industrial Control Systems (ICS) for grid balancing. However, the digitization and the properties of cyberspace provide the ability to coordinate disruptive cyberattacks against power grid infrastructures. Digital weapons may be launched against ICS to start multiple cascading outages with a keystroke, causing large-scale blackouts we have never seen before. To reduce risk, the EU’s Strategy describes three objectives for ICS: Secure-by-design, resilient, and timely patched. In the strategy, the European Commission suggests a ”network code,” i.e. a delegated act for the electric power sector, setting rules for cybersecurity in cross-border electricity flows. The draft delegated act of November 2023 presents security requirements for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Network and Information Systems (NIS). Although ICS systems are used directly to manage electricity flows, ICS is only mentioned in one of the delegated act’s recitals as a subcategory of ICT products. Suppose Information Technology (IT) rather than Operational Technology (OT) is the focus of the delegated act. In that case, policymakers may not fulfill the EU cybersecurity strategy’s ICS objectives, thus failing to improve the resilience of power grid infrastructures and cross-border electricity flows. This study is a policy process analysis, and its contribution is threefold. First, a literature review is conducted to understand the extent to which the delegated act covers OT. Second, a framework condition analysis is applied to understand why the delegated act lacks OT-specific security requirements. Third, the analysis is extended to understand whether OT is sufficiently covered to achieve the EU strategy’s ICS objectives. In conclusion, our analysis shows a strong intention to include OT-specific security in the preparatory work of the delegated act, but that a stronger position of the IT communities forced OT onto the sideline. Further, the study shows weak fulfillment of general secure-by-design principles and security patch management. These results indicate that OT coverage in the delegated act is not in line with the expectations of the EU’s cybersecurity strategy and the delegated act’s early preparatory work. Therefore, we have suggested three measures to increase OT resilience focus in the act: (a) Define the expressions NIS, ICT services, ICT processes, and ICT in general as umbrella terms that include OT, (b) The foreseen minimum and advanced cybersecurity controls should require OT-specific measures, including holistic secure-by-design principles and patch management covering all patching phases, (c) Develop an OT implementation guide for the delegated act. Our work can be used by policymakers to optimize cybersecurity policy processes and by researchers studying socio-technical gaps in the cybersecurity domain.

Traffic safety implementation at local level in line with 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: synergies, challenges and enablers

This study explores how traffic safety implementation at local level in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is characterised. By investigating interactions between traffic safety and other sustainability goals (synergies), as well as identifying contradictions between goals and conflicting interests (challenges), the study aims to pinpoint the main enablers for implementing traffic safety as part of sustainability. The emphasis lies on local authorities in Sweden representing a mature traffic safety context when viewed globally. To delve into this issue, interviews were conducted with 37 municipal employees from the city of Gothenburg, encompassing diverse roles that exemplify the significant influence Swedish local authorities wield in shaping traffic safety: as road manager and planner, in maintenance and construction phases, as employer and purchaser, and as influencer of behaviour. The study reveals several synergies between traffic safety and other sustainability goals, as well as contradictions between goals and conflicting interests posing challenges to traffic safety implementation. Main enablers for implementation of traffic safety as part of sustainability at the local level concern, for example, an integrated approach on strategic level where traffic safety could be handled as either a prerequisite (e.g. for active mobility) or a framework condition (e.g. for green cars). The necessity to bridge gaps between strategic and operational levels is also emphasised. Contradicting goals and interests are inevitable and must be managed. The study identifies the traffic strategy and strategic analyses, in the European context referred to as Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning, as a platform for traffic safety implementation as part of sustainability. Such platform highlights implementation areas in common for different target areas. The significance of integrating traffic safety in relevant activities and processes, alongside fostering horizontal collaborations across target areas, becomes apparent when striving to embed traffic safety in a wider sustainability context. While Swedish municipalities may not always recognize traffic safety as part of the sustainability agenda, existing platforms within municipalities serve as a foundation for adopting an integrated approach to traffic safety implementation. However, there is a need for a central coordinating function to ensure robust leadership in integrating traffic safety as a vital component of sustainability.

Opportunities and risks of advance directives : An appraisal of the practice in Germany after legal regulation in 2009

Living wills/advance directives (AD) are an important tool for specifying patient wishes regarding medical care in the case of future inability to consent. Since 2009, German legislation defines framework conditions for the creation and validity of such directives in §1901a BGB. An extensive literature search in an international and aGerman-language database was conducted to identify, analyze, and evaluate scientific articles on opportunities, risks, and problems in the creation and implementation of living wills. Between 10 and 40% of patients have an AD. Among the stipulations in the AD, the demand for sufficient pain therapy is very important. However, numerous problems in the preparation and implementation of ADs reduce their value in everyday clinical practice. In particular, unclear conditions of validity, unspecific instructions for action, and lack of availability of the directives prevent practitioners from determining the patient's will. Other fundamental problems include frequent patient ambivalence and clinical ethical dissent. In addition, the framework condition of unlimited coverage set by the law carries the risk that changes of opinion in the course of life or disease are not taken into account. Preparing an AD requires ahigh level of information, consultation, and time, as well as regular review or adjustment of its content. These factors are often not considered, thus complicating implementation and reducing the value of living wills. Possible solutions to these problems or alternative concepts for different patient settings are discussed in this review.

A new perspective for European SMEs’ innovative support analysis: Does non-financial support matter?

Most of the previous research focused on the effects of public support for SMEs' innovative activities dealt with the effects of financial incentives, while non-financial support was considered a kind of “black box”. This research therefore aims to fill this gap by exploring the role non-financial support systems play in triggering SMEs' collaborations and innovativeness in Europe. We show that non-financial support (framework condition) significantly facilitates collaboration and innovation of European SMEs, by using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and 216 sampled datasets of the 27 EU countries from 2012 to 2020 European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). Our expectation was confirmed about the SMEs' collaboration significant effects on their innovative activities, which subsequently translate into innovative outputs. We also found indirect significant effect of the non-financial support on SME's innovation output. This study serves several practical implications and contributes to the ongoing debate on the effects of non-financial support for cooperation and innovation activities of European SMEs.

Construct Maritime Safety Culture to Reduce Risk Occurrence Through Implement of Balanced Scorecard

_ This study aims to assess navigation safety by enhancing maritime management based on balanced scorecard (BSC). Although the International Safety Management Regulations and the Ship Safety Management System have safety related definitions and provide standard safety regulations, but lack effective management processes. This study used path analysis and regression analysis to analyze the safety outcomes relationship among organization safety culture, work condition, and framework condition sectors. In this study, 173 valid sample questionnaires were collected to answer the influence of organizational culture, working environment, service process, and framework conditions on ship navigation safety. The suggestions mentioned expect to establish a maritime management-based BSC that could pave the way for the application of maritime safety around the organization culture. Introduction Safety management is an important part of organization management process. The purpose of safety management is to prevent accidents, so organizations need to develop, plan, implement, and track risks related to personal, environmental, or property safety in order to minimize risks. The rapid development of China’s economy has promoted the increase of economic, trade, and ship navigation between Taiwan and Chinese mainland, and the number of ships in Taiwan and other countries has also increased. Maritime transportation plays a significant role in the integrated transportation system, especially in international trade system. Safety is a crucial factor due to the fact that various accidents like ship collisions and groundings often result in great economic loss, fatalities, and the environmental contamination. This information shows that Taiwan plays a key maritime role in Asia and the world. Previously, several frameworks for assessing the effects of organizational aspects on risk or safety have been published within different domains (Embrey 1992; Pate-Cornell & Murphy 1996; Oien 2001; Roelen et al. 2003; Mohaghegh et al. 2009) and in the maritime transportation field (Trucco et al. 2008). However, these have not addressed the navigation safety process management through systematic concepts and empirical study, they only emphasized the reducing risk on the maritime safety.

The national idea and ideology of personalism as a humanitarian aura of Ukrainianity

The study analyzed the role and significance of the Ukrainian national idea (UNI) and national ideology for the establishment of independence, in particular, for the spiritual victory of Ukrainians in the Russian-Ukrainian war. UNI is considered not only as a response to socio-political and economic problems of the Ukrainian nation’s development, but also as a multi-aspect – existential, metaphysical, global – challenge. In order to resolve this complex of problems, a fundamental rethinking of views on human and society and the mechanisms of their interaction was carried out. The essence of the author’s theory of stages of the person’s spiritual development has been formulated as a metaphysical theory of personality, that has a historic-philosophical tradition originating from ancient Chinese and ancient philosophy. A person in the process of his socio-political and spiritual development is able to go through the following stages of spiritual formation: dependent, mediocre person, personality and genius, although he can stop at lower stages of development. On this basis, it is proved that there can be only two paradigms of human existence: either impersonal or personal, and their fundamental features are formulated. The concepts of equality and spiritual hierarchy have been carried out. Skovoroda’s idea of unequal equality is interpreted as a combination of equality and hierarchy: civil-political, legal equality and spiritual hierarchy. It was offered to prioritize the spiritual and metaphysical theory of personality as the basis of UNI, in which the last one is the substance, that is, the primary carrier of social existence. UNI appears as a response to the dominance of the mediocre person and the depersonalized paradigm of his existence, as a unity of primary principles and primary sources (personalities), who are their creators and actors. Such understanding of the Ukrainian idea provides grounds for a holistic solution to the socio-political, existential, pedagogical, historical, and metaphysical problems of the nation and has the prospect of spiritual improvement of the covital society. On the basis of metaphysical theory of personality and UNI, the main provisions of the national ideology were formulated, the purpose of which is to form a critical mass of ethnically conscious personalities. It is argued that a military victory requires the establishment in the public consciousness of the fundamental provisions of the UNI and the ideology of personalism. It is offered to put the guiding principles of the UNI and the ideology of personalism as a framework condition of the social contract, that will contribute to overcoming impersonal tendencies in Ukrainian society.

The Logical Sustainability Theory for pension systems: the discrete-time model in a stochastic framework under variable mortality

Abstract The aim of this work is to provide the logical sustainability model for defined contribution pension systems (see [1], [2]) in the discrete framework under stochastic financial rate of the pension system fund and stochastic productivity of the active participants. In addition, the model is developed in the assumption of variable mortality tables. Under these assumptions, the evolution equations of the fundamental state variables, the pension liability and the fund, are provided. In this very general discrete framework, the necessary and sufficient condition of the pension system sustainability, and all the other basic results of the logical sustainability theory, are proved. In addition, in this work new results on the efficiency of the rule for the stabilization over time of the level of the unfunded pension liability with respect to wages, level that is defined as β indicator, are also proved.

The role of culture in policy transfer. A pilot study for transferring European models of peer review in vocational schools to China

To achieve a successful policy transfer from one country to another, knowledge is required about the framework conditions of the country to which the policy is transferred. An important framework condition to consider is cultural context. Therefore, this paper uses a combination of cultural definitions which consider culture as a driver for both the interpretation of its members and for the communicative and interactive behaviour within a community. This contribution presents a cultural concept to inform policy transfer from a European context to China. Chinese philosophical approaches such as Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, as well as the political history of China, are used to identify individual perspectives within a community that depends, among others. A pilot study for testing the peer review process in vocational education and training will also help build a better understanding of how adjustments, transfer errors and side effects can be culturally explained.

Expert judgement-based risk factor identification and analysis for an effective nuclear decommissioning risk assessment modeling

There is a growing number of decommissioned nuclear facilities, and the trend of planned nuclear-decommissioning projects does not show any decline. To ensure safe and economical nuclear decommissioning, a robust risk assessment model capable of evaluating all the risk factors associated with a nuclear decommissioning project is critical. This study identifies and evaluates novel nuclear decommissioning project risk factors. A comprehensive literature search is done to identify all the relevant risk factors. Then, an expert judgement approach is used in evaluating the identified risk factors and developing novel risk factors. The expert judgement technique is implemented using a web-based questionnaire containing all 81 identified risk factors from the literature search as a prompt. The respondents are sixty recognized nuclear-decommissioning experts. Forty-eight responses were received, while 9 responses were discarded based on predefined criteria. Resulting from the unique experience of the experts in managing nuclear-decommissioning projects, twenty-four additional novel risk factors are proposed. Moreover, a scoring metric is used to evaluate the proposed novel risk factors. The result shows that the facility pre-decommissioning radiological characteristics are a major risk factor with a median score of 5, while 50 other risk factors (61.7%) have a median score of 4, and 30 risk factors (37%) has a median score of 3 or 3.5. Calculating the risk factors with the percentage scores between 4 and 5 in each risk family, it is observed that legal and regulatory framework (85.7%), stakeholders (83.3%), and initial condition of the facility (77.8%) are the highest-ranking risk family. The result serves as a pilot study that presents critical information towards the design and implementation of robust risk assessment models for nuclear decommissioning.

Accelerated Development of High-Strength Magnesium Alloys by Machine Learning

Magnesium (Mg) has a strong application potential as a lightweight metal. Yet, its absolute strength still needs improvement. In this work, we demonstrate that machine learning can be utilized to guide the development of high-strength Mg cast alloys. In the design framework, the composition and heat treatment condition are iteratively optimized by a surrogate model that is also evolving. After two iterations, a new alloy with the composition of Mg-10.0Al-2.0Sn-2.0Zn-0.1Ca-0.1Mn (at. pct) was identified. After aging at 200 °C for 96 hours, this alloy shows a Vickers hardness value of 110.5 Hv, which surpasses the highest value (102.5 Hv) in the initial dataset from literature. Finally, microstructure of the optimized alloy was characterized to understand the origin of its high hardness. This work demonstrates the potential of data-driven approaches for material development.

ROAD FREIGHT TRANSPORT PLANNING UNDER SUSTAINABLE CITY DEVELOPMENT

This research paper devoted to the urban freight transport planning under sustainable city development. Continued urban population growth, traffic congestions, financial losses because of longer delivery times, harm-ful impact on environmental are highlighted as strong arguments for the freight traffic management in the cities. The article aims to help all stakeholders understand the challenges brought about by freight activities in an urban context, and make the planning process consistent and comprehensive for the city freight transportation system improvement. The brief overview of some recent foreign and native studies in urban transport planning and traffic engi-neering reveals main field of interests for modern researchers. The clear focus of the analysed scientific works di-rected on such aspects in sustainable urban freight transport development as energy and economic efficiency, eco-friendliness, safety, institutional and legal issues of freight transportations. Special attention is paid to the analy-sis of government initiatives in sustainable transport system development of Ukraine. Identification of the main freight transportation features in an urban area is carried out on the initial re-search stage. Each feature has an explanation for better understanding necessity of their usage in the freight transport planning process. The other focus of the research devotes to the description of the stages during urban freight transport planning process. Author attends a deep freight transport demand and supply analysis for a de-termination of the basic freight distribution regularities in an urban context. Therefore, a list of indicators for subsystem of city freight transportation evaluation is presented in the article. The whole set of indicators is divid-ed into economical, operational, environmental, social and general groups of indicators. Moreover, the compo-nents of successful measures implementation for an urban freight transport subsystem improvement are highlight-ed. Financial management, political support, institution, organisation and legal framework condition are consid-ered as the key elements of successful plans and measures implementation. Keywords: planning, sustainable development, freight transport, urban population, authorities.

Comprehensive impact analysis of electric vehicle charging scheduling on load-duration curve

Within the next decade, the number of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) will increase exponentially owing to the environmental benefits related to their utilization. In an ideal framework condition, the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system provides advantages such as subordinate administration of load leveling and peak shaving guidelines, and minimized upgrade costs. In this paper, deterministic and probabilistic methods of scheduling PHEV charging/discharging are analyzed, and their performances are compared based on a case study. In the case of the deterministic method, an optimization model is proposed to reduce the overall grid output power consumption for utilities and operate a smart charging/discharging schedule for PHEV users. Quadratic programming (QP) is used to solve the optimization cost function. In contrast, the probabilistic method uses Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) to analyze the impact and determine a coordinated time-of-use (TOU) structure for the PHEV charging/discharging schedule. Both methods suggest V2G feasibility for the smart grid system.

Ruination Science: Producing Knowledge from a Toxic World

The multiple environmental crises our planet is experiencing forces us to change the ways we engage with it, especially the ones developed by scientific disciplines such as toxicology. In particular, widespread degradation should lead us to develop scientific practices that take environmental ruination as a framework condition, not only as an object of analysis. In doing so, we should take into account the practice of science at laboratories located in the peripheries of global science, institutions that have coexisted with extensive environmental and material decay from their very onset. Contributing to this task, this paper analyzes the case of Centro Nacional del Medio Ambiente (CENMA), an environmental chemistry laboratory located in Santiago, Chile. Established in mid-1990s, decades of continual budget cuts left it in a state of almost terminal ruin. In its struggle to remain relevant, CENMA developed an alternative kind of scientific practice, ruination science. Although always precarious, ruination science also tends to be well adapted to engage with impurity, resilient but fragile, and ethically entangled, prioritizing attachment and compromises over the application of certain standard recipes or procedures. Beyond its particularities, CENMA’s ruination science provides us with several valuable keys to better deal with worlds facing multiple kinds of anthropogenic degradation.

The Politics of Renewable Energy Production in a Federal Context: The Deployment of Small Hydropower in the Swiss Cantons

This article explores the factors that hinder and promote the deployment of renewable energy generating infrastructure in/across the Swiss cantons (i.e., the country’s federal units). Using the example of small-scale hydropower, we shed light on how political regulations at the cantonal level interact with national policies and the local political process to affect the deployment of renewable energy production. The analysis demonstrates that political regulations can both foster and hinder the deployment of renewable energy production. While the national feed-in tariff scheme is revealed to be a beneficial framework condition, cantonal regulations hamper, rather than facilitate, the deployment of small-scale hydropower. Moreover, inclusive local processes and the existence of local entrepreneurs seem to act as a trigger for the local acceptance of renewable energy generation infrastructure. More generally, we conclude that, quite independently of whether state structures are decentralized or centralized, subnational and local leeway in the definition and organization of projects can help to prevent or deal with local opposition.

ЦИФРОВІ КОМПЕТЕНЦІЇ ЯК УМОВА ФОРМУВАННЯ ЯКОСТІ ЛЮДСЬКОГО КАПІТАЛУ

There have been identified and characterized impact factors for the need of developing digital competencies, in particular dissemination of results of the fourth industrial revolution («Industry 4.0»); active influence of modern drivers of socio-economic development (growing globalization; increasing duration of human life; unprecedented reorganization of work thanks to new technologies and social media, which significantly expand cooperation opportunities, etc.) necessitating the development of labor skills and digital knowledge in future. The essence and prerequisites of developing digital competences, considered as the initial framework condition for developing all other priorities in the field of harmonization of the digital markets of the EU and the Eastern Partnership countries in the context of the development of digital transformation of society as the global trend, were revealed. The primary role of education in shaping digital literacy of the society has been identified.Trends in the development of the ICT, IT industry and digitalization in Ukraine, which indicate positive dynamics of these processes and require further strategic decisions by the state in this direction, have been identified. It is argued that the modernization of public administration system should be a response to the technological challenge and competition intensifying in the framework of the digital economy, and human capital development should include the training of professionals with the competencies required in the digital economy and development of the digital society. The issue of the need to develop digital competencies of public authorities as the main initiator and strategist in the developing and implementing of the national human capital is updated.Targeted proposals have been developed for public authorities in terms of ensuring conditions for the development of the digital economy and society, developing digital competencies and implementation of program actions that will allow to develop a digital culture, elaborate a single digital platform for the interaction of government officials, business and citizens.

Methodological approaches to the essential cognition of tolerance within psychosocial theorizing

The peculiarity of this research, as any consciously carried out one on the goals, principles, methods and procedures of methodological search, is a detailed study of the form organizations and the means of effective cognition of the most complex, in our case psychosocial, objects with their diverse specificity and developmentally open everyday life. Undoubtedly, such extremely complex objects of cognition-design include human tolerance as an ontological psychic and, at the same time, a psychosocial phenomenon. In this case, the research optics of the post-nonclassical style of rational theorizing is aimed at methodological approaches to the essential cognition of tolerance in the format of their social and psychological causes, where the main tools of professional methodologization are appropriate analysis, reflection, understanding and the procedure of semantic specification of tolerant enrichment of person’s everyday life flow in the context of his continuous interaction with others. As a result of such intellectual work within psychosocial direction of finding out the phenomenological picture of tolerance, the theoretical substantiation and logic-content filling were given five methodological approaches – sociogenetic, conflict, xenological, information-communicative and personal. Each of them is a specific interpretive invariant of the epistemologically-weighted decoding of the meaning-semantic tissue of tolerance as a stage-by-stage deployed psychosociality, is being self-organized as an important vita-cultural form of conscious presence of joint life in a globalized society and, at the same time, in active dimension of social everyday life, is being approved as socio-cultural norm, also is being characterized by tolerant attitude to other, another or alternative and, as a consequence, optimize the results of collaboration and human communication. And therefore in the realities of today, appears as a framework condition for availability of solidarity processes, established and new forms of productive communicative interaction. In a personal dimension, it ontogenetically emerges as an integral trait-quality of the individual world of personality, which determines his active position in relationships with people regardless of their cultural, social and national identity and is expressed in a humane desire to reach mutual understanding, agreement of different motives, installations, orientations, without resorting to violence, oppression of human dignity and instead using the available humanitarian capabilities – dialogue, clarification, collaboration and mutual assistance.

Functional-psychological essence of consciousness as a framework condition of cognition, methodologization, faith, thinking, activity

The article substantiates that the methodology of consciousness today constitutes a high problem zone of cognitive creativity, which is caused by an irrefutable fact: the phenomenal essence of consciousness is in the noumenally-intelligible dimension, which can not be recognized by rational means of science, or even be proved the very fact of existence or not existence of this transcendental dimension. Therefore, it is logical that the cognition of given essence is now transferred to the format of faith competence. At the same time, the approach to consciousness as a “framework condition of cognition and methodologization” (A.V. Furman), which determines the qualitative parameters of all intelligence functions and activities of the subject, requires substantiation of the core functional-psychological content of the information-experienced foundations of this causation process as a basis component “of the indirectly establishing method of conditions for a conscious ability functioning” (M.K. Mamardashvili, O.M. Pyatigorsky). From these psychological positions, biovital (“earthly”) segment of a consciousness essence must be regarded as a conscious ability, which is provided by “correlative ratio between noesis and noema planes” (A. Gurwitsch) – and objective, ontological-existential meanings, and their significance for the subject. And this means that the consciousness also operates with objective contents – knowledge, – and subjective meanings – attitudes. It is advocated the thesis that for the study of consciousness as a method of indirectly establishing conditions for the functioning of conscious ability, it is necessary to identify the fundamental psychological content of this intentional ability, which is formed and functions thanks to experience. Through a systematic combination of functional-psychological characteristics of the consciousness main components (correlation between its noesis and noema planes) – conceptual knowledge, goal-setting, self-consciousness, attitudes, derived a definitive characteristic of its functional psychological content: a person knows that he knows about the content, that he knows, in particular, about himself as a subject, and his attitude to this knowledge. This characteristic is a laconic description of the key content of conscious ability, and hence the “framework conditions of cognition and methodologization” in the process of a deed as a way of human existence, that is, as a regulatory conditions “of consciousness’ life, without which or beyond which for a person is impossible neither thinking, nor activity, nor reflexive cognition, nor competent methodologization” (A.V. Furman). So, we seek to explain, “how exactly does consciousness arise” (D. Chalmers), the ability of awareness. It is proved that in the basis of processes that ensure the formation and functioning of the ability to aware, there is the operation of conceptual knowledge, where the basis among these processes is conceptual thinking. So an explanation of how this thinking is formed in ontogenesis and phylogeny reveals a channel of how consciousness arises. However, it does not arise from any other noumenon or phenomenon, but according to the genetic programmedness of the human central nervous system and the proper socio-psychological conditions – communicative activity, communication. Conceptual thinking is a speech phenomenon, because it operates with the experience which is accumulated in conceptual knowledge, the underlying system of which is a language. At the same time, this knowledge, in turn, is a fundamental component of consciousness. It is concluded that consciousness is formed, evolves and functions in harmony with conceptual thinking and speech in the process of activity. The most significant psychological operations and factors of this process in ontogenesis include surface image associations, syncretic images, pseudo-concept, egocentric, internal and written speech, etc. (according to L.S. Vygotsky), in phylogeny – participation, verbal symbolism (according to O.O. Potebnya), an ideographic and hieroglyphic writings, etc.

An Inverse Volatility Problem of Financial Products Linked with Gold Price

This paper investigates an inverse problem of identifying the implied volatility in the financial products linked with gold price, which has important application infinancial derivatives pricing. Based on the optimal control framework, the existence and necessary condition of the minimizer for the control function are obtained. Since the optimal control problem is non-convex, one may not expect a unique solution in general. However, the local uniqueness of the solution is proved in this paper. In the end of the paper, an algorithm is proposed and some numerical experiments are given. Numerical results show that our algorithm is stable and effective. The results obtained in the paper are interesting and useful and can be extended to other inverse problems arising in financial market.

Pour une épistémologie « par le bas ». Quelques remarques sur l’article de P.-H. Castel, « Psychanalyse et épistémologie : comment s’extraire de l’impasse ? »

Taking note of the text to be debated, our commentary proposes to restore the different argumentative high points, then to discuss the contributions and the limits. The interest of this article seems to us to lie in the overview it offers on questions relating to psychoanalytic epistemology, in its concern for openness to other disciplines and in its research proposal announced as innovative: that of a resituation of psychoanalysis in the more general field of socio-anthropology. The points that have to be discussed are: the author's mobilization of contradictory enunciative dimensions; sometimes irreconcilable epistemic references; the underestimation of the clinical (medical and psychological) legacy of psychoanalysis; and consequently the strong contestability (from a practitioner point of view) of the hypothesis of a psychoanalysis that finds its intelligibility as a “reflexive ritual for modern individuals in need of autonomy”. Contrary to the choice of a “top-down” epistemology defended by this text (“standard” epistemology and anthropological perspective of the rituals used to resituate a priori clinical practices), we propose, as a framework condition for any rise in generality, the prior exercise of a reflexivity from practices, clinical, “from below”.