The issue of differentiation and specialization within the Byzantine notariat, particularly its integration into the service market, remains an understudied area. This article examines categories of private legal acts, focusing on the most common among them - sale contracts - as well as the clerks responsible for their drafting, the locations where documents were formalized, and the organization of notarial offices. Notaries operating in the market sphere were referred to by various titles (with slight differences in specialization): notarius, semiographos, nomikos, ypographeus, tachygraphos, taboullarios, symbolographos, tabellion, grammateis, and kankellarios. Narrative and legislative sources allow for the identification of their classification requirements, including property and age qualifications, legal status (free or semi-free), functions, document-drafting procedures, and the intensity of their work. Using quantitative methods, it has been calculated that to achieve a monthly income of approximately 30 gold nomismata, a notary would need to draft at least 60 written acts with a minimum fee of 12 keratia per act or around 10–15 documents with fees of 2–3 nomismata each. The intensity of notarial work appears consistent with the level of economic activity in early medieval Byzantium and its economy. On average, during the 20 working days per month (excluding Sundays and holidays), a single notarial office handled no more than two to three agreements or contracts daily. Even in populous Constantinople by the late 9th century, 24 notarial offices sufficed to meet demand, collectively serving 50–70 significant clients daily during workdays. Most Byzantines engaged with notarial services relatively infrequently, primarily for transactions exceeding the value of one litra of gold. Nevertheless, the annual total amounts to an impressive figure: approximately 15,000–20,000 notarized documents produced by Constantinopolitan offices alone, excluding provincial notarial activity.

The international movement of people, services, goods and capital has contributed to demand for cross-border cooperation among lawyers. The lack of harmonised rules for the practice of these professions at the supranational level prompts a search for differences and similarities in the rules for different countries. Advocates and legal advisors are professions of public trust, the practice of which involves an obligation to respect certain ethical and deontological rules of the profession. The lack of universally binding rules at the EU level means that each Member State decides independently what rules guarantee this profession is practiced correctly and in the public interest. The purpose of this article is to analyse and compare the Polish and German provisions on exercising the profession of advocate/legal advisor in terms of fulfilling the obligation of professional training and continuous improvement of qualifications. The authors conclude that despite some systemic differences, the rules for practising the profession in both countries provide a guarantee of legal services being rendered in accordance with the highest standards of knowledge and ethics. A special element distinguishing the German and Polish legal profession is the existence of a category of ‘Fachanwlat’, i.e. lawyer-specialists in a particular field. In Poland, there are no separate categories of lawyer-specialists, although within the framework of non-normative practice, attorneys independently choose their areas of specialization. However, this is not done in a formalised manner, as it is in Germany. German attorneys who have successfully completed a specialized theoretical course and have a certain number of hours worked in a particular specialization can obtain the title of Fachanwalt. In Poland, the issue of specialization within the advocacy/advocacy profession has not yet been legally regulated.

As noted in the foreword of this Special Issue, COVID-19 has accelerated the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s or Industry 4.0’s disruption to the labour market (Sally, 2021). Beyond Industry 4.0 (I4.0), the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by enterprises, underscoring the need for workers to continuously upskill their digital competencies in order to remain relevant (Heinonen & Strandvik, 2021). Besides digitisation, organisations have had to innovate and adopt new business models to adapt to the ‘new normal’ of surviving and growing beyond the COVID-19 pandemic (Heinonen & Strandvik, 2021). In countries that largely relied on skilled migration as an important source of talent, the closure of international borders has restricted mobility of human capital resulting in insufficient skilled employees to meet the current and ever-increasing demand for skills (Guadagno, 2020).

This article presents the results of studies of Mesozoic lamprophyre dikes in the basins of the Shavaz, Beshtor, Kichik rivers of the Chatkal-kuramin region. A geological characteristic is given, new types of dikes are identified and described, the patterns of their spatial distribution are studied and the sequence of formation is determined. Material composition study results of the dike rocks include: analysis of the distribution of rock-forming petrogenic elements of minerals for the most representative varieties; composition of the main and accessory mineral phases based on microprobe analysis; Distribution of admixture elements in rocks based on ICP-MS data. The authors’ views on the geodynamic nature of lamprophyric magmatism are considered, the conditions for the generation of the parental magmas of dikes and the issues of metallogenic specialization.

Relevance. Ensuring the economic security of the Russian Federation as a strategic goal of state policy to achieve national priorities creates conditions for high rates of economic growth and improving the quality of life of the population. In this aspect, it is necessary and appropriate to search for optimal and effective tools, ways and methods that contribute to the socio-economic development of regions, one of which is economic specialization, which allows to maximize the efficiency of using the available potential and competitive advantages.The purpose of the study is to substantiate the effectiveness of industrial-agricultural specialization of the region in order to ensure economic security by conducting a comparative assessment of the dynamics of development of the CFA regions with different types of economic specialization for 2017-2021.Objectives: to consider theoretical aspects of economic specialization of regions, to analyze the structure of gross regional product of the CFD regions, grouping by type of specialization, to assess the dynamics of growth indices of gross regional product, investment in fixed capital, average per capita cash income of the population for 2017-2021.Methodology. Within the framework of the conducted research the authors use general scientific methods: scientific abstraction, analysis and synthesis, generalization of scientific practice, deduction, induction, economic and statistical analysis, comparison, summary, grouping.Results. The conducted research allowed to form and highlight the following scientific results: to substantiate the effectiveness of industrial-agricultural specialization in order to ensure economic security, to formulate the conditions necessary for the transition to industrial-agricultural specialization, to identify the advantages of this type of specialization over others.Conclusions. Regions with industrial-agricultural specialization are characterized by higher growth rates of gross regional product, investment in fixed capital and average per capita income of the population. Also, the regions with industrial-agricultural specialization retain positive dynamics of development in crisis conditions: it is the regions with this specialization that demonstrated positive dynamics in the growth of gross regional product and investment in fixed capital at the end of 2020.

Introduction to Call for Papers on Ethics of War

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue stems from the assumption that the field of public management is the necessary, missing catalyst to make tangible progress towards social equity. We begin by outlining the concept of social equity and highlighting the value of improving the field’s understanding of how we can use the foundations of public management to advance social equity principles, practices, and theories, across all forms of oppression. A brief overview of the papers in the special issue follows and we draw out key themes, which hopefully will inspire public management scholars to engage with social equity research.

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue provides an overview of the state of the art in the study of populism and democracy. It outlines the current debates and identifies several questions that remain unexplored or underexplored. It elaborates on how the different articles in this special issue address these gaps in the literature in order to advance and consolidate our knowledge about the relationship between populism and alternatives to representative democracy. Those articles make a significant contribution to this debate and open important avenues for future research.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Neural Networks Depicted in ODEs with Applications

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Cross-Layer and Collaborative Optimization Techniques in Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Networks

ABSTRACT This case study analyzes the expertise, potential conflicts of interest, and objectivity of editors, authors, and peer reviewers involved in a 2022 special journal issue on fertility, pregnancy, and mental health. Data were collected on qualifications, organizational affiliations, and relationships among six papers’ authors, three guest editors, and twelve peer reviewers. Two articles were found to have undisclosed conflicts of interest between authors, an editor, and multiple peer reviewers affiliated with anti-abortion advocacy and lobbying groups, indicating compromised objectivity. This lack of transparency undermines the peer review process and enables biased research and disinformation proliferation.Our study is limited by a few factors including: difficulty collecting peer reviewer data, potentially missing affiliations, and a small sample without comparisons. While this is a case study of one special issue, we do have suggestions for increasing integrity.

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced as one of the most prominent technological innovations to push the conversation about the digital transformation of the public sector forward. This special issue focuses on actual implementation approaches or challenges that public managers are facing while they fulfil new policy that asks for the implementation of AI in public administrations. In addition to assessing the contributions of papers in this issue, we also provide a research agenda on how future research can fill some of the methodological, theoretical, and application gaps in the public management literature.

This special issue builds on and expands computing’s engagement with Black feminist epistemologies like Intersectionality and Black Feminist Thought, exploring the intersectional experiences of Black girls and women in computing, technology, and computing education and workforce. The set of articles examines, explores, and uncovers structural and systemic barriers in computing, CS education, and technology; the roles of social supports and social capital in ensuring Black women thrive; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches that center Black girls and women instead of making them comparative groups to white or other people of color of all genders; and issues around equity and inclusivity in computing, CS education, and technology more broadly. Taken together, this collection serves as a model for centering one community often marginalized in computing, technology, and computing education: Black girls and women.

This article addresses the synchronization issue for inertial neural networks (INNs) with heterogeneous time-varying delays and unbounded distributed delays, in which the state quantization is considered. First, by fully considering the delay and sampling time point information, a modified looped-functional is proposed for the synchronization error system. Compared with the existing Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional (LKF), the proposed functional contains the sawtooth structure term V8(t) and the time-varying terms ex(t-βħ (t)) and ey(t-βħ (t)) . Then, the obtained constraints may be further relaxed. Based on the functional and integral inequality, less conservative synchronization criteria are derived as the basis of controller design. In addition, the required quantized sampled-data controller is proposed by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, two numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed scheme in this article.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Automotive CPS Safety & Security: Part 2

Foreword to the special issue of Comptes Rendus Mécanique in the memory of Roland Glowinski

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic led to an important reconfiguration of economic governance in the European Union towards deeper economic integration. This fits uneasily with predictions of an inevitable political ‘lock-in’ stemming from a responsibility–responsiveness dilemma, or an inexorably constraining politicisation. Investigating the evolution in discourses on and policies of economic governance in the EU, the papers in this collection approach the relationship between prevailing notions of responsible and responsive government as socially constructed and critically contingent upon politicisation processes. The special issue explores the reconfiguration of economic governance in the EU through multi-level analysis of politicisation, ranging from citizens’ attitudes to conflicts over central banking mandates, using a variety of methodological toolkits. As the collection shows, the shift towards investment, fiscal sharing, and green transition in the new recovery programme followed the emergence of a form of ‘responsive responsibility’ dating back to the aftermath of the euro crisis and which has led to the incorporation of responsiveness imperatives in prevailing notions of ‘responsible government’.

In this editorial we introduce the second of three special issues in the "Science of Life and Well-Being: A New Language for Humanity" series. The articles in this special issue provide insightful and helpful perspectives on the overall path toward a more flourishing future through organizations that prioritize well-being, happiness, and fulfillment.

Russia's warmongering. War is devastating, complicated, and multifaceted. To introduce the special issue, we begin by clarifying what is meant by the War in Ukraine (when it began and why we refer to it as such), as well as the costs of the war, the Ukrainian movement for democracy, and the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Criptech and the Art of Access: Introduction to Special Issue