Theoretical Issues Research Articles

Introduction of the position of the Commissioner for Environmental Human Rights in Ukraine taking into account the increase in negative factors affecting the state of the environment

The article examines theoretical and legal issues related to the need to introduce the institution of the Commissioner for Environmental Rights in Ukraine. In order to clarify this issue, the legislation of Ukraine and international legal acts, the provisions of which relate to environmental human rights, are analyzed. In addition, the authors researched the foreign experience of various models of the implementation of the position of the environmental ombudsman – the USA, Great Britain, Austria and the Republic of the Philippines. Taking into account the increase in factors influencing the state of the environment, the issue of protecting violated human environmental rights is becoming increasingly important. It is especially important to ensure the protection of environmental rights in the period of martial law in connection with the mass of their violation by the aggressor state. The issue of the relationship between the environment and human rights is considered. The article proposes the introduction of the position of the Commissioner for Environmental Rights in Ukraine with the definition of his main tasks, in particular: the implementation of the state environmental policy and strategies for the sustainable development of regions in the field of environmental protection, the implementation of monitoring in order to detect violations of environmental human rights, the initiation of the investigation of committed violations in the absence of a statement from other individuals or legal entities about offenses, taking measures to prevent violations of environmental human rights, conducting educational and educational events for individuals and legal entities. Additionally, the grounds for the presence of regional representatives of the Environmental Ombudsman have been established. Attention is drawn to achieving the goal of sustainable and green economic development, taking into account climate goals, as well as protection of legal foundations, including environmental and social components.

Computing the Mittag-Leffler function of a matrix argument

It is well-known that the two-parameter Mittag-Leffler (ML) function plays a key role in Fractional Calculus. In this paper, we address the problem of computing this function, when its argument is a square matrix. Effective methods for solving this problem involve the computation of higher order derivatives or require the use of mixed precision arithmetic. In this paper, we provide an alternative method that is derivative-free and works entirely using IEEE standard double precision arithmetic. If certain conditions are satisfied, our method uses a Taylor series representation for the ML function; if not, it switches to a Schur-Parlett technique that will be combined with the Cauchy integral formula. A detailed discussion on the choice of a convenient contour is included. Theoretical and numerical issues regarding the performance of the proposed algorithm are discussed. A set of numerical experiments shows that our novel approach is competitive with the state-of-the-art method for IEEE double precision arithmetic, in terms of accuracy and CPU time. For matrices whose Schur decomposition has large blocks with clustered eigenvalues, our method far outperforms the other. Since our method does not require the efficient computation of higher order derivatives, it has the additional advantage of being easily extended to other matrix functions (e.g., special functions).

ОКАЗАНИЕ ПОЛИЦИЕЙ ПОМОЩИ ЛИЦАМ, НУЖДАЮЩИМСЯ В ЕЁ ЗАЩИТЕ ОТ ПРОТИВОПРАВНЫХ ПОСЯГАТЕЛЬСТВ

The article examines theoretical and legal issues of police activity in providing assistance to persons in need of its protection from unlawful attacks («police assistance»). The need for additional study of this issue in the context of intensifying criminogenic risks for citizens and threats to public safety has been updated. The main approaches to defining the concept of «police assistance» are studied, its main features are highlighted, a conclusion is drawn about the administrative and legal nature of this type of police activity, the author’s definition of the term «police assistance» is proposed, and possible directions for further research on this topic are indicated

Vicarious Dissonance: Pre-Registered Meta-Analysis.

The vicarious cognitive dissonance process predicts that observing an inconsistent act by a member of the ingroup causes uncomfortable arousal in the observer, inducing a motivation to reduce this discomfort. This meta-analysis examined the effect of vicarious cognitive dissonance based on 24 studies (N = 16,769). Our results indicated a small effect for the vicarious cognitive dissonance (g = 0.41 [0.27, 0.54], p <.001) with important variability between the outcomes. Our moderator analysis was limited by the low number of included studies. Publication bias analyses indicate a small true effect size (e.g., 3PSM: g = 0.22, p = .042), that was inflated by small sample sizes (R-index = 14.6%). We discussed theoretical issues concerning the psychological processes underlying vicarious cognitive dissonance, and methodological questions concerning operationalization. We proposed ways of improving the design and procedure to ensure that the effects found in the literature exist and are replicable.

Теоретические аспекты временного перевода футболиста к другому работодателю

The article is devoted to the study of theoretical issues of temporary transfer of a football player to another employer, which is considered by the author through the prism of three interrelated relationships: between a football player and an employer at the place of main work, between a football player and an employer at the place of temporary work, between an employer at the place of main work and an employer at the place of temporary work. The analysis of the correlation of the terms «temporary transfer to another «employer» and «transfer on the terms of «lease» was carried out, according to the results of which it was revealed that temporary transfer in its legal content is one of the varieties of sports «lease». Special attention is paid to the norm fixed in paragraph 1 of Article 348.4 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation, linking the temporary transfer to another employer with the employee's lack of opportunity to participate in competitions. The author believes that this provision contradicts the normative legal meaning of temporary transfer and the established practice of football labor relations and is therefore subject to exclusion from the legislation.

Theoretical Issues of Training Pedagogical Competency for Students Majoring in Primary Education at Universities to Meet Output Standards

Training pedagogical competency for students is an important activity, a specific feature of vocational training in the training program, distinguishing teacher training from training in other majors. The purpose of training pedagogical competency activities is to form competency, theoretical and practical competencies for pedagogical students - future teachers. For students majoring in primary education, vocational training is even more important because, in the future, these are the teachers who will participate in the process of educating young children. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the content, skills, and methods in the process of pedagogical competency training for students majoring in primary education from a theoretical perspective. Because this is the basis for universities to design appropriate content and training programs. Based on researching domestic and foreign documents; Vietnam’s legal documents; this study focuses on analysis, comparison, and evaluation to clarify the following contents: (i) Training objectives; (ii) Content of the training program; (iii) Methods and forms of training organization; (iv) Training force, cooperation between universities and primary schools; (v) Evaluate training results against output standards; (vi) Conditions and facilities for training. Clarifying theoretical issues helps universities have a basis for applying them to their future training process.

Acoustic indices fail to represent different facets of biodiversity

Acoustic indices are cost-efficient tools for monitoring acoustically active taxa. Despite their increasing popularity, their suitability as biodiversity proxies remains debated due to theoretical and practical issues. Existing research has predominantly focused on assessing their capacity to capture species richness and abundance of sounds, with limited attention given to other biodiversity facets like phylogenetic and functional diversity. Yet, phylogenetic distance and trait diversity may influence acoustic communication, so acoustic indices may be better suited to capture their changes than changes in the mere number of species. Here, we investigated the ability of acoustic indices to represent the species, phylogenetic, and functional diversity of acoustically active avian species across three habitat types in Italy: urban, riparian forest and deciduous woodland.Recordings were collected at dawn by a trained ornithologist, who also identified acoustically active species captured, first in the field and secondarily from recordings. We then applied eleven widely used acoustic indices for each recording and tested their ability to capture differences in species, functional and phylogenetic diversity across sites (i.e., listening points) within each habitat type using a linear mixed effect model. We then reduced the acoustic indices dimensionality to a few axes and repeated the analysis to test if compound indices delivered comparable information.Species richness and phylogenetic diversity correlated with at least one acoustic index across the three habitat types, while functional diversity correlated with an index only in the urban habitat. However, the nature of the relationships identified was often opposite to what expected by the indices’ formulation. Furthermore, across the three habitat types the interrelations among indices varied, as well as the observed relationships with diversity indices. Compound indices also exhibited inconsistent relationships across sites and contrary to what expected based on their correlation with acoustic indices.Our results cast doubts on the suitability of acoustic indices as proxies for biodiversity for biodiversity monitoring. Additionally, the inconsistent relationship among indices across the three areas suggests they are unsuitable for geographic comparisons. Temporal comparisons are possible but require local validation and may need adjustments over time of the community composition changes. Despite the attractiveness of acoustic indices as easy and cheap tools for biodiversity monitoring, we urge caution on their application.

Accelerated dimensionality reduction of single-cell RNA sequencing data with fastglmpca.

Motivated by theoretical and practical issues that arise when applying Principal component analysis (PCA) to count data, Townes et al. introduced "Poisson GLM-PCA", a variation of PCA adapted to count data, as a tool for dimensionality reduction of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. However, fitting GLM-PCA is computationally challenging. Here we study this problem, and show that a simple algorithm, which we call "Alternating Poisson Regression" (APR), produces better quality fits, and in less time, than existing algorithms. APR is also memory-efficient and lends itself to parallel implementation on multi-core processors, both of which are helpful for handling large scRNA-seq datasets. We illustrate the benefits of this approach in three publicly available scRNA-seq datasets. The new algorithms are implemented in an R package, fastglmpca. The fastglmpca R package is released on CRAN for Windows, macOS and Linux, and the source code is available at github.com/stephenslab/fastglmpca under the open source GPL-3 license. Scripts to reproduce the results in this paper are also available in the GitHub repository and on Zenodo.

Организация и обеспечение безопасности судебной деятельности на территории Донбасса, Запорожья и Херсона: вопросы теории и практики

Aleksandr V. Orlov, Presiding Judge of the Commercial Court of the Central District, PhD (Law) The article is devoted to the study of certain theoretical and practical issues of the organization and security of judicial activity in the territory of the DPR, LPR, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. The article discusses the issues of financing courts, public procurement to meet the needs of judicial authorities, and some issues of openness of judicial activity.

Pollination efficiency and the pollen-ovule ratio.

Pollination presents a risky journey for pollen grains. Pollen loss is sometimes thought to favour greater pollen investment to compensate for the inefficiency of transport. Sex allocation theory, to the contrary, has consistently concluded that postdispersal loss should have no selective effect on investment in either sex function. But the intuitively appealing compensation idea continues to be raised despite the lack of theoretical endorsement. We address the theoretical issue with a model that directly represents pollen loss (and ovule loss through floral demise or loss of receptivity) as rate-dependent dynamical processes. These loss rates can be varied to examine the effect of pollination efficiency on optimal sex allocation. Pollen-ovule ratios follow from the sex allocation based on the resource costs of pollen and ovule production. This model confirms conventional findings that pollen loss should have essentially no effect on sexual resource allocation in large, panmictic populations. Pollen limitation of seed set does not alter this conclusion. These results force us to rethink the empirical association of pollination efficiency with low pollen-ovule ratios. This pattern could arise if efficient pollen transport commonly results in stigmatic deposition of cohorts of related pollen. Empirical evidence of correlated paternity supports this explanation.

Simulation of the impact of an ultrasonic drill as a composition of a robotic platform for investigation of soil on celestial bodies

The article discusses the theoretical issues of developing an ultrasonic drill for drilling soil on celestial bodies as part of a robotic platform and formulates the tasks of its control. The specifics of using the drill require a wide temperature range during operation, low energy consumption, an efficient operating cycle and the requirement to ensure the preservation of the structure and composition of the soil when exposed to the tool. One of the promising areas of development is devices with vibration decoupling from the ground by ultrasound due to the transformation of ultrasonic vibrations into repeated impacts of sound frequency using a specially introduced “free” body between the ultrasonic and impact parts of the drill (bit). This allows continuous drilling regardless of the condition of the impact bit, including jamming. The purpose of the work is to select the most effective drill design and compile a mathematical model that provides simulation modeling. Materials and methods. Technical solutions of both domestic and foreign authors were considered, and a prototype was selected. Theoretical works were analyzed and it was found that the materials presented in them do not contain detailed mathematical models necessary for simulation modeling at the stage of design and optimization of the structure. In the theoretical part of the article, mathematical models are proposed, obtained on the basis of equivalent parameters found from a distributed description of the drill design elements. Methods of mathematical physics, classical mechanics and similarity theory were used. The results are that two alternative mathematical models are developed. One of the models has a continuous description with a significantly nonlinear rigidity of the “wall” upon impact, while the impact motion is considered as a type of self-oscillation. The second model is based on the theory of impact. Conclusion. A parametric study was carried out and the dependences of the oscillation frequency of a free body on the size of the impact gap, body mass and amplitude of oscillations of the concentrator, etc. were obtained. The considered models can be used for simulation modeling when developing a drill design. The tasks of controlling a robotic drilling platform are formulated from the position of ensuring the operability of the drill when drilling various soils.

Судебная экономическая экспертиза в делах о банкротстве

This work is devoted to the study of problems related to the conduct of judicial economic examinations in bankruptcy cases. The article discusses general theoretical issues related to the use of special knowledge in the arbitrazh process, as well as the legal aspects of the use of forensic examinations and their evidentiary value. A special part of the study is devoted to bankruptcy issues. Particular attention is paid to the problems related to the classification and regulatory consolidation of the methods of financial examinations conducted within this category of cases. The paper also provides a detailed study of all available judicial practice of arbitrazh courts of the first, appellate and cassation instances in bankruptcy cases for the period from 2020 to 2023.

Theoretical and legal issues of defining digital currencies as an administrative and legal phenomenon

The last decade has seen a rapid growth of innovations in the field of IT technologies, one of the consequences of which was a change in the approach to the payment system – for the first time in human history, electronic records rather than real funds were provided in exchange for goods and services, which made it possible to represent money and currencies in a virtual form. The emergence of cryptocurrencies and the development of electronic payment systems have created the basis for the emergence of digital currencies, a technological innovation that performs the exchange functions of money, but operates outside the modern banking sector and has developed outside the supervision of monetary regulators. Since the first digital currency, bitcoin, was created, the digital currency market has been growing rapidly and has already become significant for the global economy. Currently, digital currencies are widely used in the economic and legal environment of Ukraine. Despite certain attempts by the national legislator to regulate relations in the field of digital currencies, a number of aspects remain unaddressed by the legislator, there is legal uncertainty regarding activities related to digital currencies, there is no regulation of the procedure for the activities of entities providing services in the field of digital currencies, and, most importantly, the terminology for defining the definition of digital currencies in the legal plane is not regulated at the doctrinal level. This is important in the context of the development of administrative law and the related phenomenon of "digital currency". The purpose of the paper is to study the theoretical and legal issues of defining digital currencies as an administrative and legal phenomenon. The paper examines the definition of the category «digital currency» – a digital object intended for payment functions contained in the form of a set of electronic data (digital code or designation) in an information network operating on the basis of distributed ledger technology, the circulation of which is regulated by administrative law. The analysis has shown that there are numerous approaches to understanding legal relations in the field of digital currency circulation. These relations are based on the principles of discretion and equality of the parties with a mandatory method of legal regulation. Therefore, administrative legal relations in the field of digital currencies are social relations regulated by administrative law regarding the possession, use and disposal of digital currencies in accordance with the rules of administrative law.

Spontaneous instrumental approach-avoidance learning in social contexts in autism

BackgroundIndividuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are characterized by atypicalities in social interactions, compared to Typically Developing individuals (TD). The social motivation theory posits that these difficulties stem from diminished anticipation, reception, and/or learning from social rewards. Although learning from socioemotional outcomes is core to the theory, studies to date have been sparse and inconsistent. This possibly arises from a combination of theoretical, methodological and sample-related issues. Here, we assessed participants’ ability to develop a spontaneous preference for actions that lead to desirable socioemotional outcomes (approaching/avoiding of happy/angry individuals, respectively), in an ecologically valid social scenario. We expected that learning abilities would be impaired in ASC individuals, particularly in response to affiliative social feedback.MethodWe ran an online social reinforcement learning task, on two large online cohorts with (n = 274) and without (n = 290) ASC, matched for gender, age and education. Participants had to indicate where they would sit in a waiting room. Each seat was associated with different probabilities of approaching/avoiding emotional individuals. Importantly, the task was implicit, as participants were not instructed to learn, and emotional expressions were never mentioned. We applied both categorical analyses contrasting the ASC and TD groups and dimensional factor analysis on affective questionnaires.ResultsContrary to our hypothesis, participants showed spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes, regardless of their diagnostic group. Yet, when accounting for dimensional variations in autistic traits, as well as depression and anxiety, two main findings emerged among females who failed to develop explicit learning strategies: (1) autism severity in ASC correlated with reduced learning to approach happy individuals; (2) anxiety-depression severity across both ASC and TD participants correlated with reduced learning to approach/avoid happy/angry individuals, respectively.ConclusionsImplicit spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes is not generally impaired in autism but may be specifically associated with autism severity in females with ASC, when they do not have an explicit strategy for adapting to their social environment. Clinical diagnosis and intervention ought to take into account individual differences in their full complexity, including the presence of co-morbid anxiety and depression, when dealing with social atypicalities in autism.

What Formal Approaches to Syntactic Interfaces Can Tell Us about the Syntax of Preverbal and Prenominal Constituents in Galician

An important line of research within a generative, formal approach to syntax in the early 21st century has centered on exploring phenomena related to the interface between syntax and other linguistic modules in human language. In this paper, we review the notion of interfaces and how they have been viewed within formal theoretical approaches to monolingual and bilignual competence and language acquistion, noting their relevance as they relate to language acquisition and bilingualism in the context of Galicia (Spain). We review a selection of Noun Phrase (NP) structures that implicate a syntactic interface: subject position, clitic directionality, and determiner clitic allomorphy. We provide a review of the relevant literature and the theoretical issues of interest as they relate to our understanding of these syntactic interfaces, reporting on our current theoretical understandings, persistent questions, and our view of the path forward as it relates to linguistic research on the Galician language.

Towards mechanistic investigations of numerical and music cognition.

Are there cognitive connections between humans' ability to make music and their understanding of math and numbers? This question has motivated centuries of speculation across the fields of philosophy and education and an increasing number of empirical studies of the topic. We review research at the intersection of numerical and music cognition, and establish its relevance both to the applied sphere (e.g., education) and to core theoretical issues in the cognitive sciences. Next, we identify notable limitations within the literature, and attempt to explain some of the likely causes of-and solutions to-these limitations. Finally, we propose specific themes of focus (spatialization and the mapping between symbolic and nonsymbolic representations) for future research aimed at understanding whether there is shared cognitive architecture for reasoning about number and math. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizational and Legal Aspects of the Activities of the Cheka Bodies at the Local Level in the Context of New Archival Documents: Theoretical and Historical Legal Issues

Organizational and Legal Aspects of the Activities of the Cheka Bodies at the Local Level in the Context of New Archival Documents: Theoretical and Historical Legal Issues

Theoretical-methodological aspects of researching the area of religion and public administration

This article, commissioned by the editors of Public Policy and Administration, contributes to the theoretical and methodological groundworks for the development of research in religion and public administration. It does so in three ways. The first part contrasts different approaches to defining the concept of religion, those from the vantage of academic observers against those from within religious traditions themselves. Several theoretical and methodological challenges for public administration follow. Part two sets out two theoretical concerns; first, the role of religious belief in intentional explanations of public administration activity; second, the institutionalised position of secularity in the recently freighted concept of a religious regime. Part three identifies a clutch of methodological concerns associated with these theoretical issues. A final section concludes with a summary of the contribution of the article to the nascent research programme in public administration for a post-secular world.

On the scale from ransomware to cyberterrorism: the cases of JBS USA, Colonial Pipeline and the wiperware attacks against Ukraine

ABSTRACT This research explores the conditions under which ransomware can be considered as an act of cyberterrorism and whether the cases of JBS USA, Colonial Pipeline and the wiperware attacks against Ukraine in 2022 constitute such. These theoretical and practical issues are particularly important in light of the negotiations at the United Nations level for a binding treaty on cybercrime. To achieve these goals, we have undertaken the following steps in designing a model for the analysis of ransomware events. First, we searched for an agreed-upon definition for cyberterrorism in the academic literature. To do so, we compiled a dataset of one hundred peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals on the topic of cyberterrorism. We reported whether authors considered factors such as inducing a sense of fear/panic, the destruction of property or the threat of such, and/or killing/violence/coercion or the threat of such as necessary conditions for the definition of cyberterrorism. Second, we complemented academic views with the definitions of practitioners and policymakers. Third, we applied the model to test whether the three ransomware case studies fit the criteria for cyberterrorism. We found that based on the proposed framework, all case studies constitute acts of cyberterrorism, albeit to a different extent.

Big ideas that changed the world of disability: Exploring theory with self‐advocates

AbstractBackgroundInclusive research has sidelined discussion of theoretical issues with researchers with intellectual/learning disabilities. This is a situation which the Big Ideas initiative sought to change. Between 2021 and 2023, the Open University, Leipzig University and the University of Koblenz organised nine workshops to explore influential theories in disability research. The objective was to share a theory (Big Idea) that sheds light on disability with self‐advocates and discuss how it relates to their experience. By making theories accessible and discussing how they relate to lived experience, we aimed to inform self‐advocates and activist researchers about key concepts in disability, deepen their capacity for research and campaigning, and better equip them to activate for change.MethodsThe online workshops were evaluated by observers. These observations were used by an inclusive group of activist researchers as the basis for an overall evaluation of the project.FindingsPeople with learning disabilities can engage with complex theories if these are presented accessibly alongside opportunities for reflective discussion. Input from self‐advocates helps to broaden and deepen theoretical understanding.An unanticipated but important finding was that the Big Ideas workshops created a new space in which academics and self‐advocates could learn together as equals.ConclusionsMaking theory accessible and easier to understand is both possible and valuable.