Cultivators,Creditors and the State: Rural Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire

Although the existence of rural indebtedness in the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century and some of its consequences are well known, information about the grassroots structure and causes of indebtedness and the structure of debt relationships is limited. This article explores rural collective indebtedness using two debt registers from the districts of Mihaliç and Kirmast? in western Anatolia. By placing these within a broader theoretical and historiographic context, it challenges the conventional notion that the Ottoman state generally strived to protect the peasantry from the detrimental effects of indebtedness. It is argued that the official approach was determined by two interrelated facts: the structure of the ruling class at the time was unstable, and its new components were drawn from wealthy elements who themselves engaged in money lending. For this reason, the attitude of the Ottoman state to rural indebtedness was largely one of indifference, and such interventions as did occur were rare and ineffective.     

The frequency of alcohol,illicit and licit drug consumption in the general driving population in South-East Hungary

In the framework of the DRUID (Driving under the Influence of Drugs, Alcohol, and Medicines) EU-6 project, a roadside survey was performed in South-East Hungary to determine the incidence of alcohol and the most frequent illicit and licit drug consumption (amphetamines, THC, illicit and medical opiates, cocaine, ketamine, benzodiazepines, zopiclone and zolpidem) in the general driving population. All 3110 drivers stopped between 01 January 2008 and 31 December 2009 were checked for alcohol, and among them 2738 persons (87.7%) participated in the further examinations, on a voluntary basis. Licit and illicit drugs were determined from their oral fluid samples by GC–MS analysis.Illicit drugs were detected in 27 cases (0.99%), licit drugs in 85 cases (3.14%), and alcohol (cut off: 0.1 g/l) was found in 4 (0.13%) cases. Illicit drug consumption was the highest among men of the ages 18–34, during the spring, and on the week-end nights. With respect to licit drugs, the highest incidence was found among women over the age of 50, during the summer, and on the week-days. All alcohol positive cases were men over the age of 35. In comparison to international European averages, the alcohol and illicit drug consumption was low, but the licit drug consumption was over the European average.     

The necessity of legally compliant data management in European cloud architectures

Taking advantage of flexible resource provisions enabled by Cloud Computing, many businesses have recently migrated their IT applications and data to the Cloud, allowing them to respond to new demands and requests from customers. However, Cloud Computing also moves functions and responsibilities away from local ownership and management to a third-party provided service, and brings with it a set of associated legal issues, such as data protection, licensing, intellectual property rights and the need to comply to necessary regulation. In this paper we evaluate commonly-observed Cloud Computing use cases against the law applying to Cloud Computing to find where legal problems may arise. We derive a general architecture for Clouds and use it to illustrate common Cloud Computing usage patterns. The use cases are assessed against evaluation criteria derived from the relevant Cloud Computing law for the data processing of end-user details and materials, including roles and responsibilities necessary for legal compliance. The Data Protection Directive of the European Union has been used in this evaluation, as it is a commonly accepted and influential directive in the field of data processing legislation.     

Effects of language mismatch in automatic forensic voice comparison using deep learning embeddings

In forensic voice comparison, deep learning has become widely popular recently. It is mainly used to learn speaker representations, called embeddings or embedding vectors. Speaker embeddings are often trained using corpora mostly containing widely spoken languages. Thus, language dependency is an important factor in automatic forensic voice comparison, especially when the target language is linguistically very different from that the model is trained on. In the case of a low-resource language, developing a corpus for forensic purposes containing enough speakers to train deep learning models is costly. This study aims to investigate whether a model pre-trained on multilingual (mostly English) corpus can be used on a target low-resource language (here, Hungarian), not represented by the model. Often multiple samples are not available from the offender (unknown speaker). Samples are therefore compared pairwise with and without speaker enrollment for suspect (known) speakers. Two corpora are used that were developed especially for forensic purposes and a third that is meant for traditional speaker verification. Speaker embedding vectors are extracted by the x-vector and ECAPA-TDNN techniques. Speaker verification was evaluated in the likelihood-ratio framework. A comparison is made between the language combinations (modeling, LR calibration, and evaluation). The results were evaluated by Cllr_min and EER metrics. It was found that the model pre-trained on a different language but on a corpus with a significant number of speakers can be used on samples with language mismatch. Sample duration and speaking style also seem to affect the performance.     

The Concept of Entrapment

Our question is this: What makes an act one of entrapment? We make a standard distinction between legal entrapment, which is carried out by parties acting in their capacities as (or as deputies of) law-enforcement agents, and civil entrapment, which is not. We aim to provide a definition of entrapment that covers both and which, for reasons we explain, does not settle questions of permissibility and culpability. We explain, compare, and contrast two existing definitions of legal entrapment to commit a crime that possess this neutrality. We point out some problems with the extensional correctness of these definitions and propose a new definition that resolves these problems. We then extend our definition to provide a more general definition of entrapment, encompassing both civil and legal cases. Our definition is, we believe, closer to being extensionally correct and will, we hope, provide a clearer basis for future discussions about the ethics of entrapment than do the definitions upon which it improves.