Unmanned aircraft systems: Surveillance,ethics and privacy in civil applications

This paper examines how the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) for surveillance in civil applications impacts upon privacy and other civil liberties. It argues that, despite the heterogeneity of these systems, the same “usual suspects” – the poor, people of colour and anti-government protesters – are targeted by UAS deployments. It discusses how current privacy-related legislation in the US, UK and European Union might apply to UASs. We find that current regulatory mechanisms do not adequately address privacy and civil liberties concerns because UASs are complex, multimodal surveillance systems that integrate a range of technologies and capabilities. The paper argues for a combination of top-down, legislated requirements and bottom-up impact assessments to adequately address privacy and civil liberties.     

违法侦查行为的程序性制裁效果研究——以非法口供排除规则为中心

不断出现的冤案及其背后的违法侦查问题使整个刑事司法的公信力日趋式微。学界和司法部门最高层认识到,只有通过建立非法证据排除规则,剥夺违法侦查者非法取证的利益,才能促使其依法取证。此谓程序性制裁。但是,在目前的机制下,由于我国违法侦查的发现几率极低、无法定罪的成本极小和次级制裁机制的乏力,程序性制裁根本无法成为依法取证的"激励机制"。因此,如果要使程序性制裁的威慑效果发挥作用,必须建立有效的违法侦查行为发现机制,把非法证据排除真正转变为违法侦查的成本,并使法院真正具备作出无罪判决的能力。     

不是所有涉案查账都是司法会计鉴定

之所以说不是所有涉案查账都是司法会计鉴定,是由于两者具有对象与方法不同等实质性差异。然而,说两者不同,并非是对涉案查账的排斥,也并非说司法会计鉴定就不需要查账了。它们各有所长,也各有用武之地。     

Outbound Chinese Capital Spurs European Economy

正THE European Union’s advanced technology,skilled labor force,transparent legal environment,and relatively easy market access make it the preferred investment destination for Chinese investors.European countries,meanwhile,welcome investment from Chinese enterprises,because it promotes economic recovery     

Why China Won't Suffer a “Debt Crisis”

正INACCURATE articles sometimes appear in the Western media claiming China faces a"severe debt crisis."Factually these are easily refuted.Changyong Rhee,the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department director,recently pointed out that China’s national and local government debt is only 53 percent of GDP,while the U.S.government’s debt is roughly     

The Linux FAT32 allocator and file creation order reconstruction

The allocation algorithm of the Linux FAT32 file system driver positions files on disk in such a way that their relative positions reveal information on the order in which these files have been created. This provides an opportunity to enrich information from (carved) file fragments with time information, even when such file fragments lack the file system metadata in which time-related information is usually to be found.Through source code analysis and experiments the behaviour of the Linux FAT allocator is examined. How an understanding of this allocator can be applied in practice is demonstrated with a case study involving a TomTom GPS car navigation device. In this case, time information played a crucial role. Large amounts of location records could be carved from this device's flash storage, yielding insight into the locations the device has visited—yet the carved records themselves offered no information on when the device had been at the locations. Still, bounds on the records' time of creation could be inferred when making use of filesystem timestamps related to neighbouring on-disk positions.Finally, we perform experiments which contrast the Linux behaviour with that of Windows 7. We show that the latter differs subtly, breaking the strong relation between creation order and position.     

Italian Utilities and Public Control: Evidence of Merger Effects

ABSTRACT

Increasing competition-induced mergers amongst public utilities may favour in Italy a reduction in public control and an increase in fair value accounting. In this context, conducting a multiple case study characterized by an innovative comprehensive approach, it is investigated how the peculiarities of the sector affect integration and the subsequent accounting representation of the post-merger entity. The findings show, firstly, the persistent will of the public shareholders to maintain control and, secondly, shed light on a form of interconnected ‘accounting levelling out’ that seems ill-suited to represent the economic reality of the most significant post-merger companies, despite New Public Management provisions.     

Who Represents the Constituency? Online Political Communication by Members of Parliament in the German Mixed-Member Electoral System

Members of parliament (MPs) are elected via two different tiers in mixed-member electoral systems—as winners of a seat in a constituency or as party candidates under proportional rules. While previous research has identified important consequences of this “mandate divide” in parliaments, questions remain how this institutional setup affects MPs' political behavior in other arenas. Analyzing more than one million social media posts, this article investigates regional representation in the online communication of German MPs. The results show that MPs elected under a direct mandate refer approximately twice as often to their constituencies by using regionalized wording and geographic references than MPs elected under the proportional tier. The substantive findings provide new evidence for the benefits of mixed-member electoral systems for political representation while the methodological approach demonstrates the added value of social media data for analyzing the political behavior of elites.     

Ideology,party systems and corruption voting in European democracies

What is the impact of corruption on citizens' voting behavior? There is a growing literature on an increasingly ubiquitous puzzle in many democratic countries: that corrupt officials continue to be re-elected by voters. In this study we address this issue with a novel theory and newly collected original survey data for 24 European countries. The crux of the argument is that voters' ideology is a salient factor in explaining why citizens would continue voting for their preferred party despite the fact that it has been involved in a corruption scandal. Developing a theory of supply (number of effective parties) and demand (voters must have acceptable ideological alternatives to their preferred party), we posit that there is a U-shaped relationship between the likelihood of corruption voting and where voters place themselves on the left/right spectrum. The further to the fringes, the more likely the voters are to neglect corruption charges and continue to support their party. However, as the number of viable party alternatives increases, the effect of ideology is expected to play a smaller role. In systems with a large number of effective parties, the curve is expected to be flat, as the likelihood that the fringe voters also have a clean and reasonably ideologically close alternative to switch to. The hypothesis implies a cross level interaction for which we find strong and robust empirical evidence using hierarchical modeling. In addition, we provide empirical insights about how individual level ideology and country level party systems – among other factors – impact a voter's decision to switch parties or stay home in the face of their party being involved in a corruption scandal.     

The patriarchy index: a comparative study of power relations across historical Europe

This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. The index combines all these items, with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in different societal and familial settings. In order to explore the comparative advantages of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91 regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index allows the authors to identify regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. The unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories of family organization across the European landmass.