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Using new transaction-level data for non-financial commercial paper (CP) in the U.S., we show that companies systematically reduce their outstanding short-term debt on quarterly and annual disclosure dates. Constraints on CP lending supply cannot explain this pattern. Instead, firms prefer repaying short-term debt over disclosing high cash holdings to signal that their cash is readily available and not trapped in foreign subsidiaries. Consistent with this interpretation, we show that firms with higher cash holdings, more sales in regions with tight capital controls, or with higher debt-equity ratios compared to industry peers reduce their short-term debt more aggressively at disclosure dates.

The present paper was prepared and submitted as part of the European Commission's public consultation to give stakeholders the opportunity to express their views on the questions raised and policy options proposed in the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence.

On 19th February 2020, the European Commission published the long-awaited and pre-announced White Paper on artificial intelligence. In addition, the Commission published a document shaping Europe's digital future, a document on the European data strategy and a report on the impact of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and robotics on security and liability . Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in her presentation of the new EU digital strategy that the objectives for shaping Europe's digital future cover “everything from cyber-security to critical infrastructures, digital education to skills, democracy to media" . Whether this promise has been fulfilled and to what extent it has been possible to focus on content will be examined below. For this purpose, the following article will discuss individual proposals from selected documents and address newly emerging liability issues arising in connection with the use of AI.

In February 2020 the EU published its white paper on ‘Artificial Intelligence: A European approach to excellence and trust’. This is likely to form the core of future policy and legislation within the EU and as such will have global impact on standards and norms. In this comment piece we survey the five sections of the white paper and then critically examine three themes, namely, i. regulatory signalling, ii. the risk-based approach, and, iii. the auditing styles. The key takeaway is that the white paper, and the EU’s strategy at large, is ambiguous and lacks vision, which, if unchecked, is likely to have a negative impact on EU competitiveness in the development of AI solutions and services.

The EU White Paper on AI mentions healthcare as one of the sectors where AI applications might pose high risks. These comments provide the vision on the regulatory framework for high-risk healthcare AI applications. The key takeaways concern transparency, preventing bias, safety and quality of AI applications used for medical purposes. I suggest that the transparency of AI shall not be equated to its explainability. To increase transparency and ensure the safety of AI healthcare applications, cooperation between manufacturers and users of AI (healthcare providers) shall be improved. I highlight that biased AI decisions alert on the inaccuracy of algorithms. While discrimination and stigmatization are difficult to identify and prove, especially for AI and especially for healthcare, controlling of AI’s accuracy is an efficient tool to prevent and mitigate biases in AI systems. Finally, I briefly compare the two regulations that might apply to AI tools in healthcare - the Medical Devices Regulation (EU) 2017/745 (MDR) and the In-vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices Regulation (EU) 2017/746 (IVDR). I conclude that the IVDR is more tailored to AI characteristics while it is more detailed and more focused on data quality and relevance. Thus, the IVDR rules can be a good starting point for clarifying and implementing a regulatory framework for high-risk AI healthcare applications.

This short position paper was presented at the Meeting of the OECD Network of Experts on Artificial Intelligence (ONE AI) held in Paris on 26-27 February 2020. It argues that public and collective governance, including through collective bargaining, is urgently needed to prevent the most invasive uses of Artificial Intelligence and algorithmic management and surveillance over workers. Tools such as GPS-based wearable devices that monitor workers' position at the workplace and collect data on particularly private information, including workers' heartbeats and emotional status call for immediate action from regulators and social partners. Surveillance practices should be limited to indispensable cases and transparency of data collection and processes should be safeguarded, also to rule out the many possible discriminatory consequences of management-by-algorithm.

In response to recent calls for major reforms to the American military justice system, which are apparently based on continuing Congressional concerns about sexual assaults in the military, the authors present statistical data on sexual assaults from a number of sources: national crime statistics; military crime statistics; crime statistics from several states, and statistics from a university. The authors also present information on the tremendous strides that have been made in recent years to protect the rights of military victims of sexual assault, noting that some of those rights are not found in federal or state criminal justice systems. Finally, the authors conclude that the rate of sexual assaults in the military is lower than for other civilian jurisdictions. Military victims report offenses at a higher rate than the jurisdictions examined.

Since the first RNs earned orthopaedic certification in 1988, over 12,000 nurses have proudly held the ONC credential. Today, nearly 7000 orthopaedic-certified nurses, nurse practitioners, and clinical nurse specialists demonstrate excellence in the care of persons with musculoskeletal health concerns. Why did they choose certification? A representative sample of over 300 orthopaedic-certified nurses responded to a survey from the Orthopaedic Nurses Certification Board (ONCB) to confirm why they value their credentials and maintain specialty certification. Their answers offer compelling reasons for nurses to get, and keep, orthopaedic nursing certification.

Academic reading, a form of active reading, often involves interaction with the text. Highlighting and annotating are some of the most common strategies of interacting with academic texts, yet we have limited understanding of exactly how such interaction affects reading comprehension in digital versus analog reading environments. In this paper, we compare how university students (N=50) interact with a digital and a physical text, focusing on highlights and annotations. We compare reading speed, interaction with, and subsequent memory of the texts. We make nine observations about reading speed, highlighting frequency and memory scores between paper and laptop. We find indications that highlighting and annotating when reading a digital text has a higher impact on memory than when reading a paper text, and suggest that the main challenge for designers of digital reading support tools appears to be better designs for active annotation.

Paper Series VII discusses Arrangement or compromise between two or more companies, the provisions applicable to schemes or contract involving the transfer of shares in a company, the provisions applicable to dissenting shareholders. Further, the Paper Series considers Arrangement on sale of company’s property during members’ voluntary winding-up, power to compromise with creditors and members and then the moratorium on creditors voluntary winding-up in a scheme of arrangement.

Whilst the media freedom and pluralism implications of content moderation, takedowns, privatised censorship and down-ranking have been widely discussed in recent years, content curation practices like prioritisation, prominence, and discoverability started to raise concerns among policy makers only in the past few years. These are however, two sides of the same coin. The question of whether regulators or governments should create regimes of prominence online, or rather step back from the ongoing process of ad-hoc private construction of these regimes, raises complex questions at the intersection of freedom of expression, media freedom and media pluralism that demand our attention. Such questions are currently being addressed through different regulatory instruments in different countries, as we witnessed an acceleration of the institutionalisation of new prominence and discoverability regimes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Such developments are therefore leading towards an extremely fragmented regulatory landscape that is trying to solve shared challenges of platform governance systems. In this context, the objective of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, the research investigates the legislative measures and regulatory proposals used in different countries to regulate prominence and discoverability online; secondly, it questions the potential implications of such measures for media pluralism, understood as a plurality of content and information from sources independent of private and/or state-interference. To do so empirically, the paper applies a qualitative methodological framework with a document analysis of relevant literature and current legislative proposals and measures from a selected sample of countries. Based on this, this work discusses four approaches to prominence regulation, informed by the policy debates and legislative proposals of four countries, namely, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and China. These countries were purposively selected because they present the most mature proposals in this policy area, and they are used as illustrative national cases that are compared on two dimensions: 1) the criteria used to determine which content and services should be granted preferential treatment and 2) the types of services and devices that should comply with new prominence and/or discoverability obligations.

U.S. Supreme Court justices typically donate their working papers to archives upon their retirement, often with lengthy embargoes. Researchers have debated whether the justices should be required to retain and disclose their papers as government records, but there has been little study of how the papers are used in scholarly and journalistic discussions of the Court. This empirical study examines how the papers of Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun are used via citations in books and academic law journal articles. We find that the vast majority of citations to the papers support discussions of the justices’ deliberations and negotiations when deciding cases, precisely the kinds of uses that show the value of transparency. To address constitutional objections to mandated disclosures, we propose an incentive grant program that benefits the archives that receive justices’ collections. This program would encourage justices to donate their papers with relatively short embargoes, ideally 15 years after retirement from the Court.

This paper looks back at the development of the common law right to remain silent and its eventually being made a constitutional right as an amendment to the United States Constitution via the 5th Amendment. The paper also traces the historical development of the right not to incriminate oneself and the link between the right to remain silent found in the Fifth Amendment but also to the right to have counsel present during interrogation found in the Sixth Amendment.

Different chroniclers of the history of the Byzantine Empire have noted various economic data gleamed from historical documents and accounts of the empire at different periods of time. Research for this paper has not uncovered any estimates of long term, annual macroeconomic data (gross domestic product (GDP), national income (NI), etc.) for the empire during its existence. Such data has been estimated to one extent or another for other nations and societies that have existed during the middle ages. This paper attempts to provide conjectures on approximate real GDP per capita trends for the empire over its existence from AD 300 to 1453. Finally, some hypotheses on factors that would have affected Byzantine economic performance are tested using climate/environmental factors. The results of this paper appear to confirm some findings on how the Byzantine economy might have been affected by periods of regional climate change. [enter Abstract Body]

In China, HSS master students are becoming the main target of Chinese-language predatory journals. Existing research has not paid attention to why the HSS master students publish papers in Chinese-language predatory journals. This research interviewed 13 HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) master students with different majors using the semi-structured interview method, then used GT to analyze the data and found that research discrimination, research context, self-awareness and individual demand are the main reasons why HSS master students publish papers in Chinese-language predatory journals. This research suggests that universities, colleges, and research institutions establish mechanisms for evaluating the quality of researcher’s papers, and no longer value the number of papers.

Investment in capital, new technology, and agricultural techniques has not been considered an endeavor worthwhile in a medieval economy because of a lack of strong property rights and no incentive on the part of lords and barons to lend money to or grant rights to peasant farmers. Therefore, the medieval economy and standards of living at that time often have been characterized as non-dynamic and static due to insufficient investment in innovative techniques and technology. Paul Baran’s concept of the economic surplus is applied to investment patterns during the late medieval, mercantile, and early capitalist stages of economic growth in England and the UK. This paper uses Zhun Xu’s Baran Ratio concept to try to develop general trends to demonstrate and to reinforce other historical accounts of these times that a productive and sufficient level of public and private investment out of accumulated capital income, taxation, and rents does not have a real impact on economic per capita growth until around the 1600s in Britain. This would also be about the time of capitalism’s ascent as the dominant economic system in England. Even then, dramatic increases in investment and economic growth do not appear until the late 18th Century when investment more consistently becomes more than one hundred percent of the level of economic surplus and takes in government spending. The types of investment, threshold amounts of investment out of profits and rents along with government spending seem to matter when it comes to a growth path raising GDP per capita and national income per capita to higher levels. Although much of this knowledge perhaps is embodied in current historical accounts, the Baran Ratio nicely summarizes and illustrates the importance of levels of investment to economic growth.

As part of its corporate financing strategy, a company may raise capital through debt securities and these could be by mortgage of real property or chattels, debenture, bond, promissory notes, and bill of exchange made or accepted on behalf of the company by an authorized person etc. For purposes of this Paper Series IV(B), emphasis is placed on Company’s Debt Securities, particularly on debentures, debenture trust deed and realization of security.

This study was entitled Catalyst and Transparency; An analysis of the Campus Paper Function as a Watchdog. The study reveals that the publication is inconsistently complying with all standards of journalism because of some major problems like the fear of being personal attacks, lack of funds, and beginner in the field of campus journalism. However, this reveals the improvement of the publication in excelling from the various competitions and also in the releases. Campus publication is realized as citizens’ journalism outside, this plays a vital role in shaping the discipline and awareness need of the students. Ethics and standards of journalism should be part of the training and learning of every students’ journalist. This research study was conducted to analyze the efficiency of the CLSU Collegian in terms of practicing the standards of journalism. This also reviewed the status of the publication in the present situation and the continuation of listing the important accounts of the publication from the year 2011-2015. It also examines the engagement of the staffers of the CLSU Collegian in the elements of journalism, knows the workings of the press. The problems they encountered and solutions they made in practicing the elements of journalism. Key informant interview, focus group discussion, archival research, and library research are the major methods that the researcher do, to validate the data that are being collected the study adapted the triangulation process.

Sustainability has immensely become a widespread buzzword with a contested meaning in the last century. Different scholars have portrayed the concept from different backgrounds and magnitudes. This paper aims to discuss various standpoints of the concept of sustainability. The notion has been defined as the procedures of maintaining a suitable environment for the growing consciousness, for instance, environmental dilapidation, resource diminution, and socioeconomic discrimination. The concept of sustainability has its root in the ‘Brundtland Report’, which has been encircling social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Thus, sustainability is the ability of prevailing or co-existing of human beings and the biosphere uninterruptedly. In 1978, Thomas Malthus discussed his theory of growing starvation for the barren land to feed a high population. Moreover, sustainability is the concept of economics where the scarcity of resources is the primary concern. In 1987, the Brundtland commission introduced the concept of sustainable development for ensuring improved life within this scarce resource.

This paper conceptualizes that a human mind consists of three components: (1) rational self (2) emotions (3) an automatic system that memorizes habits. Based on anthologists’ research, I posit that rational self is used only in the occasions that the return of using it is high, which serves human genes’ purposes of saving vital energy of physical strength for production and fighting against ferocious animals in ancient times. In other occasions, rational self is in a dormant mode, with habits determining human behaviors. The switch from dormant to active state of rational self is through the spur of emotions. For example, in ancient times, when an individual’s peers obtain something valuable, it is usually a good opportunity for him to try to obtain it as well. Therefore, human genes create the emotion of jealousy, which yields psychological pain to spur the rational self to find the best way to get it as well through learning from his peers. When an individual makes a serious mistake, human genes create the emotion of regret, which generates psychological pain to spur the rational self to learn the lesson. When humans feel contended and their energies are under-used, human genes create the emotion of greed and boredom, which yields psychological pain to spur them to act… In contemporary times, however, these emotions may often only yield tremendous human suffering while bringing no benefits to the survival of the gene. To mitigate pains or to utilize the pleasure mechanism that human genes create, rational self may choose illusions, sexual promiscuity, taking drugs, addiction to video games, or even suicide, all of which can be conceptualized as a “principal-agent problem” between human genes and rational self. Moreover, religions may be a way to reduce human suffering. The goal of rational self is to maximize the individual’s lifetime happiness by trying to be fully aware of all of the desires and emotions that human gene creates and imposed on the individual and striking an optimal balance among them. This goal can be interpreted as the “meaning of life”, which often amounts to the satisfactions of biological needs and/or the continuous pursuit of the sense of “winning” in some aspects of life.