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The inconsistency in the hierarchical knowledge base is due to the fact that the assertions (ABoxes) come from several sources with different levels of reliability. We introduce the management of this inconsistency problem to query the inconsistent DL-Lite knowledge bases. Most of the approaches studied in the literature first repair all of the inconsistent assertions in the DL-Lite incoherent knowledge base and then question it. In this article, we proceed directly to a knowledge base query to retrieve an exhaustive list of responses and then, once these responses are retrieved, we repair them. The main contribution of this work therefore consists of studying several response strategies to queries from various data sources using a recurrent function to calculate the rank of coherence which will allow us to manage inconsistencies in the set of responses. We study these strategies from different points of view: productivity, precision, recall, F-measure, Accuracy, G-mean and computational complexity. The experiments carried out, on different corpora, and the analysis of the results, which we carried out, show encouraging results in productivity since our approach is much more productive, providing the greatest number of responses, while remaining the best in time compared to the other studied approaches.

This paper explores paradoxical tensions and their management in modular solution networks on digital platforms. A case study approach was adopted to examine how two firms in the lighting facility and ICT industries use digital platforms to coordinate their diverse, large and dynamic modular solution networks. Our findings reveal that due to contradictory goals in offering diverse customized solutions, solution providers with digital platforms are facing several paradoxical tensions between flexibility and efficiency, control and autonomy, and standardization and customization. We find that solution providers cope with these paradoxes through implementing two simultaneous mechanisms: unification and diversification. While the diversification mechanism aims at increasing variety among modules and module providers, unification focuses on forming similarities among them. These mechanisms are made possible through digital platform features, such as algorithms, online communities and platform access. This study contributes to the B2B literature by highlighting the nested nature of paradoxical tensions in the context of modular solution networks and by identifying mechanisms for managing these paradoxes. It also offers practical tools to solution providers to identify and manage paradoxical tensions in platform-based modular solution networks.

Technology is central to human life but hard to define and study. This review synthesizes advances in fields from anthropology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to propose an interdisciplinary cognitive science of technology. The foundation of this effort is an evolutionarily motivated definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. This broad scope respects the complexity of the subject but poses a challenge for theoretical unification. Addressing this challenge requires a comparative approach to reduce the diversity of real-world technological cognition to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. To this end, a synthetic perceptual-motor hypothesis (PMH) for the evolutionary-developmental-cultural construction of technological cognition is advanced as an initial target for investigation.

Nominal syntax is a generalisation of first-order syntax that includes names, a notion of name binding and an elegant axiomatisation of alpha-equivalence, based on nominal set theory. However, it does not take into account non-capturing atom substitution, which is not a primitive notion in nominal syntax. We consider an extension of nominal syntax with non-capturing atom substitutions and show that matching is decidable and finitary but unification is undecidable in general. The proof of undecidability of unification is obtained by reducing Hilbert's tenth problem to unification of extended nominal terms. We provide a general matching algorithm and characterise a class of problems for which matching is unitary, giving rise to expressive and efficient rewriting systems.

There is no denying the Central Dogma's impact on the biological sciences. Since the Dogma's formulation by Francis Crick in 1958, however, many have debated the Dogma's empirical adequacy. My aim is to move beyond these discussions, and instead consider the Central Dogma's significance to contemporary biological practice. To do this, I consider four distinct approaches for determining the non-descriptive methodological significance of a scientific principle. I argue that these approaches fail to vindicate the Central Dogma, and that, under many of these approaches, the Dogma amounts to a triviality.

Recent research formalizes cooperative communication as belief transport using the mathematical theory of optimal transport. This formalization allows rigorous a priori analysis of the statistical and ecological properties of models of cooperative communication, unification of prior models and analysis of their differences, and promising directions for future research.

Lean Production Systems are widely used in manufacturing enterprises. Through the avoidance of waste on the shop floor, efficient processes are established. Another newer concept is Industry 4.0, which is one of the most promising approaches to handle future production problems like the high demand for customized products. Many types of research address the combination of both concepts to maintain an efficient and flexible production process. This paper addresses the mentioned issue by combining both ideas and systematically identifies the unification. The aim is to develop an approach that assesses the technologies of Industry 4.0 to suitable elements of a Lean Production System.

This work presents a new paradigm for empirical study of cognitive models of emotional intelligence and preliminary results obtained within it. Among computational approaches to modeling human emotions, the eBICA cognitive architecture takes a special place, because it provides a framework for unification of cognitive and physiological models of emotional intelligence, dimensional and componential representations of emotions, and more. Selected paradigm involves spontaneous interactions among three dancing avatars, one or two of which can be controlled by human participants. Available behaviors include selection of a partner, changing facial expressions and dance patterns. Several types of virtual dance partners are implemented based on the eBICA model: “timid”, “ringleader”, “dancer”, “naive”, and intermediate cases. Simulations and empirical data show that the selected approach is useful and can potentially lead to a socially attractive, emotionally intelligent behavior.

This study uses the German socioeconomic panel data to investigate the effects of mass migration of East Germans on the generalized trust of West Germans who experienced the aftermath of the unification. Results suggest that West Germans’ trust is negatively correlated with migration, but the persistent effect is only confined to participants in the labor markets at the time. The subsequent analysis finds that perceiving migrants as labor market competitors is a possible channel through which trust is negatively affected.

The FASILL programming language (acronym of “Fuzzy Aggregators and Similarity Into a Logic Language”) combines a weak unification algorithm, based on similarity relations, along with a rich repertoire of fuzzy connectives and aggregators, whose truth functions can be defined on a complete lattice. In this work, we want to provide a unified view of the fundamental concepts and ideas that inspired its construction, jointly with the implementation techniques that made it possible. We detail the implementation of the operational semantics and we describe the overall structure of the FASILL system. The FASILL language is well-suited for a wide range of applications and, specifically, it can help the development of knowledge based systems where to deal with uncertainty is important. After ten years designing and implementing fuzzy logic systems, this work culminates and agglutinates the experience acquired in our research group on the development of this kind of modern programming languages.

We revisit faithfully balanced modules. These are faithful modules having the double centralizer property. For finite-dimensional algebras our main tool is the category ${\rm cogen}^1(M)$ of modules with a copresentation by summands of finite sums of $M$ on which ${\rm Hom}(-,M)$ is exact. For a faithfully balanced module $M$ the functor ${\rm Hom}(-,M)$ is a duality on these categories - for cotilting modules this is the Brenner-Butler theorem. We also study new classes of faithfully balanced modules combining cogenerators and cotilting modules. Then we turn to relative homological algebra in the sense of Auslander-Solberg and define a relative version of faithfully balancedness which we call $1$-$\mathbf{F}$-faithful. We find relative versions of the best known classes of faithfully balanced modules (including (co)generators ,(co)tilting and cluster tilting modules). Here we characterize the corresponding modules over the endomorphism ring of the faithfully balanced module - this is what we call a \emph{correspondence}. Two highlights are the relative (higher) Auslander correspondence and the relative cotilting correspondence - the second is a generalization of a relative cotilting correspondence of Auslander-Solberg to an involution (as the usual cotilting correspondence is)., Comment: 37 pages. v2: Some typos have been fixed, including the incorrect statements in Theorem 1.3 and Theorem 1.4

Unification and generalization are operations on two terms computing respectively their greatest lower bound and least upper bound when the terms are quasi-ordered by subsumption up to variable renaming (i.e., t 1 ⪯ t 2 iff t 1 = t 2 σ for some variable substitution σ). When term signatures are such that distinct functor symbols may be related with a fuzzy equivalence (called a similarity), these operations can be formally extended to tolerate mismatches on functor names and/or arity or argument order. We reformulate and extend previous work with a declarative approach defining unification and generalization as sets of axioms and rules forming a complete constraint-normalization proof system. These include the Reynolds-Plotkin term-generalization procedures, Maria Sessa's “weak” unification with partially fuzzy signatures and its corresponding generalization, as well as novel extensions of such operations to signatures with weaker functor similarities (i.e., with possibly different arities). One advantage of this approach is that it requires no modification of the conventional data structures for terms and substitutions. This and the fact that these declarative specifications are efficiently executable conditional Horn-clauses offers great practical potential for fuzzy information-handling applications.

Genomics is a sequence-based informatics science and a three-dimensional-structure-based material science. However, in practice, most genomics researchers utilize sequence-based informatics approaches or three-dimensional-structure-based material science techniques, not both. This division is, at least in part, the result of historical developments rather than a fundamental necessity. The underlying computational tools, experimental techniques, and theoretical models were developed independently. The primary result presented here is a framework for the unification of informatics- and physics-based data associated with DNA, nucleosomes, and chromatin. The framework is based on the mathematical representation of geometrically exact rods and the generalization of DNA basepair step parameters. Data unification enables researchers to integrate computational, experimental, and theoretical approaches for the study of chromatin biology. The framework can be implemented using model-view-controller design principles, existing genome browsers, and existing molecular visualization tools. We developed a minimal, web-based genome dashboard, G-Dash-min, and applied it to two simple examples to demonstrate the usefulness of data unification and proof of concept. Genome dashboards developed using the framework and design principles presented here are extensible and customizable and are therefore more broadly applicable than the examples presented. We expect a number of purpose-specific genome dashboards to emerge as a novel means of investigating structure-function relationships for genomes that range from basepairs to entire chromosomes and for generating, validating, and testing mechanistic hypotheses.

This paper proposes an extension of first-order disunification problems by taking into account binding operators according to the nominal approach. In this approach, bindings are implemented through atom abstraction, and renaming of atoms is implemented via atom permutations. In the nominal setting, unification problems consist of equational questions ( s ≈ α ? t ) considered under freshness constraints ( a # ? t ) that restrict solutions by forbidding free occurrences of atoms in the instantiation of variables. In addition to equational and freshness constraints, nominal disunification problems include also nominal disunification constraints ( s ≉ α ? t ), and their solutions consist of a substitution and additional freshness constraints such that under these constraints the instantiation of the equations, disequations and freshness constraints with the substitution hold. By re-using nominal unification techniques, this paper shows how to decide whether two nominal terms can be made different modulo α-equivalence. This is done by extending previous results on first-order disunification, and defining the notion of solutions with exceptions in the nominal syntax. A discussion on the semantics of disunification constraints is also given.

Current technical discussions like Industrie 4.0 and now Artificial Intelligence lead to more and more agreement potential between the employer side and workers’ representatives. This paper is about a methodological concept in the learning factory where the social partners (employer and workers’ representatives) jointly work on an implementation project in their company. Conflicts between both parties lead to higher costs and longer time in the commissioning of new technologies. Since the commissioning of new technologies in Germany is subject to codetermination the importance here is even higher. For this reason, an assumption of this approach is that it will lead to faster unification processes of the social partners to save time and money. The learning factory will be introduced as a neutral location to handle projects factual and not ideological. Conflict management theories and the holistic view of the learning factory with the technology-organization-personnel (T-O-P) approach will support the new concept as well. With the help of the learning factory participants will be able to enhance their knowledge about special technologies through practical exercises. They would be able to discuss at eye level in order to observe the most important fields of action during the introduction process of technologies. The method uses the classical morphology of learning factories and extends the concepts by several aspects. It will also show the possibilities and limits of the method.

Recent ISO Geometrical Product Specifications (GPS) standards have introduced multiple ways to define geometrical deviations in design and manufacturing. These definitions depend on an association operation, which fits an ideal-form surface to a nonideal-form feature. This paper describes new mathematical and computational challenges that stem from these recent developments and provides a unification of different points of view using classical definitions of Riemann sums and integration. It also provides important practical means to define association operations for verification using digital technologies.

Hierarchy of urban transport networks is a fundamental component of the traffic organization in cities. Until recently, conventional hierarchy approach has provided almost absolute priority to car movement, resulting in dysfunctional urban systems with low level of modal integration, unattractive and inaccessible public spaces as well as serious environmental issues. The need for a new hierarchy formulation which promotes sustainable means of transport is now more imperative than ever. The aim of this paper is to create a methodological process for formulating the strategic road network of a large metropolitan city. This method divides primary roads into 6 categories based on their network position, their connectivity, their urban characteristics, the existence of trunk bus lines or metropolitan cycling routes as well as their current classification. The study area of the research is the metropolitan area of Athens in Greece. The implementation of the proposed method can benefit Athens in many ways, such as promotion of sustainable means of transport, enhancement of urban vitality, environmental protection, unification of the urban fabric, accessibility improvement etc. The methodological framework described, constitutes a street-oriented planning tool that gives priority to public transport, walking and cycling. It can be applied to other study areas as well, acting as a roadmap for strategic road network formulation.

Drags are a recent, natural generalization of terms which admit arbitrary cycles. A key aspect of drags is that they can be equipped with a composition operator so that rewriting amounts to replace a drag by another in a composition. In this paper, we develop a unification algorithm for drags that allows to check the local confluence property of a set of drag rewrite rules. This work is partially supported by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 under grant PID2020-112581GB-C21.

Autonomous Agents (AAs) capable of exhibiting emotional behaviors have contributed to the development of natural human-machine interactions in several application domains. In order to provide AAs with emotional mechanisms, their underlying architecture must implement an Artificial Emotion System (AES), a computational model that imitates specific facets of human emotions. Although several AES have been reported in related literature, their design is generally supported on several emotion theories, leading researchers to model and integrate isolated emotion components and mechanisms into the architectures of AES. This theoretical foundation of AES contributes to ambiguities in the analysis and comparison of their underlying architectures, which demands the definition of standards, design guidelines, and integrative frameworks. In this paper, we present a psychologically inspired theoretical framework designed to serve as a platform for the unification of AES' components, the comparison of AES, and the design and implementation of AES in AAs. We analyze common emotion-related requirements of AES, emotion components involved in the design of this type of computational model, and emotion theories that drive the design of most AES. The validation of this framework demonstrates its compatibility with current AES and its feasibility as a model for unifying multiple emotional theories.

Thomas Kuhn suggested that symbolic generalizations are applied to concrete systems by a process involving exemplars and analogical reasoning. Using the related concepts of theoretical and formal templates, I argue that the process of applying templates can in some cases be made explicit and that we do not need to rely on similarity relations and tacit knowledge. In so doing I show how some formal models can be transferred from one scientific field to another. Examples include scale-free networks, the Lotka-Volterra model from biology, and the Goodwin model in economics. I also argue that this explicit approach has advantages over the more psychologically oriented approach of Kuhn and explain the sense in which templates do and do not produce unification.

In this paper, the notion of semi-symmetric connections provides us a good apparatus to establish a unified field theory. The field equations are derived from an action principle which is formed naturally by the scalar curvature of the semi-symmetric connection. The derived equations contain the Einstein and Maxwell equations in vacuum, simultaneously.

This paper presents a novel method for personal authentication of individuals using a deep learning approach. The reported method implements the fusion of two biometric attributes, namely fingernail plates and finger knuckles. Both these biometric traits have been extracted from the index, middle and ring fingers of a database of 890 (5 each from 178 persons) low-resolution hand dorsal images. AlexNet, a pre-trained deep learning model , has been tailored for feature extraction to suit the number of classes in the database. Deep learning features are extracted from both the traits using the customized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). These features have been fused at the score-level and the rank-level for different combinations. Both these levels of fusion have been executed through well-established rules. Score-level fusion results show that verification can be done quite accurately with this multimodal framework. Results also depict that information fusion of these traits at the rank-level can be optimized to give Rank-1 identification rate of a perfect 100%.

This work adapts a formalisation in Coq of a nominal C-unification algorithm to include “protected variables” that cannot be instantiated during the unification process. By introducing protected variables we are able to reuse the C-unification algorithm to solve nominal C-matching (as well as equality check) problems. From the algorithmic point of view having this extension would be enough to adapt the C-unification algorithm for dealing with equational check as well as with C-matching problems, but the resulting algorithms would not be formally checked by simple reuse of the original formalisation. This paper describes the additional effort necessary in order to adapt the specification and reuse previous formalisations.

Microbial communities play a major role in disease, biogeochemical cycling, agriculture, and bioremediation. However, identifying the ecological processes that govern microbial community assembly and disentangling the relative impacts of those processes has proven challenging. Here, we propose that this discord is due to microbial systems being studied at different spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic scales. We argue that different processes dominate at different scales, and that through a more explicit consideration of spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic grains and extents (the two components of scale) a more accurate, clear, and useful understanding of microbial community assembly can be developed. We demonstrate the value of applying ecological concepts of scale to microbiology, specifically examining their application to nestedness, legacy effects, and taxa-area relationships of microbial systems. These proposed considerations of scale will help resolve long-standing debates in microbial ecology regarding the processes determining the assembly of microbial communities, and provide organizing principles around which hypotheses and theories can be developed.

This paper describes a formalisation in Coq of nominal syntax extended with associative (A), commutative (C) and associative-commutative (AC) operators. This formalisation is based on a natural notion of nominal α-equivalence, avoiding the use of an auxiliary weak α-relation used in previous formalisations of nominal AC equivalence. A general α-relation between terms with A, C and AC function symbols is specified and formally proved to be an equivalence relation. As corollaries, one obtains the soundness of α-equivalence modulo A, C and AC operators. General α-equivalence problems with A operators are log-linearly bounded in time while if there are also C operators they can be solved in O(n 2 log ⁡n); nominal α-equivalence problems that also include AC operators can be solved with the same running time complexity as in standard first-order AC approaches. This development is a first step towards verification of nominal matching, unification and narrowing algorithms modulo equational theories in general.

We present a class of heterotic compactifications where it is possible to lower the string unification scale down to the GUT scale, while preserving the validity of the perturbative analysis. We illustrate this approach with an explicit example of a four-dimensional chiral heterotic vacuum with N=1 supersymmetry., 14 pages

In this paper, we obtain an inequality for unitarily invariant norms which unifies the arithmetic–geometric mean inequality and the Holder inequality for unitarily invariant norms.

Cloud Computing is currently one of the major trends in the computer industry. It offers a wide range of both opportunities and challenges. The lack of governance causes a slowdown in the adoption process, especially with an absence of a comprehensive approach supporting the Cloud Computing governance objectives. Regarding this issue, our goal is to develop a new management and governance framework based on endorsed IT models; namely ITIL, COBIT, and ISO/IEC 27001/2. These models have been developed for different purposes and aspects of IT governance. The proposed framework is an attempt to a unified approach by taking into consideration the models’ dissimilarities. Before we go further with the final unification stage, this study's main objective is to develop both the evaluation and the integration approaches with regwards to the IT models. The results, therefore, are to shed light on the relevant outcomes emanate from an elaboration within an entirely unified CC governance framework.

The problem of nominal unification where variables are allowed for atoms, and computing a complete set of unifiers is considered. The complexity is shown to be NP-complete, while for special cases there are polynomial time algorithms. The main result is a novel algorithm to compute a complete set of unifiers which performs lazy guessing of equality or disequality of atom-variables, runs in NP time, and the collecting variant has more chances to keep the complete set of unifiers small. Applications of this algorithm are in reasoning about program transformations in higher order functional languages. We also present a variant of the unification algorithm that delays guessing and checking solvability, and produces a single most general unifier.

The principle of dynamical similitude—the belief that the same behavior may be exhibited by very different systems—allows us to use mathematical models from physics to understand psychological phenomena. Sometimes, model choice is straightforward. For example, the two-frequency resonance map can be used to make predictions about the performance of multifrequency ratios in physical, chemical, physiological and social behavior. Sometimes, we have to dig deeper into our dynamical toolbox to select an appropriate technique. An overview is provided of other methods, including mass-spring modeling and multifractal analysis, that have been applied successfully to various psychological phenomena. A final demonstration of dynamical similitude comes from the use of the same multifractal method that was used to extract team-level experience from the neurophysiological data of individual team members to the analysis of a large scale economic phenomenon, the stock market index. Continual development of analytical methods that are informed by and can be applied to other sciences allows us to treat psychological phenomena as continuous with the rest of the natural world.

The last fifty years or so have seen a transformational change in statistical methodology, from a discrete set of specific methods to a single, integrated paradigm. An early example is the seminal paper by Nelder and Wedderburn (1972) that introduced the unifying concept of the generalised linear model for independently replicated data. Later computational advances have stimulated a comparable unification for modelling data with various kinds of dependence, for example in time and/or in space. I argue that this transformation should encourage statistical scientists to change their focus from analysing data to solving problems. I give an example from an ongoing study of the acquisition of natural immunity to leptospirosis among slum-dwellers in northern Brazil.

The ability to define complex in a clear but representative manner Shape is a useful method in machine learning, known as shape abstraction. A deep neural network without supervision that forecasts a number Primitive forms for a three-dimensional arbitrary input. The shape of the aircraft and chair models is built and educated. Any changes to correct unfair outcomes. This is the network can predict primitive sets similar to the form of Input. The primitive sets are not parsimonious, however, i.e. The same part of a can be defined with several primitives Item object. A solution to this problem is suggested by adding a punitive purpose for primitive overlapping, but not generating the effect you like. Effects of direct application of both the network and the improvements are implemented and discussed.

What determines the rejection of exogenously imposed institutions? To address this question, we exploit the transplantation of institutions that occurred when southern Italy was annexed to Piedmont, during the Italian unification process of the 1860s. We assemble a novel dataset on episodes of brigandage, a form of violent uprising against the unitary government, and on pre-unification social and economic characteristics of southern Italian municipalities. We find that the intensity of institutional rejection is ceteris paribus lower in and close to settlements of Piedmontese origin. We argue that geographical distance from these communities is a proxy for cultural distance from the Piedmontese rulers. Thus, our results suggest that cultural proximity to the ‘donor’ reduces institutional rejection by ‘recipient’ communities in the context of institutional transplantations. We rule out alternative mechanisms proposed by the economic literature, provide suggestive evidence of cultural persistence and diffusion in our context, and discuss two possible culture-based interpretations of our results: a clash between local values and the content of the new institutions, and social identification with the Piedmontese rulers.

China has announced its commitment to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. However, market segmentation might hinder these achievements because it creates carbon leakage among provinces. This study aims to empirically examine the impact of market segmentation on the effectiveness of environmental regulations based on a dynamic spatial panel approach using data for 30 Chinese provinces from 2004 to 2018. The results show that although environmental regulations can effectively curb carbon emissions, they can also have the opposite effect under the influence of market segmentation, which leads to a green paradox. The green paradox effect of market segmentation is more pronounced in provinces with a higher share of secondary industries. Therefore, to effectively avoid the green paradox phenomenon, it is necessary to continuously promote market unification, optimize the industrial structure, and establish a unified carbon reduction system. This study clarified the relationship between market segmentation and the green paradox, thereby providing important insights for China to achieve its carbon emission reduction and carbon neutrality goals.

We analyze clearing mechanisms in financial networks in which agents may have both monetary individual assets and mutual liabilities. A clearing mechanism prescribes mutual payments between agents to settle their mutual liabilities. The corresponding payments, summarized in a payment matrix, are made in accordance with agent specific claims rules that stem from the vast literature on claims problems. We show that large classes of centralized and decentralized clearing mechanisms all prescribe the same payment matrix under the condition that the underlying claims rules satisfy composition; a property satisfied by the proportional rule that is often applied in insolvency proceedings. This payment matrix is the one that contains the minimal amount of payments required to clear the network. In fact, we show that composition guarantees unification of clearing mechanisms in which agents pay simultaneously and clearing mechanisms in which agents pay sequentially in any arbitrary order. Therefore, for a given financial network, each clearing mechanism gives rise to the same transfer allocation. Moreover, we provide an axiomatic characterization of the corresponding mutual claims rule on the basis of five axioms: scale invariance, equal treatment of equals, composition, path independence and consistency. This characterization extends the analogous characterization for claims rules as given by Moulin (2000).

Are transaction costs and half-lives between two cities the same in both directions in traditional city-based monetary systems? Market conditions and political circumstances may not justify this assumption; and we provide evidence that it does not hold in the 1825-1885 period in Spain. Moreover, we show empirical evidence that market integration in Spain from 1875 to 1885 was a slow process of monetary unification with decreasing transaction costs, and a very inefficient convergence. Therefore, full integration did not happen in the period 1875-1885 and had to wait until mid-1880s, when the Spanish money-market was unified due to financial innovations.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed humankind to a global health crisis unprecedented in its scope and impact. The pandemic struggle, however, is not limited to our biological survival; it extends to preserving our cultural and growth achievements by avoiding an economic catastrophe on both global and regional levels. Nevertheless, only a few narrow measures have been taken to restore the equilibrium in affected business relationships. This lack of rigorous regulatory intervention raises the question of whether private law regimes can fairly cope with the effects of the pandemic on international trade. Attempting to answer this enquiry, this paper explores the role of the Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) in tackling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study comprises three parts, which correspond to: i. the successful resolution of disputes and the salvage of existing business relationships, ii. the reinstatement of trust and the creation of new opportunities in international trade, and iii. the promulgation of private law mechanisms that foresee such crises and allocate the burden of such major events between the parties.

A nonstandard viewpoint to quantum gravity is discussed. General relativity and quantum mechanics are to be related as two descriptions of the same, e.g. as Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schrodinger’s wave mechanics merged in the contemporary quantum mechanics. From the viewpoint of general relativity one can search for that generalization of relativity implying the in-variance “within – out of” of the same system.

The different target of the time period has been established over the past two decades in the institutionalization of a single currency union in West Africa. Depending on varied reasons the proposed programs have always failed before the set timelines in respect of ECOWAS monetary unification and single currency adoption. As a result, the paper explored and developed its argument based on the existing studies of structured economic shocks, significant to the failure of the single currency union, and its major causal factors. And with observed structured analysis propose catalytic activator method as a theoretical guide to attain the single currency union within three (3) years ahead, if the necessary requirement as the commitment level of members’ State is applied towards the single currency unification program. It then elaborates in the spirit of precision the process required to sustain the eco-currency program in other to elevate members State in an out-date of its domestic currencies struggling as a subservient economic bloc to the adoption of a new anticipated domineering currency in its own merit to shoulder with the global dominating hard currencies.

Serbian Abstract: На крају Првог светског рата и победе Антанте, као и револуције у Русији, долази до озбиљне прекомпозиције карте Европе: нестало је неколико великих царевина, а више народа је остварило своју независност, или територијално проширење. Краљевина Срба, Хрвата и Словенаца је окупила Србе и остале југословенске народе, након ратних победа Србије и Црне Горе. Румунија је значајно проширена у односу на предратно стање, добитком Трансилваније, румунског Баната, Бесарабије и Буковине. Две суседне земље су биле савезничке у Првом светском рату и потом су блиско сарађивале у Версајској Европи, као чланице Мале антанте, Балканског савеза и савезнице Француске. English Abstract: At the end of World War I and the victory of Entente, as well the Russian revolution, it came to serious re-composition of the European map: the some great empires disappeared, and many nations achieved independence, or territory enlargement. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes gathered Serbs and other Yugoslav nations, after the victory of Serbia and Montenegro. Romania was significantly enlarged, in relation to prewar situation, with incorporation of Transylvania, Romanian Banat, Bessarabia and Bukovina. Two neighbor states were allies in World War I and then close collaborated in Versailles Europe, as the members of Little Entente, Balkans Union and as French allies.

Recent political events such as Brexit, as well as changing demographics have made the unification of Northern Ireland and the Republic likelier than recently thought possible. Unification would require addressing many political and economic issues. One change would be the adoption of the currency of The Republic-the euro. A low level of co-movement between Northern Irish and euro housing markets could be problematic both for the housing market and economy of Northern Ireland. If home prices in Northern Ireland were falling, while those in the rest of the euro zone were sharply rising, the ECB would likely tighten policy. This would be the opposite of what would be optimal for Northern Ireland. We thus study house price co-movement between Northern Ireland and eight eurozone housing markets. When we employ measures that are mainly linear, results indicate that co-movement between euro housing markets and Northern Ireland may be no worse, and perhaps even greater than current co-movement with the UK. However, the use of a metric which accounts for differences in cyclical amplitudes reveals a very low level of co-movement with euro countries compared to that with the UK. Indeed, Northern Ireland exhibits much greater idiosyncrasy with the rest of the euro markets than even Ireland or Spain, both of which had housing booms and busts followed by sharp recessions. Joining the euro would thus entail substantial risk for Northern Irish housing market and, by extension, its macroeconomy.

Problem definition: In the U.S. auto market, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) implements a stricter fuel economy standard in California than the federal standard implemented by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Trump administration’s 2018 announcement to freeze the EPA standard threatened to widen its gap from the CARB standard and cause a split market where automakers offer differentiated car models in CARB and non-CARB states. Inspired by this crisis, we investigate three research questions: when is market unification (all vehicles meeting a common efficiency standard) attainable? Is unifying a split market likely to reduce total CO2 emissions? If so, what strategies can help unify the market when unification does not occur naturally? Methodology/results: We adopt a game-theoretic model where two regulators with different levels of environmental awareness set efficiency standards in their respective markets, a firm offers product(s) for these markets, and consumers make purchases. We find that there exist cases where the firm offers a unified product for both markets, a different product in each market, or only serves one market, and our analysis suggests that unifying a split market may help curb emissions. We then propose and show that horizontal negotiations (between the regulators) and vertical negotiations (between a regulator and the firm) are potentially effective strategies to unify a split market and reduce emissions. Managerial implications: Our findings show that a more environmentally aware regulator can leverage its market power and reduce CO2 emissions outside its jurisdiction through negotiations. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the regulator should prioritize horizontal negotiations while using vertical negotiations as a back-up option. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.1141 .

The purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate pathways to Irish unification that would be (a) constitutionally permissible in Ireland—i.e. the State currently governed by the Constitution of Ireland 1937—(b) consistent with the terms of the Belfast / Good Friday Agreement 1998 (GFA), and (c) consistent with the Northern Ireland Act 1998. Starting with the southern Irish perspective, we argue that bare unification does not require constitutional amendment, and could be achieved by a plebiscite or (probably) legislation. There are, however, many related changes frequently suggested in the context of unification that would require either a constitutional amendment or constitutional replacement in the South. Without evaluating the merits of any of these changes, we make an assumption—which we believe to be reasonable although contestable—that unification would involve at least some changes of this type. It follows that unification would involve a referendum, either to amend or replace the Constitution of Ireland 1937. We argue that the GFA requires that this referendum be concurrent with a referendum in Northern Ireland, although there is some ambiguity as to the meaning of ‘concurrence’. If both referendums favour unification, there is then an obligation on the Irish and British Governments to introduce and support in their respective parliaments legislation to give effect to that wish. Irish unification must therefore involve, if it is to meet the three criteria identified above, concurrent referendums North and South followed by legislation approved by Westminster and the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament). We go further, however, and specify three desiderata against which unification processes can be assessed. First, that those voting in referendums should be able to have a reasonably clear idea of what the implications of their vote. Second, that the processes should reduce the risk of the UK and Ireland diverging over the final constitutional status of Northern Ireland. Third, that the processes should allow for a wide range of consultation and negotiation over the constitutional and political structure of a unified Ireland, including extensive attempts to engage with the views of northern unionists. We identify several models that fit the legal parameters. We suggest, however, that the model that best meets the desiderata is one in which the form of a united Ireland is settled through negotiations prior to the referendums. The required legislation in Westminster and the Oireachtas should then follow as a matter of course.

The history of modern economics abounds with pleas for more pluralism as well as pleas for more unification. These seem to be contradictory goals, suggesting that pluralism and unification are mutually exclusive, or at least that they involve trade-offs with more of one necessarily being traded off against less of the other. This paper will use the example of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) to argue that the relationship between pluralism and unification is often more complex than this simple dichotomy suggests. In particular, Samuelson's Foundations is invariably presented as a key text in the unification of modern economics during the middle of the twentieth century; and in many ways that is entirely correct. But Samuelson's unification was not at the theoretical (causal and explanatory) level, but rather at the purely mathematical derivational level. Although this fact is recognized in the literature on Samuelson, what seems to be less recognized is that for Samuelson, much of the motivation for this unification was pluralist in spirit: not to narrow scientific economics into one single theory, but rather to allow for more than one theory to co-exist under a single unified derivational technique. This hidden pluralism will be discussed in detail. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for more recent developments in economics.

Buildings are supposed to create a healthy and comfortable environment for people. Considering subjective response, the problem of multi-objective optimization of building environment control becomes more complicated. The weight method can achieve the unification of optimization goals, but the core challenge is to obtain accurate weights based on a small amount of measured data. Information theory provides a way to quantify the importance of parameters. This paper established a method to calculate the weights of subjective and objective parameters quickly based on the information gain ratio, and took the difference in occupants' feedback under satisfied and unsatisfied conditions into account. Then this method was applied to a case study, two office buildings located in Shanghai, China, in which 120 samples (satisfied 104; unsatisfied 16) in Case 1 and 715 samples (satisfied 537; unsatisfied 178) in Case 2 were collected. The weight calculation time was less than 0.1s, and thus the weight of all parameters can be updated quickly when data is accumulated. Among all the parameters, the thermal satisfaction (with a weight of 0.145 in Case 1 and 0.243 in Case 2) and light satisfaction (with a weight of 0.146 in Case 1 and 0.171 in Case 2) were found to have the greatest impact on overall satisfaction. The weight calculation results under satisfied (0.57 and 0.90 of subjective parameters; 0.43 and 0.10 of objective parameters) and unsatisfied conditions (0.55 and 0.70 of subjective parameters; 0.45 and 0.30 of objective parameters) were found to be different, thus, comprehensive consideration of the difference is of great significance to engineering applications.

What does it mean to be a professional in accounting? Drawing on a comprehensive set of empirical materials, this paper provides a rich account of how accountants made sense of their professional identities in the context of the unification of three Canadian accounting associations. In a sharp contrast to what prior studies have examined in terms of knowledge, personal trait, and presentationalism, this paper reveals that professional identity is often construed by accountants in terms of self-privileged standing in perceived social pecking orders (identity ranking) and in terms of professional life journey (identity experiencing). Self-privileged standing is about how one is positioned and compared with others; professional life journey, on the other hand, entails not just the past but also the future and is laden with cognition, meanings, and emotions. These two aspects of professional identity are co-constitutive and feed each other for accountants’ identity work, in which the sense of professional security (or insecurity) plays an important role. This paper in its totality highlights the dynamic, fluid nature of professional identity. But more importantly, this paper points to the problematic hollowing out of the very meaning of the term “professional” in the accounting field.

In this paper, we solve the problem of hybrid output unification of two local output feedback controller U 0 and U 1 for linear systems subject to input saturation. The closed-loop system with the controller U 0 has a smaller region of attraction R 0 and higher decay rate σ0, while the closed-loop system with U 1 has a larger region of attraction R 1 and a slower decay rate σ1, R 0 ⊂ R 1 and σ0 > σ1. To the best of our knowledge, the problem of unification of two local output feedback controller, has been solved only in the recent papers [17] and [2]. In [17] , the problem of unification of two output controller is solved by using two norm estimators and a trigger time τ* to switch from the “global” controller to the “local” one, where it is defined in [17] and chosen sufficiently large. The work [2] proves that it can be selected arbitrarily small. Such choice of τ* minimizes the use of the slow controller U 1 and, thus, ameliorates the performance significantly. In this paper, the solution of the unification problem is formulated by means of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be easily verified numerically. The numerical example given in this paper compares the performance of the proposed hybrid controller with hybrid controllers in [17] and [2] .

Energy efficiency has become one the most important factors in today's processing platforms. Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) have turned out to perform well in this area. In this paper, we have proposed two methods to enhance their energy efficiency. The first method decreases the power consumption of a CGRA by reducing the number of occurring transitions of the context switching process. The second one decreases the energy consumption of a CGRA through volume shrinkage of its context memory. Our results show up to 83% of the context memory energy can be reduced by using our proposed method. In addition, a high level instruction-set simulator for CGRA has been presented in this paper.

This study aims to explore the optimal model for the Korean government's organization (KGO) of the maritime industry using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The result of the AHP analysis revealed that most respondents of the survey firstly weighted realistic possibility (0.473), and goal orientation (0.316) and institutional stability (0.221) were secondly and thirdly evaluated. The sub-criteria were systematically classified as suitability (0.279), competency (0.139), reliability (0.125), efficiency (0.115), political coordination (0.098), feasibility (0.095), equity (0.076), independence (0.044), and cooperation (0.041). Finally, shipbuilding and offshore plants under the unification with the Ministry of Ocean and Fisheries should be considered as the optimal KGO of the maritime industry in terms of the evaluation of AHP alternatives. Keywords: Korea's Shipping Industry, Ministry of Maritime and Ocean Affairs, Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, Hanjin Shipping, Oversupply of Vessel

In the Korean (re-)unification discourse, limited attention is given to how the highly different systems of land tenure can be unified in a comprehensive land governance framework. Possible reasons include the uncertainty of (re-)unification itself, high sensitivity of the land issue as a territorial matter and limited access to North Korean data about land tenure. Moreover, there are insufficient theoretical foundations regarding the role and the significance of land tenure in the (re-)unification process. This paper identifies what (re-)unification is and describes how, where and when land tenure could be significant in a (re-)unification process. These questions are addressed using the Context-Intervention-Mechanisms-Outcomes-Constraints (CIMOC) framework. This systematic approach takes both the time sequence and a number of aspects based on patterns found in literature into account in order to identify and define what (re-)unification is and how it aligns, adapts or merges to land tenure relations. We find that during transformation processes, discussions on land tenure have both an instrumental and reforming function and land tenure resolution facilitate the peace-building in integration processes. In addition, land tenure institutions play significant role in a territorial development process. The key findings of the research synthesis rationalize the significance of land tenure in (re-)unification process. Amalgamation of (re-)unification and land tenure discourses derive intricate relationships to address the multi-dimensional problems in the Korean peninsula. Yet, the discussion of both concepts have so far focused on monolytical and pragmatic problem-solving rather than the start of a more fundamental discussion: how to re-shape land governance institutions. This study can be a starting point for policy-makers to discuss and comprehend an unsolved quandary of the Korean peninsula.