Conclusion

This chapter explores the scope and limits of the book’s central claims, extending the argument to other circumstances and norms and describing cases that do not fit the theory. The chapter examines the recent variation between the United States and Europe on the question of torture. The human rights picture in Europe has improved over the past few decades in part because European institutions have been clearer than the United States about prohibiting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, eliminating the antitorture norm’s specificity problem, and preventing a slippery slope that so often ends with torture. Finally, the chapter broadens the argument by demonstrating how the pervasive belief that autocrats have an edge over rule-bound democracies has tempted certain elected officials to chip away at their own liberal-democratic institutions.

COVID-19 variants, available treatments, and vaccinations: An overview study

SARS-CoV-2 is the recent variation of the corona virus which is infecting people around the world and has affected more than 258 million people worldwide. Upon observation, the virus is similar to the coronavirus which spread from the horseshoe bat or wild animals to human beings. Up to date, there have been three major variants of the coronavirus which have been identified in UK, South Africa, and India which are spreading to other countries. Based on the current data, it is suggested that the incidents of repeated infection with SARS-CoV-2 is related to the level of neutralizing antibodies and the retained memory response which follows infection. Moreover, recently, a critical issue arises in relation to the association of black fungus and COVID-19, and urgent investigation is required. As a treatment method of COVID-19, FDA has recently approved the feasibility of Remdesivir to treat COVID-19 as emergency use authorization (EUA). There are also various possible antivirals which are still undergoing clinical trial. After widespread of the vaccine, the results showed that EUA vaccines have been effective in controlling COVID-19 in patients. However, these licensed vaccines ought to be reviewed to ensure they are also effective in combating the rising variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Entropy as a Topological Operad Derivation

We share a small connection between information theory, algebra, and topology—namely, a correspondence between Shannon entropy and derivations of the operad of topological simplices. We begin with a brief review of operads and their representations with topological simplices and the real line as the main example. We then give a general definition for a derivation of an operad in any category with values in an abelian bimodule over the operad. The main result is that Shannon entropy defines a derivation of the operad of topological simplices, and that for every derivation of this operad there exists a point at which it is given by a constant multiple of Shannon entropy. We show this is compatible with, and relies heavily on, a well-known characterization of entropy given by Faddeev in 1956 and a recent variation given by Leinster.

This time is different! Or is it? NeoMalthusians and environmental optimists in the age of climate change

Warning about dire effects of climate change on armed conflict is a recent variation of a scenario that has been promoted by environmental pessimists for over two centuries. The essence is that human activities lead to resource scarcities that in turn will generate famine, pestilence, and war. This essay reviews three stages of the argument: first, the original Malthusian thesis that focused on food production. Second, the broader neoMalthusian concern from the 1970s about limits to growth and developing scarcities in a range of necessities. And recently, the specter of climate change. In each phase, the Malthusians have met firm opposition from environmental optimists, who argue that emerging scarcities can be countered by human ingenuity, technological progress, and national and international economic and political institutions and that environmental change is not in itself a major driver of human violence. In the third phase, the Malthusian case appears to be stronger because human activities have reached a level where they have a truly global impact. Environmental optimists still insist that these problems can be overcome by human ingenuity and that the long-term trend towards less violence in human affairs is unlikely to be reversed by climate change. The stakes seem higher, but the structure of the debate remains largely the same.

Deep Learning Based Human Presence Detection

Human detection and tracking have been progressively demanded in various industries. The concern over human safety has inhibited the deployment of advanced and collaborative robotics, mainly attributed to the dimensionality limitation of present safety sensing. This study entails developing a deep learning-based human presence detector for deployment in smart factory environments to overcome dimensionality limitations. The objective is to develop a suitable human presence detector based on state-of-the-art YOLO variation to achieve real-time detection with high inference accuracy for feasible deployment at TT Vision Holdings Berhad. It will cover the fundamentals of modern deep learning based object detectors and the methods to accomplish the human presence detection task. The YOLO family of object detectors have truly revolutionized the Computer Vision and object detection industry and have continuously evolved since its development. At present, the most recent variation of YOLO includes YOLOv4 and YOLOv4 - Tiny. These models are acquired and pre-evaluated on the public CrowdHuman benchmark dataset. These algorithms mentioned are pre-trained on the CrowdHuman models and benchmarked at the preliminary stage. YOLOv4 and YOLOv4 – Tiny are trained on the CrowdHuman dataset for 4000 iterations and achieved a mean Average Precision of 78.21% at 25FPS and 55.59% 80FPS, respectively. The models are further fine-tuned on a Custom CCTV dataset and achieved significant precision improvements up to 88.08% at 25 FPS and 77.70% at 80FPS, respectively. The final evaluation justified YOLOv4 as the most feasible model for deployment.

The Competitive Impact of Vertical Integration by Multiproduct Firms

We study the impact of vertical integration on pricing incentives in multiproduct industries. To do so, we exploit recent variation in vertical structure in the US carbonated-beverage industry. While the elimination of double marginalization with vertical integration is normally characterized as procompetitive, economic theory predicts that it may cause anticompetitive price increases in multiproduct industries. We indeed find that vertical integration causes price decreases in products with eliminated double margins but price increases in the other products sold by the integrated firm. These results provide new evidence of anticompetitive effects of vertical mergers. (JEL D22, D43, G34, L13, L22, L66)

Strong geodetic problem on Cartesian products of graphs

The strong geodetic problem is a recent variation of the geodetic problem. For a graph G, its strong geodetic number sg(G) is the cardinality of a smallest vertex subset S, such that each vertex of G lies on a fixed shortest path between a pair of vertices from S. In this paper, the strong geodetic problem is studied on the Cartesian product of graphs. A general upper bound for sg(G □ H) is determined, as well as exact values for Km □ Kn, K1,k □ Pl, and prisms over Kn–e. Connections between the strong geodetic number of a graph and its subgraphs are also discussed.