Fostering Statistical Literacy in Greece

The Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), the National Statistical Institute of Greece, as the guarantor of the quality of official statistics in Greece, has been pursuing, since 2016, an ambitious strategy aiming to foster Statistical Literacy, focusing on strengthening ties with citizens in their dual capacity both as providers of data and ultimately as users of statistics, and thus, operate as crucial enablers of a smoothly functioning virtuous circle of official statistics. Objectives include the development of an understanding of basic methodologies and tools used in official statistics, along with the awareness of its institutional foundations and core principles. This critically contributes to the value of official statistics being spread and effectively communicated, making, at the same time, a convincing case for fact-based decision making in the daily lives of the main stakeholders. This article motivates the approach followed in developing a specific strategy on statistical literacy, outlines its philosophy and main objectives and browses through the array of initiatives and actions undertaken over the last five years. In addition, it explores the responsiveness of citizens to these initiatives and the extent to which these initiatives lead to an increased engagement of key targeted stakeholders.

Rosy: An elegant language to teach the pure reactive nature of robot programming

Robotics is very appealing and is long recognized as a great way to teach programming, while drawing inspiring connections to other branches of engineering and science such as maths, physics or electronics. Although this symbiotic relationship between robotics and programming is perceived as largely beneficial, educational approaches often feel the need to hide the underlying complexity of the robotic system, but as a result fail to transmit the reactive essence of robot programming to the roboticists and programmers of the future. This paper presents Rosy, a novel language for teaching novice programmers through robotics. Its functional style is both familiar with a high-school algebra background and a materialization of the inherent reactive nature of robotic programming. Working at a higher-level of abstraction also teaches valuable design principles of decomposition of robotics software into collections of interacting controllers. Despite its simplicity, Rosy is completely valid Haskell code compatible with the ROS~ecosystem. We make a convincing case for our language by demonstrating how non-trivial applications can be expressed with ease and clarity, exposing its sound functional programming foundations, and developing a web-enabled robot programming environment.

Freedoms or Rights? A Court Deciding While Comfortably Numb

EU was quite a lot valiant back in 1957, when the Treaty of Rome established the dogma of free movement, paving the road for what was considered to be an economic integration. The dogma was founded on the principle of freedom relating to goods; and the subsequent EU Treaties strengthened the freedom of movement for services, persons and capital. However, they were not all the freedoms equally developed. For many years, it seemed that the European Union gave a fairly obvious advantage to the economic significance instead of focalizing on its people and the parameters of their needs. Subsequently, striking a balance between fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights has become a frequent exercise for the CJEU ever since, as well as a difficult puzzle. Bearing in mind that the digital era brings new challenges for both the circulation of commodities and the preservation of rights, the puzzle gets more and more complex: a tug-of-war between the tech-giants and our information privacy. By using the proportionality principle as its most effective weapon, the CJEU has built a convincing case-law, one step at time. However, does it really find the appropriate balance, or the conundrum is more complex than it seems? The present paper attempts to answer this question.

Is there a convincing case for climate veganism?

Climate change compels us to rethink the ethics of our dietary choices and has become an interesting issue for ethicists concerned about diets, including animal ethicists. The defenders of veganism have found that climate change provides a new reason to support their cause because many animal-based foods have high greenhouse gas emissions. The new style of argumentation, the ‘climatic argument(s) for veganism’, may benefit animals by persuading even those who are not concerned about animals themselves but worry about climate change. The arguments about the high emissions of animal-based food, and a resulting moral obligation to abstain from eating such products, are an addition to the prior forms of argument for principled veganism grounded on the moral standing of, and concern for, nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine whether the climatic argument for veganism is convincing. We propose a formulation for the amended version of the argument and discuss its implications and differences compared to the moral obligations of principled veganism. We also reflect upon the implications of our findings on agricultural and food ethics more generally.

Alexander Rosner. - The volume of removal of the entire uterus with the help of a thermocauter to eliminate vaccine relapses. (Über die sog. Thermocauterectomia uteri totalis zur Verhütung von Imfrecidiven)

The author fully shares Winter's opinion about the infectiousness of cancer. He cites one convincing case in this relationship from his own practice, namely, in a patient who underwent a bilateral episiotomy with the removal of the entire uterus, after some time after the operation, relapses were noted, with which there was a cancerous lesion in the place of the former episiotomy.

Spinoza and Property

Though Spinoza did not write much explicitly concerning the subject of property, Matheron, in this essay, makes the convincing case that Spinoza nonetheless had a rich and compelling view on the matter as it was understood in the context of the 17th century. Spinoza’s decisive innovation, against Hobbes and all of his other predecessors is to conceive of right as a physical power, as opposed to a moral power. In other words, right is coextensive with the real power to do whatever one desires to do, which is, quite simply, whatever they actually do in fact do. The inevitable human desire to possess external objects, be they land or money, serves as the basis for Matheron’s analysis of Spinoza’s political philosophy. Matheron concludes with a number of striking claims about Spinoza’s communism, which he suggests is very present in such discussions of property.

The Hemorrhaging Woman and Jairus’ Daughter as Representatives of Israel

The scope of the present study is the symbolic analysis of the two interwoven Markan narratives about the healing of the woman with the flow of blood (5:25-34) and the raising of Jairus’ daughter (5:21-24.35-43). The principal thesis of this work consists in interpreting both women as symbols of Israel. The study begins with the presentation of the methodological premises of symbolic analysis. The main methodological premise of this work is the conviction that the literary sense of this pericope is in fact imbued with symbolism. Then there is a presentation of three criteria which help in detecting symbols in the biblical text: textual probability, conventions probability and contextual probability. Subsequently, in order to lend credence to the principal thesis of the article, seventeen literary elements found in Mark 5:21-43 are discussed; each of them meets the first two criteria and lends itself to symbolic interpretation of the two women as representations of Israel. The cumulative weight of these seventeen elements creates a rather strong cumulative argument in favor of the main thesis. Finally, the conformity between the symbolic interpretation of these women and both the immediate and global contexts of this pericope is discussed. The presence of this conformity meets the third criterion of contextual probability. The article thus offers a convincing case for the symbolic interpretation of the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus’ daughter in Mark 5:21-43 as representations of Israel.

“A style which defies convention, tradition, homogeneity, prudence, and sometimes even syntax”

Combining the methods of stylistics and literary criticism, this essay takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as metaphorical language, employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1881 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s “world of thought and feeling,” creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other “world of thought and feeling”. In addition to positioning both novels as inherently feminist and progressive, this essay compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I hope to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.

Is Ecology Absurd? Diogenes and the End of Civilization

This chapter proposes to unravel the many ecological underpinnings of Diogenes of Sinope’s Cynicism. Perhaps thinking cynically about climate change requires going back to Ancient Cynicism in general, and Diogenes of Sinope in particular; within the argument of this volume, this chapter explores the resurgence of Diogenes and the particular tone of the works of François Rabelais and Michel Montaigne. It makes a convincing case for reading both of these authors less as polar opposites and more as thinkers of the ecological shift in early modern France.

Copying Europe? Integration as a Citizenship Requirement in Australia

Recent decades have seen a significant expansion of so-called “integration requirements” for citizenship applicants in many countries. Though led by European states, the trend now seems to be reaching traditional settler states such as Australia. This article examines the integration requirement proposed for citizenship applicants in Australia in 2017. According to the proposal, applicants for citizenship by conferral would have been required to show that they had “integrated into the Australian community,” for instance, through employment, involvement in community organizations, and the absence of conduct inconsistent with Australian values. Although the proposal failed, it is noteworthy because of its far-reaching nature and novelty in a traditional country of immigration. This article analyzes the implications of the proposed legislation with reference to the diverse groups of permanent immigrants entering Australia, demonstrating its discriminatory potential in terms of gender, nationality, and visa category. It argues that the proposal failed because despite its significant implications, the government did not put forward a convincing case for its introduction and may even have initiated it as a symbolic gesture. The article contributes to understanding why integration requirements that are popular in some states and regions may fail to gain favor in others. It suggests that, given the rapid spread of restrictive immigration policies, scholars should pay more attention to the specific local conditions under which immigration and citizenship policy transfers succeed or fail.