Umweltschutzrecht in Tschechien

After 40 years of a totalitarian regime, the state of the environment in Czechoslovakia was catastrophic. The revolutions that swept through Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in 1989/1990, including Czechoslovakia, sparked enthusiastic hopes for a better, democratic and perhaps “greener” future for this region. The major strategic goal of all the post-communist CEE countries was to join the European Union. The “eastern” enlargement was to take place under strict conditions in order to ensure that the EU does not suffer the negative consequences of an ill-prepared expansion. In the light of joining the EU, Czechoslovakia managed to adopt the whole series of progressive environmental legislation. However, after the parliamentary elections in June 1992 and the split of Czechoslovakia, environmental protection had to give way to economic growth and the overall transformation of society. This paper describes the development of Czech environmental law from a legal and a political perspective, providing examples illustrating the Czech Republic’s performance in implementing the EU environmental law and policy. After 17 years of membership in the EU, the Czech Republic and the implementation of the EU environmental law is still in conditional mode - the availability of the EU funds is the main leverage and motive to comply with the EU law.

New Insights Into Learning With Correntropy-Based Regression

Stemming from information-theoretic learning, the correntropy criterion and its applications to machine learning tasks have been extensively studied and explored. Its application to regression problems leads to the robustness-enhanced regression paradigm: correntropy-based regression. Having drawn a great variety of successful real-world applications, its theoretical properties have also been investigated recently in a series of studies from a statistical learning viewpoint. The resulting big picture is that correntropy-based regression regresses toward the conditional mode function or the conditional mean function robustly under certain conditions. Continuing this trend and going further, in this study, we report some new insights into this problem. First, we show that under the additive noise regression model, such a regression paradigm can be deduced from minimum distance estimation, implying that the resulting estimator is essentially a minimum distance estimator and thus possesses robustness properties. Second, we show that the regression paradigm in fact provides a unified approach to regression problems in that it approaches the conditional mean, the conditional mode, and the conditional median functions under certain conditions. Third, we present some new results when it is used to learn the conditional mean function by developing its error bounds and exponential convergence rates under conditional ([Formula: see text])-moment assumptions. The saturation effect on the established convergence rates, which was observed under ([Formula: see text])-moment assumptions, still occurs, indicating the inherent bias of the regression estimator. These novel insights deepen our understanding of correntropy-based regression, help cement the theoretic correntropy framework, and enable us to investigate learning schemes induced by general bounded nonconvex loss functions.

A Note on the Nonparametric Estimation of the Conditional Mode by Wavelet Methods

The purpose of this note is to introduce and investigate the nonparametric estimation of the conditional mode using wavelet methods. We propose a new linear wavelet estimator for this problem. The estimator is constructed by combining a specific ratio technique and an established wavelet estimation method. We obtain rates of almost sure convergence over compact subsets of Rd. A general estimator beyond the wavelet methodology is also proposed, discussing adaptivity within this statistical framework.

MRF Model-Based Estimation of Camera Parameters and Detection of Underwater Moving Objects

The detection of underwater objects in a video is a challenging problem particularly when both the camera and the objects are in motion. In this article, this problem has been conceived as an incomplete data problem and hence the problem is formulated in expectation maximization (EM) framework. In the E-step, the frame labels are the maximum a posterior (MAP) estimates, which are obtained using simulated annealing (SA) and the iterated conditional mode (ICM) algorithm. In the M-step, the camera model parameters, both intrinsic and extrinsic, are estimated. In case of parameter estimation, the features are extracted at coarse and fine scale. In order to continuously detect the object in different video frames, EM algorithm is repeated for each frame. The performance of the proposed scheme has been compared with other algorithms and the proposed algorithm is found to outperform.

Geometria imaginacji. O kształtowaniu przestrzeni u Schulza

The starting point of the essay is a hypothesis that the concepts of time in Schulz’s fiction can be approached more effectively and systematically than those of space. It is space that shows his inventiveness the best, comparable to his drawings. There are many studies of space in Schulz’s fiction, yet few of them address the basic problem: how is space actually created, what are the rules of its production? While a number of critics have pointed at the figure of the labyrinth and geopoetics has inevitably become a relevant method, less attention has been paid to the representations of phenomena from the border area of dream and wakefulness. Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Impressions, commonly read by Schulz’s peers, suggests many valuable clues. The proper frame of reference for such phenomena, close to spontaneous hallucinations, is language. It is its dynamic, with which Schulz collaborates in a disciplined way without reducing its artistic value, which generates analogies between linguistic operations and spatial forms. The shaping of space conditioned by language – verbal mimesis which renounces any other mimetic ambitions – is a very interesting aspect of Schulz’s writing. The essay includes analyses of the selected passages from Schulz’s stories – those dominated by a unique conditional mode signalized on various levels by verbal, adjectival, and adverbial phrases. Schulz’s tour de force in that respect is “The Gale.” The atmosphere of the story is uncanny and surreal, and, what is perhaps the most important, the sound effects are rich as in no other work of fiction by the Drogobych writer. “Spring” shows other strategies of creating spaces derived from words. It is important that the stories in both Schulz’s collections make the reader turn to the concepts related to the category of non-place.