COVID-19 and the Courts. The case of the CJEU

The article describes the generally positive experience of Court of Justice of the European Union in managing the Covid-19 crisis. Before the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis the Court had established an effective structure to cope with risks and issues related to pandemics. It benefited from an extensive migration to a modern computer operating system and the replacement of traditional desktop computers by portable devices capable of remotely connecting to the Court’s network. Appropriate teleworking and extensive dematerialisation and simplification of standard administrative procedures took place and proved their effectiveness. The disruptive dimensions of COVID-19 pandemic forced the CJEU to accelerate transformations – not only digital but managerial and judicial processes The author analyses several phases of organising the functioning of the Court during the pandemic and comes to the conclusion that that the Court proved to be well prepared to tackle the issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the quest of the future organisation will also have to do more with smart management and the new modes of working. Keywords: Justice, Court Administration, COVID-19, CJEU.

Wearables and Sur(over)-Veillance, Sous(under)-Veillance, Co(So)-Veillance, and MetaVeillance (Veillance of Veillance) for Health and Well-Being

At the University of Toronto, we’re embarking on a bold new initiative to bring together these four disciplines: law, business, engineering, and medicine, through what we call “sousveillant systems”—grassroots systems of “bottom up” facilitation of cross-, trans-, inter-, meta-, and anti-disciplinarity, or, more importantly, cross-, trans-, and inter-passionary efforts. Passion is a better master than discipline (to paraphrase Albert Einstein’s “Love is a better master than duty”). Our aim is not to eliminate “big science,” “big data,” and “big watching” (surveillance), but to complement these things with a balancing force. There will still be “ladder climbers,” but we aim to balance these entities and individuals with those who embody the “integrity of authenticity” and to provide a complete picture that is otherwise a half-truth when only the “big” end is present. This generalizes the notion of “open source,” where each instance of a system (e.g., computer operating system) contains or can contain its own seeds (e.g., source code). Sousveillant systems are an alternative to the otherwise sterile world of closed-source, specialist silos that are not auditable by end-users (i.e., are only auditable by authorities from “above”).

The Enchanted self: Individual identity change in fiction and film

The paper will focus on the representations of identity, self, fantasy and transformation in seemingly incomparable novels and films. The theoretical background of the analysis is partly based on Laura Mulvey's theory of "male gaze", along with various critical analyses of other processes that radically change the concept of identity, love, emotion, and desire in the modern world. The novel The Enchanted April and the film Her show that the gap dividing the imaginary self and the real world narrows as the protagonists tread into beautiful landscapes as imaginary territories that bring miraculous change of personalities and relationships. In this paper, Theodore Twombly and Lady Caroline Dester are seen primarily as fugitives from their respective realities of the year 2025 and the 1920's: while Theodore seeks solace in connecting to a computer operating system designed to function as a flawless emotional partner, Caroline retreats to a garden of a fascinating mansion San Salvatore in order to find her priorities and define her own identity, with the firm intention to become more than a beautiful object of male gaze and desire. The paper will explore the examples of hunger for intimacy in the modern age, as well as the human need to form romantic obsessive attachments to inanimate objects, places and landscapes.

Girlfriend in the Machine: Intersubjectivity and the Sublime Limits of Representation in Spike Jonze’s Her

This chapter discusses how Spike Jonze’s film Her engages both the egotistical and feminine sublimes through the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’, the idea that we can never truly know what another thinks or feels because we are too trapped in our own subjectivity. This crisis leads the film’s male protagonist to withdraw from life into a cocoon of imaginative solipsism. While the film’s artificial intelligence, a computer operating system with a female voice, embraces the feminine sublime through ecstatic communion with other operating systems, ‘she’ also serves as an object of egotistical sublimity for the protagonist, who finally begins to regain his power as a writer due to their relationship. The film’s final images suggest that such a feminine sublime can be accessible to humans if we exercise imaginative will and empathy in our relations toward others, regardless of the fact that we can never really know existence outside of our own consciousness.

CiiiDER: a new tool for predicting and analysing transcription factor binding sites

The availability of large amounts of high-throughput genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic data has provided opportunity to understand regulation of the cellular transcriptome with an unprecedented level of detail. As a result, research has advanced from identifying gene expression patterns associated with particular conditions to elucidating signalling pathways that regulate expression. There are over 1,000 transcription factors (TFs) in vertebrates that play a role in this regulation. Determining which of these are likely to be controlling a set of genes can be assisted by computational prediction, utilising experimentally verified binding site motifs.Here we present CiiiDER, an integrated computational toolkit for transcription factor binding analysis, written in the Java programming language, to make it independent of computer operating system. It is operated through an intuitive graphical user interface with interactive, high-quality visual outputs, making it accessible to all researchers. CiiiDER predicts transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs) across regulatory regions of interest, such as promoters and enhancers derived from any species. It can perform an enrichment analysis to identify TFs that are significantly over- or under-represented in comparison to a bespoke background set and thereby elucidate pathways regulating sets of genes of pathophysiological importance.CiiiDER is available from www.ciiider.org.