Readiness Potential Prevalence During A Deliberate Decision-making Task

This study investigated the hypothesis that neural markers associated with arbitrary decision-making are present in higher order, deliberate decisions. Furthermore, the study aimed to investigate the effect of higher order decision content on neurophysiological markers such as the readiness potential and the P300 potential. An experiment was designed to measure, evaluate, and compare these electroencephalographic potentials under both arbitrary and deliberate choice conditions. Participants were presented with legal cases and had to convict and acquit criminal offenders. Distinct readiness potentials and P300 potentials were observed for both arbitrary and deliberate decisions across all participants. These findings support the hypothesis that the readiness potential and the P300 potential are present in the neurophysiological data for higher order deliberate decisions. The study also showed initial findings of how the readiness potential may inherently relate to decision content. Increased readiness potential amplitudes were observed for participants with previous exposure to violent crime when they had to acquit or convict criminals accused of violent crimes.

Building a Regime-Type Framework

As a first step in trying to understand the nature and impact of the changes taking place in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, this chapter considers what ‘type’ of regimes their rulers (or rather de facto rulers) now represent. Firstly, it establishes the scholarly consensus on the political systems underpinning the Gulf monarchies, namely their ‘sheikhly authority’ (based on some form of elite consultation and Islamic legitimacy), and their hydrocarbon-financed and social contract-based ‘rentier’ structures (in which citizens generally accept wealth distributions in exchange for their political acquiescence). Secondly, it makes the argument that MBS and MBZ’s regimes have taken a more autocratic-authoritarian turn--moving away from their predecessors’ sheikhly-rentierism--and hypothesizes that their highly personalistic and seemingly more arbitrary decision-making processes might represent some form of contemporary sultanism. In this context, it also makes clear that the other four Gulf monarchies do not appear to have taken the same path, and have mostly retained their historic consultative elements.

Legal Certainty – Protected Values and Partial Objectives: The Case of the Czech Republic

Legal certainty is an essential prerequisite for individuals’ autonomy, as lack of certainty prevents the planning of future activities and making rational decisions. As other key legal principles, it comprises an axiological quality which influences the interpretation of legal rules and the application of statutory laws. Thus, it should be adhered to by all branches of state power. Its objective is to promote several values that are all important for the protection of human rights: the rule of law, protection of legitimate expectations, general trust in law, prevention of arbitrary decision-making, inadmissibility of retroactivity. However, in some legal systems, the concept of legal certainty is slightly different. These differences also influence the extent and limits of legal certainty as it may not mean total rigidity and prevent necessary changes in statutory laws and decision-making. The reasonable balance is influenced by its axiological content. The article analyses the interpretation practice of the Czech Constitutional Court with the aim to determine the partial values inherent to the principle and categorise them according to their importance. Several partial objectives were determined by qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis indicates that the key partial objectives include protection of the values comprising a general trust in the law, individuals’ legitimate expectations, and a certain degree of predictability of laws, administrative practice and courts’ decisions (uniformity, transparency, internal consistency and stability). Having identified these values, further research may be conducted as to how and to what extent expectations should be upheld.

Administrative Issues and Reforms in the Bureaucracy of Pakistan: An Analytical Study

This article highlights the nature of governance in bureaucracy in Pakistan during various regimes. The bureaucracy involved itself in politics and ignored the golden sayings of Quaid-i-Azam, which led it to face various sociopolitical and administrative issues and problems. Bureaucrats sense of primacy resulted in the politicization of bureaucracy. This intervention, as a result, led to decay, arbitrary decision-making, corruption, kickback culture and lack of accountability, etc. This study attempts to present various issues and problems faced by the bureaucracy of Pakistan and suggests reforms to minimize them so that the cherished goal of a developed Pakistan in the 21st century may be achieving.

Public Servitudes for the Certain Types of Facilities Placing: Towards a Discussion on Public Interest Presence

From the standpoint of the dominant interest criterion the article examines the justification of the legislator`s decision to apply public law methods in order to regulate relations concerning the use of land for infrastructural facilities placing. The author gives the arguments in favor of understanding the public interest as the interest of the whole society as a system, rather than the interest of an indefinite range of persons or the majority of the population. The author concludes that there is the simultaneous presence in the specified legal relations and private interests of the participants of legal relations, and public interests of society as a system. Both types of interests in these legal relations are important, but in terms of different aspects of the legal impact mechanism. Public interest is important because its realization is the purpose of legal regulation of this type of legal relations, from this point of view it acts as a dominant interest. The private interest of the holder of a public servitude is important as an incentive to attract the efforts of private individuals to achieve a publicly significant goal. The private interest of a land plot owner is important from the point of view of securing the right of ownership. It is substantiated that the public servitude is not an arbitrary decision of the legislator, but an example of application of the incentive method in the land law, which provides a favorable legal regime for a socially useful activity.

The (In)Visibility of Migrants

Bruno Catalano’s sculpture Voyageurs brilliantly catches an impalpable, yet pervasive, feature of refugees’ representation: their invisibility. This may seem an oxymoron but throughout my visual analysis, and while looking for what was represented in the images studied, I have been struck by what is not there. Susan Sontag has defined photography as “grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing!” (Sontag 1973, 1). If Sontag is right when she affirms that photography makes things represented worth being seen, we may be led to think that, on the contrary, what is not photographed is not worth seeing. On this arbitrary decision over presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, hinges a very important dimension of the power of photography.

STATegra: Multi-omics data integration - A conceptual scheme and a bioinformatics pipeline

Technologies for profiling samples using different omics platforms have been at the forefront since the human genome project. Large-scale multi-omics data hold the promise of deciphering different regulatory layers. Yet, while there is a myriad of bioinformatics tools, each multi-omics analysis appears to start from scratch with an arbitrary decision over which tools to use and how to combine them. It is therefore an unmet need to conceptualize how to integrate such data and to implement and validate pipelines in different cases. We have designed a conceptual framework (STATegra), aiming it to be as generic as possible for multi-omics analysis, combining machine learning component analysis, non-parametric data combination and a multi-omics exploratory analysis in a step-wise manner. While in several studies we have previously combined those integrative tools, here we provide a systematic description of the STATegra framework and its validation using two TCGA case studies. For both, the Glioblastoma and the Skin Cutaneous Melanoma cases, we demonstrate an enhanced capacity to identify features in comparison to single-omics analysis. Such an integrative multi-omics analysis framework for the identification of features and components facilitates the discovery of new biology. Finally, we provide several options for applying the STATegra framework when parametric assumptions are fulfilled, and for the case when not all the samples are profiled for all omics. The STATegra framework is built using several tools, which are being integrated step-by-step as OpenSource in the STATegRa Bioconductor package https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/STATegra.html.

A Consciously Applied, Design-Driven Dialogue Can Improve Healing Architecture

Objectives: This article states that a consciously applied, design-driven dialogue can improve healing architecture. There are different forms of knowledge, beyond evidence, which are partly hidden from our consciousness. We call this type of knowledge tacit. By using a design-driven dialogue, where staff and management participate in the design process, this tacit knowledge may transform into a more conscious and explicit one, a kind of knowledge that will inform the architect’s work in a richer way and thereby increase the possibilities for improving healthcare architecture. Background: Among proponents of evidence-based design (EBD), there has been an aspiration toward rigor to avoid arbitrary decision making. The concept of evidence has been put forward as a way to achieve this. Some of the advocates of EBD have looked upon subjective and aesthetic decisions with great skepticism. However, today, there is a growing number of architects who have lately become critical of that attitude in design. They search for alternative ways to understand the use of different kinds of knowledge in order to promote better architecture. This article aims to overcome some contradictions between different ways of looking at the design process. Methods: This discussion article is based on personal introspection and literature studies. The personal experiences referred to stem from three major design projects for general and forensic psychiatric care facilities. Results: This article presents a tentative design theory on how a design-driven dialogue process can be formed in order to achieve better outcomes in healthcare architecture. Conclusions: How the design-process is driven has a vital influence for the physical environment and its impact on treatment outcomes.

Attuning to a changing ocean

The ocean is a lifeline for human existence, but current practices risk severely undermining ocean sustainability. Present and future social−ecological challenges necessitate the maintenance and development of knowledge and action by stimulating collaboration among scientists and between science, policy, and practice. Here we explore not only how such collaborations have developed in the Nordic countries and adjacent seas but also how knowledge from these regions contributes to an understanding of how to obtain a sustainable ocean. Our collective experience may be summarized in three points: 1) In the absence of long-term observations, decision-making is subject to high risk arising from natural variability; 2) in the absence of established scientific organizations, advice to stakeholders often relies on a few advisors, making them prone to biased perceptions; and 3) in the absence of trust between policy makers and the science community, attuning to a changing ocean will be subject to arbitrary decision-making with unforeseen and negative ramifications. Underpinning these observations, we show that collaboration across scientific disciplines and stakeholders and between nations is a necessary condition for appropriate actions.