Intelligibility of a criminal law: Theoretical and practical aspects

The main task of the article is to study a separate qualitative property criminal law its intelligibility. When solving the problem the definition of intelligibility of the criminal law taking into account genesis is formulated this concept and different approaches to its content, which have developed in modern law doctrine. In order to substantiate the author's approach to the definition of intelligibility of the criminal law the monitoring of normative-legal acts, decisions of national and international judicial authorities is carried out. It is shown that the term ‘intelligibility of law’ and related terms ‘clear’, ‘precise’, ‘simple’ law are actively used both in regulations and in decisions of national and international judicial authorities. However, the terminology is diverse, thereby it has been suggested in the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights to use the term ‘intelligibility’of the law, which is the most accurate and adequately reflects the assessment of the legal certainty of national laws. The general conclusion is substantiated that in modern doctrine there are three approaches to determining the legal nature of the intelligibility of the law: as a component of the rule of law, as a requirement for the language of law, as a qualitative property of law. The absence of antagonistic features in each of the approaches allowed to use the positive gains of different perceptions of the intelligibility of the criminal law and to define it.

Qualitative Property of Third-Order Nonlinear Neutral Distributed-Delay Generalized Difference Equations

This paper investigates the qualitative property of third-order nonlinear neutral distributed-delay generalized difference equations. By utilizing Philos-type technique and Riccati transformation, some oscillation criteria are presented to ensure that every solution of this equation oscillates or converges to zero. To illustrate the significance of our main result, we provide a suitable example.

NOTE ON THE UNIQUENESS OF AN ENDEMIC EQUILIBRIUM OF AN EPIDEMIC MODEL WITH BOOSTING OF IMMUNITY

For some diseases, it is recognized that immunity acquired by natural infection and vaccination subsequently wanes. As such, immunity provides temporal protection to recovered individuals from an infection. An immune period is extended owing to boosting of immunity by asymptomatic re-exposure to an infection. An individual’s immune status plays an important role in the spread of infectious diseases at the population level. We study an age-dependent epidemic model formulated as a nonlinear version of the Aron epidemic model, which incorporates boosting of immunity by a system of delay equations and study the existence of an endemic equilibrium to observe whether boosting of immunity changes the qualitative property of the existence of the equilibrium. We establish a sufficient condition related to the strength of disease transmission from subclinical and clinical infective populations, for the unique existence of an endemic equilibrium.

Anaxagoras, the thoroughgoing infinitist

In the analysis of Anaxagoras’ physics in view of the relation between his teachings on multitude and heterogeneity, two central questions emerge: 1) How can the structure of the universe considered purely mereo-topologically help us explain that at the first cosmic stage no qualitative difference is manifest in spite of the fact that the entire qualitative heterogeneity is supposedly already present there? 2) How can heterogeneity become manifest at the second stage, resulting from the noûs intervention, if according to fragment B 6 such a possibility requires the existence of “the smallest”, while according to the general principle stated in fragment B 3 there is not “the smallest” but always only “a smaller”? This paper showcases the perplexity of these two questions but deals only with the former. The answer follows from Anaxagoras’ being a thoroughgoing infinitist in the way in which no Greek physicist was: the principle of space isotropy operative in geometry is extended to physics as well. So any two parts of the original mixture are similar to each other not only in view of the smaller-larger relation but also because each contains everything that the other one contains. This in effect means that at the stage of maximal possible heterogeneity each part of any part contains infinitely many heterogeneous parts of any kind whatsoever. So, neither can there be homogeneous parts in view of any qualitative property, nor can there be predominance in quantity of parts of any kind that would make some property manifest.

Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible.

PENYELESAIAN NUMERIK MODEL PREDATOR-PREY DENGAN SKEMA BEDA HINGGA TAK-STANDAR

Interaction between predator and prey can be represented as a system of non-linear differential equation which is difficult to be solved analytically. In this research, a predator-prey model with an addition of harvesting factor is discretized into a system of difference equation using non-standard finite difference scheme. The analysis result shows that the developed scheme has qualitative property which is consistent to the continuous system.

Automated Quantitative Verification for Service-Based System Design: A Visualization Transform Tool Perspective

Service-based systems are a new software mode for distributed business processes integration. It is difficult for traditional testing methods to verify the functional and nonfunctional requirements of software. To address this problem, this paper proposes a visual verification platform to quantitatively compute the reliability and cost for evaluating the performance of service-based systems in the design phase. First, an extended automata model namely Probabilistic Reward Labeled Transition System (PRLTS) is proposed to formalize both the functional behaviors and nonfunctional features. Then, the formal language of probabilistic model checker PRISM is introduced to show the grammar of the target verification codes that we want to transform. Second, XML description tags of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is parsed to generate the functional behaviors using different kinds of transformation rules, based on which the probability matrix and reward concept are employed to denote the service’s reliability and cost, respectively. Third, the PRLTS model is turned into the input language of PRISM, where the graphic description language DOT of Graphviz is used as an intermediary to display system behaviors in a visual way. The model layout allows the designer to manually adjust the behaviors of the PRLTS model, where verification codes can be dynamically updated according to the changes in modified information. Fourth, to perform quantitative verification, the verification property in the form of the Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) formula can be automatically generated when the requirement model of the service-based system is inputted, during which the threshold value of qualitative property will be initially computed and returned as a recommended value. This allows the user to modify the qualitative property in an interactive way. Furthermore, experimental analysis of the real-world case study demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method. Thus, our platform provides guidance for quantitative verification and graphical visualization for effectively generating formal models and checking the quantitative properties for service-based systems.

The Influence of Refractance Window Drying on Qualitative Properties of Kiwifruit Slices

In this research, effect of Refractance Window (RW) drying on the quality properties of the kiwifruit samples was investigated. Drying temperatures of 80–100 °C, slice thickness of 0.8–2.4 mm and Mylar thickness of 100–300 µm were the independent variables and different qualitative attributes including drying duration, textural hardness, colour, rehydration ratio and organoleptic properties were responses monitored in each situation. Drying temperature was the most important factor contributed to quality features of RW dried kiwifruits with significant effects on all properties. Similarly, slice thickness influenced nearly all quality traits except textural hardness and some colour indices. However, Mylar membrane thickness failed to affect about every qualitative property of kiwifruit samples significantly. The majority of organoleptic properties of RW dried kiwifruits, including flavour, colour, texture, shrinkage and overall acceptance, were judged to be in the range of medium to good quality (scores of 3–4) by panellists.