Technical – organizational measures for classifying pyrotechnic articles

Pyrotechnic articles shall be classified by manufacturers according to their type of use, their purpose and their level of risk, including their noise level, and the notified bodies shall confirm the classification as part of the conformity assessment procedures. In accordance with the relevant national legislation, the national authority must take all appropriate measures to ensure that pyrotechnic articles do not endanger the health and safety of persons. If the national market surveillance authority has sufficient reasons to consider that a pyrotechnic article poses a risk to the health, safety of persons or other aspects of the protection of the public interest, it shall carry out an assessment of the pyrotechnic article concerned. INCD INSEMEX Petrosani is an accredited institution, to carry out such technical expertise according to the legislation in force harmonized with the European regulations, having also adequate modern facilities for fulfilling the requirements of the standards in the field. The paper also highlights the results of the modernization of the methodological and practical infrastructure as well as the technical facilities that underlie the substantiation of the new approach in terms of optimizing and increasing the quality of the process.

Host States’ Due Diligence Obligation Towards Foreign Investors in the Context of Rebellions and Civil Wars

Based on an analysis of State practice and case law, this article examines one basic principle of international law embodied in Article 10 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on State responsibility. In the context of an unsuccessful insurrection or civil war, the host State is responsible for its own failure to discharge its due diligence obligation to protect foreign investors in relation to acts committed by rebels, i.e. to make all efforts within its capacity to suppress an insurrection and to take all reasonable measures to prevent injurious conduct by rebels and damages from occurring. This article examines the scope and content of this ‘duty to protect’ obligation, the applicable ‘test’ and the relevant circumstances to determine whether any breach of the obligation has been committed in light of recent investment awards analysing the full protection and security clause in the context of Libya’s civil war.

Incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into National Law

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) requires States Parties to take all appropriate measures to implement the rights in the Convention. As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Convention's adoption, focus has shifted onto the measures being taken at national level to give effect to children's rights with specific reference to legal incorporation both direct and indirect. The way in which the CRC is given legal effect is highly contingent upon the constitutional and legal systems of individual countries and can best be understood by those writing from the specific national context. <br><br>So this book combines individual contributions that address the experience of legal incorporation in selected countries by their national experts, with comparative analysis of the international landscape from the world's leading authorities on legal implementation of the CRC. The result is an up-to-date, comparative and international analysis of the progress made around the world to incorporate the CRC, in the first comprehensive and analytical presentation of these issues. <br><br><i>Incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into National Law</i> is a rich resource central to the work of every lawyer with an interest in the CRC or the incorporation of international legal instruments.

Social Information and Gender Differences in Competitive Preferences

This is an exploratory study that examines the effect of social information on gender differences in selection into a winner-take-all tournament, using a simple addition task. Participants perform this task in multiple rounds and then select into a competitive or non-competitive pay scheme. Prior to choosing payment schemes, participants are shown selected results about average performance and choices in a similar experiment. I find that the inclusion of social information eliminates any extant gender gap in competitive choices in every treatment. The reduction in the gender gap is not due to greater efficiency of choices by men or women, even though inefficient choices by low-performing individuals are mostly eliminated. Rather, the inclusion of feedback causes men and women to select into a competitive pay scheme in a similar manner, thereby removing the gender gap. Despite these results, the complexity of the social information intervention used leaves some results unexplained. JEL Codes: C9, J2, J16.

Precise visuomotor transformations underlying collective behavior in larval zebrafish

Complex schooling behaviors result from local interactions among individuals. Yet, how sensory signals from neighbors are analyzed in the visuomotor stream of animals is poorly understood. Here, we studied aggregation behavior in larval zebrafish and found that over development larvae transition from overdispersed groups to tight shoals. Using a virtual reality assay, we characterized the algorithms fish use to transform visual inputs from neighbors into movement decisions. We found that young larvae turn away from virtual neighbors by integrating and averaging retina-wide visual occupancy within each eye, and by using a winner-take-all strategy for binocular integration. As fish mature, their responses expand to include attraction to virtual neighbors, which is based on similar algorithms of visual integration. Using model simulations, we show that the observed algorithms accurately predict group structure over development. These findings allow us to make testable predictions regarding the neuronal circuits underlying collective behavior in zebrafish.

Fire and Explosion Hazards Due to Medical Oxygen Handling During Coronavirus Pandemic

With the continued outbreak of the coronavirus and the increase in the need for medical oxygen, it became necessary to take all measures for the safe handling of gas. Oxygen is very reactive and behaves differently to air, compressed air, nitrogen and other inert gases. Medical oxygen, at high pressure, from a cylinder, can react violently with hydrocarbons such as oil and grease which may be used mistakenly in cylinder valve or regulator. The oxidation products are a potentially explosive hydroperoxide. Nearly all materials including rubber, textiles, and metals will burn vigorously in the presence of oxygen. Atmospheric air contains nitrogen 78%, oxygen about 21% and with 1% remaining including a variety of other gases like carbon dioxide and argon. Even a small increase in the oxygen level in the air to about 24% can create a dangerous situation. It becomes easier to start a fire, which will then burn hotter and more fiercely than in atmospheric air and may be impossible to put the fire out. Increase the concentration of oxygen due to leaking valve or hose in a poorly ventilated room or in confined space can quickly create a dangerous level.

5. Finnegans Wake

‘Finnegans Wake’ assesses James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce attempted to write a book which would take all history and knowledge for its subject matter and the workings of the dreaming mind for its form. Four themes surround the book: language, the family, sexuality, and death. In Joyce’s attempt to break away from the ‘evidences’ of conventional narrative with its fixed causality and temporality, two Italian thinkers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, were of profound importance in the writing of Finnegans Wake. Bruno and Vico are used in Finnegans Wake to aid the deconstruction of identity into difference and to replace progress with repetition.

Characterization and aggressiveness of take-all root rot pathogens isolated from symptomatic bermudagrass putting greens

Take-all root rot is a disease of ultradwarf bermudagrass putting greens caused by Gaeumannomyces graminis (Gg), Gaeumannomyces sp. (Gx), Gaeumannomyces graminicola (Ggram), Candidacolonium cynodontis (Cc), and Magnaporthiopsis cynodontis (Mc). Many etiological and epidemiological components of this disease remain unknown. Improving pathogen identification and our understanding of the aggressiveness of these pathogens along with growth at different temperatures will advance our knowledge of disease development to optimize management strategies. Take-all root rot pathogens were isolated from symptomatic bermudagrass root and stolon pieces from 16 different golf courses. Isolates of Gg, Gx, Ggram, Cc, and Mc were used to inoculate ‘Champion’ bermudagrass in an in planta aggressiveness assay. Each pathogen was also evaluated at 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35C to determine growth temperature optima. Infected plant tissue was used to develop a real-time PCR high resolution melt assay for pathogen detection. This assay was able to differentiate each pathogen directly from infected plant tissue using a single primer pair. In general, Ggram, Gg, and Gx were the most aggressive while Cc and Mc exhibited moderate aggressiveness. Pathogens were more aggressive when incubated at 30C compared to 20C. While they grew optimally between 24.4 and 27.8C, pathogens exhibited limited growth at 35C and no growth at 10C. These data provide important information on this disease and its causal agents that may improve take-all root rot management.

Beware the Black-Box: On the Robustness of Recent Defenses to Adversarial Examples

Many defenses have recently been proposed at venues like NIPS, ICML, ICLR and CVPR. These defenses are mainly focused on mitigating white-box attacks. They do not properly examine black-box attacks. In this paper, we expand upon the analyses of these defenses to include adaptive black-box adversaries. Our evaluation is done on nine defenses including Barrage of Random Transforms, ComDefend, Ensemble Diversity, Feature Distillation, The Odds are Odd, Error Correcting Codes, Distribution Classifier Defense, K-Winner Take All and Buffer Zones. Our investigation is done using two black-box adversarial models and six widely studied adversarial attacks for CIFAR-10 and Fashion-MNIST datasets. Our analyses show most recent defenses (7 out of 9) provide only marginal improvements in security (<25%), as compared to undefended networks. For every defense, we also show the relationship between the amount of data the adversary has at their disposal, and the effectiveness of adaptive black-box attacks. Overall, our results paint a clear picture: defenses need both thorough white-box and black-box analyses to be considered secure. We provide this large scale study and analyses to motivate the field to move towards the development of more robust black-box defenses.