Unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly quadcopters, have several medical, agriculture, surveillance, and security applications. However, the use of this innovative technology for civilian applications is still very limited in low-income countries due to the high cost, whereas low-cost controllers available in the market are often tuned using the hit and trial approach and are limited for specific applications. This paper addresses this issue and presents a novel proof of concept low-cost quadcopter UAV design approach using a systematic Model-Based Design method for (...) mathematical modeling, simulation, real-time testing, and prototyping. The quadcopter dynamic model is developed, and controllers are designed using Proportional Integral, and Derivative, Pole Placement, and Linear Quadratic Regulator control strategies. The stability of the controllers is also checked using Lyapunov stability analysis. For verification and validation of the design, Software-in-the-Loop, Processor-in-the-Loop, Hardware-in-the-loop testing, and Rapid Control Prototyping have been performed. The V&V methods of the MBD approach showed practically valid results with a stable flight of the quadcopter prototype. The proposed low-cost POC quadcopter design approach can be easily modified to have enhanced features, and quadcopters with different design parameters can be assembled using this approach for a diverse range of applications. (shrink)

Scientific research and ethics -- Ethical theory and decision making -- Data acquisition and management -- Mentoring and professional relationship -- Collaboration in research -- Authorship -- Publication and peer review -- Misconduct in research -- Intellectual property -- Conflicts of interest and scientific objectivity -- The use of animals in research -- The use of human subjects in research -- The use of vulnerable subjects in research -- Genetics, cloning, and stem cell research -- International research.

This study examines the R&D investment behaviour of different types of family-controlled firms with the moderating role of ownership discrepancy between cash-flow rights and excess voting rights by using the sufficiency conditions’ theoretical framework of ability and willingness developed by De Massis. It uses data from family firms that have issued A-shares from 2008 to 2018. They used pooled OLS regression for data analysis and Tobit regression for robustness checks. This study classifies family firm types into two categories, namely, the (...) lone-controller family firms (LCFFs) and the multi-controller family firms (MCFFs), with each being further classified as “excess” or “no excess” voting rights. Both LCFFs without excess voting rights and MCFFs with excess voting rights have the “ability” and “willingness” toward R&D investment. LCFFs with excess voting rights and MCFFs without excess voting rights only have the ability but low willingness to invest in R&D. The study also establishes that Chinese family-controlled firms are heterogeneous toward risky investment. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to differentiate Chinese family firms by their unique ownership structure characteristics in investigating the effect of the family firm structure on R&D investment. The study is a novel attempt to test the willingness and ability framework of LCFFs and MCFFs. Previous studies based on agency theory have tacitly assumed that ability and willingness exist in family-controlled firms. However, this study challenges this implicit assumption. (shrink)

The laws are not silent in war, but what should they say? What is the moral function of the law of armed conflict? Should the law protect civilians who do not fight but help those who do? Should the law protect soldiers who perform non-combat functions or who may be safely captured? How certain should a soldier be that an individual is a combatant rather than a civilian before using lethal force? What risks should soldiers take on themselves to avoid (...) harming civilians? When do inaccurate weapons become unlawfully indiscriminate? When does 'collateral damage' to civilians become unlawfully disproportionate? Should civilians lose their legal rights by serving, voluntarily or involuntarily, as human shields? Finally, when should killing civilians constitute a war crime? These are the questions that Law and Morality at War answers, contributing to a cutting-edge international debate. Drawing on the concepts and methods of contemporary moral and legal philosophy, the book develops a normative framework within which the laws of war and international criminal law can be evaluated, criticized, and reformed. While several philosophical works critically examine the moral status of civilians and combatants, this book fills a gap, offering both an account of the laws of war and war crimes, and proposing how the law could be improved from a moral point of view. (shrink)

Through a critical engagement with Jeremy Waldron’s work, as well as the work of other writers, I offer an account of the relative scope of the morality of war, the laws of war, and war crimes. I propose an instrumentalist account of the laws of war, according to which the laws of war should help soldiers conform to the morality of war. The instrumentalist account supports Waldron’s conclusion that the laws of war justifiably prohibit attacks on civilians even if it (...) turns out that some civilians lack a moral right not to be killed. Importantly, the instrumentalist account also offers what Waldron thinks impossible: a non-consequentialist defense of the failure of the laws of war to prohibit the killing of nonthreatening combatants. Finally, I argue that new war crimes can be broader than the morality of war as well as established laws of war and that many of the arguments for defining war crimes more narrowly than either the morality of war or the laws of war are unconvincing. In all of these ways, I hope to carry forward Waldron’s project of exploring the relationship between law and morality in war. (shrink)

The expropriation of marginalized women’s labor is a key issue in business ethics in these times of global outsourcing and informal work arrangements. This has led to a transnational advocacy movement for securing the labor rights of homeworkers, who are poor women working on piece-rate contracts out of their homes. Drawing on materialist feminism, our paper critically explores the homeworker network in Pakistan, that was set up as part of a global push by international institutions and networks to localize the (...) issue across geographies. Our focus is the national women’s NGO that leads advocacy efforts on the issue in the country and its relationship with other actors. Through fieldwork spanning 3 years we find that the network employs a top-down ‘us versus them’ approach in advocacy and mobilization. The race-to-the-bottom between the network’s national and district-level actors for donor funding further undermines prospects for developing indigenous narratives of resistance. The network, while mission bound to enhance the collective agency of its constituency, has depoliticized what should have been a class-based feminist struggle. From a materialist perspective, we conclude that the NGOized network rests upon and feeds off of its constituency, creating an additional layer of primitive accumulation over the workers it represents. (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s position on the relationship between religion and politics reaffirms his two-track political theory of the secular state and civic duty. His “hard-core” theory of secularism coupled with an ethics of citizenship seeks new ways of including religious citizens in modern pluralistic societies. The analysis of secularism both as a concept and as a guiding principle in Habermas’s work shows that most critics have misinterpreted his specific use of the term. The result of this is that (...) most secularist and accommodationist critics of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship disregard his two-track political theory and its co-originality principle that assumes the equal status of public and private autonomies of citizens. My aim is thus to shift critical attention to the central aspects of Habermas’s work on religion, specifically to the task of translating religious reasons into an all-accessible language. This task of translation faces several difficulties due to some points that are left unclear by Habermas, such as determining the line separating the informal and the formal spheres, and how to avert the risk of majoritarian hijacks of democracy that could altogether undermine the Habermasian framework. (shrink)

Jensen’s inequality is one of the fundamental inequalities which has several applications in almost every field of science. In 2003, Mercer gave a variant of Jensen’s inequality which is known as Jensen–Mercer’s inequality. The purpose of this article is to propose new bounds for Csiszár and related divergences by means of Jensen–Mercer’s inequality. Also, we investigate several new bounds for Zipf–Mandelbrot entropy. The idea of this article may further stimulate research on information theory with the help of Jensen–Mercer’s inequality.

How does international financial aid affect the cooperative behavior of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Can NGOs, while turning global, preserve peer connections with local actors and be engaged in local issues? The civil society literature contains competing perspectives on and reports of how international financial aid may restructure local civic networks. Some scholars argue that international support comes at the expense of local integration as inclusion in global networks takes local NGOs out of the local context, while others find evidence (...) that organizations do not have to face “a forced choice”, and may well be integrated both globally and locally. Drawing on this scholarship, we examine two hypotheses on how transnational funding influences cooperation patterns among NGOs. The hierarchy argument states that public entities tend to cooperate with internationally funded NGOs as external contact signals quality and trustworthiness. The segregation argument, on the contrary, suggests financial homophily according to which organizations are more likely to choose peers similar in sources of funding. To test these hypotheses, we apply Exponential Random Graph Models to the data on cooperation among 221 Kazakhstani NGOs. Results support the segregation hypothesis implying that NGOs are likely to have a bias towards similarly funded peers. (shrink)

This study addresses the gap between policy and practice on the issue of women’s right to own rural land through a qualitative study conducted in Pakistan’s two largest provinces, Punjab and Sindh. A recent survey finds that only 4% of women own rural land in Pakistan. Given the relatively large agrarian economy, land is a key resource determining women’s agency. To understand the dynamics that maintain this status quo, I use two distinct strands of feminist theory. First is Joan Acker’s (...) organizational theory of gender and class structures, to explore the inequality regimes embedded in rural patriarchy. Second, I adapt Suad Joseph’s conceptualization of patriarchal connectivity to show how in rural Pakistan, valorizing kinship works to exclude women from matters pertaining to land and silencing demands for their inheritances. This framework simultaneously allows for a fine-grained analysis of the politico-economic and social structures of rural society, while building an intimate understanding of familial relations. The findings show how land is discursively defined as a collective good to ensure that landed patriarchs remain entrenched within the political and economic order of the state, limiting possibilities, for women, of acquiring agency through owning and controlling rural land. The study also upends the widespread myth of Islamic misogyny, for it demonstrates the political economy of patriarchal domination over religion in Pakistan. (shrink)

It is universally accepted that informed consent to participate in medical research should be given by subjects. People have the fundamental human right to freely choose, without coercion or withholding of information necessary to make a reasonable choice, whether they will undergo any risks associated with a research project. United States researchers have known for some time that they have the duty to inform potential subjects of the nature of proposed research and the risks and possible benefits, and to seek (...) consent. Investigators also have the duty to design the research so that it will be scientifically valid while minimizing foreseeable and avoidable harms. (shrink)

There is consensus that children have questionable decisional capacity and, therefore, in general a parent or a guardian must give permission to enroll a child in a research study. Moreover, freedom from duress and coercion, the cardinal rule in research involving adults, is even more important for children. This principle is embodied prominently in the Nuremberg Code (1947) and is embodied in various federal human research protection regulations. In a program named "SATURN" (Student Athletic Testing Using Random Notification), each school (...) in the Oregon public-school system may implement a mandatory drug-testing program for high school student athletes. A prospective study to identify drug use among student-athletes, SATURN is designed both to evaluate the influence of random drug testing and to validate the survey data through identification of individuals who do not report drug use. The enrollment of students in the drug-testing study is a requirement for playing a school sport. In addition to the coercive nature of this study design, there were ethically questionable practices in recruitment, informed consent, and confidentiality. This article concerns the question of whether research can be conducted with high school students in conjunction with a mandatory drug-testing program, while adhering to prevailing ethical standards regarding human-subjects research and specifically the participation of children in research. (shrink)

The police are one of the most powerful and important forces for any country. The main task of the police is to install a sense of security in the ordinary citizens and to protect their life and property when they are in danger. Bangladeshi Police have a glorious past with tremendous achievement. Especially in our great liberation war in 1971, they played an important role in achieving our liberation. Eliminating terrorism & militancy and others several operation that leads with the (...) risk of their life. But there are still a lot of accusations against the police force. Like- abusing of power, Misconducting with the people, Committing crossfire defying the high-court order, Wearing white dress when they move to detain criminals, Arresting without warrant, and many other including Bribery, Extortion, Trading Drug and Yaba, Playing partisan role, keeping Bad association, Filing case against deceased man, Charging sheet against the infant who has not been born yet, Enforcing disappearance, Suppressing the freedom of express, Violating Human rights, Doing anti-social activities such as rape, forcible extortion, drinking alcohol, etc. are the real scenario of Bangladesh Police. Policing ethics or related unethical behaviors, in particular, are shaped by both societal perceptions and organizational socialization of the police personnel on how authority should be exercised, as well as the latter's relationship with the socio-political and economic structures overtime. This paper proposes to explain the role of police as the main law enforcement agency in any democratic country. An Attempt has been made to bring different perspectives of ethics which comprises views of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Immanuel Kant, J S Mill and John Rawls. The paper focuses on police Ethics. Police ethics’ reflects the society and the regulations that shape the policing system. Discuss the results and analysis of the consequences of moral degradation caused by the Police. Explore the police brutality because of the lack of Ethics to highlight the public's attitude towards police. The ethical standards and the code of conduct Police practitioners should actually abide by is an ongoing debate. (shrink)

The right of freedom of religion is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Malaysian Constitution. The provision over the right to freedom of religion is seen as one of the most crucial provisions ever stated in the Federal Constitution. Article 11 has never been amended. Indeed, provision in Article 3 reiterates the right of individuals, especially the non-Muslims to profess and practise their religion freely, without any fear and interference. The special status of the religion of Islam enshrined (...) in Article 3 does not mean that non-Muslims have no right in matter of freedom of religion. However, the Federal Constitution seems to restrict the right to freedom of religion, in the sense that freedom of religion in Malaysia is not absolute. There have been several restrictions imposed not only within the constitutional framework but also other general legislations. Among provisions that furnished such restrictions can be seen in Articles 11, 11 and 10 of the Federal Constitution. Moreover, the Parliament had also passed several legislations allowing such restrictions. This can be seen, among others, the Internal Security Act of 1960, the Societies Act of 1966, the Police Act of 1967, the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1976 and the Penal Code. As such, Muslims and non-Muslims alike must adhere to certain religious constraints for the sake of public order, public health and morality.While freedom of religion is guaranteed for individuals in the Malaysian Constitution, some states in Malaysia have penalised Muslims who renounced the Islamic faith. Although there is no death penalty for apostasy in Malaysia, apostates are subject to punishments like fine, imprisonment and to a certain extent whipping. In certain states, apostates are detained at the rehabilitation centre for up to 36 months. These have brought concern to human rights activists because such punishments and detention may seem contrary to the right to freedom of religion enshrined under Article 11 of the Federal Constitution and Article 5 that guarantees individual liberty. This article attempts to investigate whether restrictions over the right of freedom of religion particularly when Muslims renounce the Islamic faith is constitutionally valid. It also intends to highlight the conflict in the laws surrounding the punishment for apostasy in various states in Malaysia. (shrink)

Most of the literature on phase one trials has focused on ethical and safety issues in research on patients with advanced cancer, but this article focuses on healthy, adult subjects. The article makes six specific recommendations for protecting the rights and welfare of healthy subjects in phase one trials: 1) because phase one trials are short in duaration (usually 1 to 3 months), researchers should gather more data on the short-term and long-term risks of participation in phase one studies by (...) healthy subjects; 2) researchers should develop strict inclusion/exclusion criteria that exclude unhealthy or vulnerable subjects, such as decisionally impaired people, in phase one studies; 3) subjects should not participate in more than one phase one study at the same time and should wait at least 30 days between participating in different studies; 4) researchers should develop a database to keep track of phase one participants; 5) subjects should be guaranteed a minimum wage equivalent to the equivalent type of unskilled labor, but there should be no upper limits on wages; and 6) subjects should be allowed to engage in collective bargaining with research sponsors. *Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this article are the authors' personal views and do not represent the views of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, or the United States government. (shrink)

This article responds to four others that critically and productively engage with my book, Law and Morality at War. Four themes emerge: the law of armed conflict’s claim to legitimate authority, the relationship between the law of armed conflict and the deep morality of war, the moral norms governing killing in the fog of war, and the moral permissibility of targeting civilians.

Kur’an tasavvuru belli kavramlardan meydana gelmektedir. İnsanın fiziki ve manevî yönünü ifade eden fıtrat kavramı, Kur’an tasavvurunu ifade eden önemli kavramlarından biridir. Fıtrat kavramının ilk günden itibaren tefsircilerin ilgi odağı olması da bundandır. Genellikle fıtrat, İslam dini, ilk yaratılış ve insanın dini kabul etme potansiyeli olarak yorumlanmış ve bunların değişip değişmeyeceği üzerinde durulmuştur. Rum sûresinde geçen “khalqullah” ile Nisâ sûresinde geçen “khalqullah” terkiplerinin bulunduğu âyetler arasında bu çerçevede bağlantı kurulmuştur. Bu çalışmamızda fıtratın mahiyeti ile fıtratla ilgili âyetlerin birbiriyle ilişkilendirilmesi irdelenecek (...) ve fıtratın temel unsurları üzerinde durulacaktır. Akıl, sevgi, aşk, güzel şeylere ilgi duyma ve çirkinliklerden kaçınmanın, insan fıtratının temel bileşenleri arasında yer alıp almadığı tartışılacaktır. Ayrıca fıtrat âyetinde geçen tebdîl kavramı ile Nisâ sûresinde geçen tağyir kavramının, aynı manayı ifade edip etmediği üzerinde durulacaktır. (shrink)

A broad consensus affirms the concept that all human beings have equal moral worth (Beauchamp and Childress 1994; Rawls 1971). Translating this ethical norm into practice requires careful attention...

A broad consensus affirms the concept that all human beings have equal moral worth (Beauchamp and Childress 1994; Rawls 1971). Translating this ethical norm into practice requires careful attention...

The Ahmadiyya Muslim community represents the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a charismatic leader whose claims of spiritual authority brought him into conflict with most other Muslim leaders of the time. The controversial movement originated in rural India in the latter part of the 19th century and is best known for challenging current conceptions of Islamic orthodoxy. Despite missionary success and expansion throughout the world, particularly in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Africa, Ahmadis have effectively been banned from (...) Pakistan. Adil Hussain Khan traces the origins of Ahmadi Islam from a small Sufi-style brotherhood to a major transnational organization, which many Muslims believe to be beyond the pale of Islam. (shrink)

Helen Frowe’s Defensive Killing is in many respects an excellent book, full of arguments that are original, interesting, important, and often persuasive. In other respects, the book is deeply unsettling, as it forcefully challenges the belief that killing ordinary civilians in armed conflict is a paradigmatic moral wrong. In particular, Frowe argues that civilians who make political, material, strategic, or financial contributions to an unjust war may lose their moral protection from intentional and collateral harm. On this point, Frowe’s arguments (...) are original, interesting, and important but, thankfully, not persuasive. (shrink)

Egyptians had many reasons to overthrow the government of Hosni Mubarak, and to challenge the legitimacy of the interim military government. Strikingly, among the leading reasons for the uprising and for continued protest are reasons grounded in criminal justice. Reflection on this dimension of the Egyptian uprising invites a broader examination of the relationship between criminal justice and political legitimacy. While criminal justice is neither necessary nor sufficient for political legitimacy, criminal injustice substantially undermines political legitimacy and can provide independent (...) reasons for revolution. A state may compromise its legitimacy by committing criminal acts, by perverting or subverting the criminal process, and by failing to discharge its duty to punish serious wrongdoing—a duty that then falls to individuals to discharge either directly (through vigilantism) or indirectly (through revolution). Contrary to the views of many leading criminal law theorists, the duty to punish serious wrongdoing applies to individuals and not only to states. The relevance of political legitimacy to criminal justice is more complicated. Individuals are morally obligated to follow the morally justified laws of an illegitimate state, but are not morally obligated to follow the morally unjustified laws of a legitimate state. Nor may any state punish in the absence of moral wrongdoing and moral fault. However, illegitimate states may be incapable of justly holding individuals accountable to the state, to the community, or to victims through criminal trials. This incapacity provides an additional reason to overthrow illegitimate states and replace them with legitimate states capable of justly administering a just criminal law. (shrink)

The success of fecal microbiota transplantation as a treatment for Clostrioides difficile infection has stirred excitement about the potential for microbiota transplantation as a therapy for a wide range of diseases and conditions. In this article, we discuss vaginal microbiota transplantation as “the next frontier” in microbiota transplantation and identify the medical, regulatory, and ethical challenges related to this nascent field. We further discuss what we anticipate will be the first context for testing VMT in clinical trials, prevention of the (...) recurrence of a condition referred to as bacterial vaginosis. We also compare clinical aspects of VMT with FMT and comment on how VMT may be similar to or different from FMT in ways that may affect research design and regulatory decisions. (shrink)

Arabic language; grammar; syntax; linguistics.

A broad consensus affirms the concept that all human beings have equal moral worth (Beauchamp and Childress 1994; Rawls 1971). Translating this ethical norm into practice requires careful attention...

Readers of literary narratives undergo an emotional experience by feeling varied emotions in various ways. While going through a narrative, we assume here, a fictive reader may be absorbed because they very often believe they develop a feel what is to be felt from a perspective presented and, similarly they understand what is to be understood in a given situation and character engaged in highly textually interwoven situation. Therefore, certain techniques and devices are employed by the authors of emotional fiction (...) to engage their readers emotionally and to create text- reader empathy. In this paper, an attempt has been made to discover the lexico-grammatical texturing of emotional fiction using the Corpus Stylistics Framework for identifying emotional intensity based on Systemic Functional Linguistics to unveil how this particular texturing causes emotional immersion. Through a lexico-grammatical analysis of the selected passages of ‘The Bride’, it is established that by using particular lexical choices and devices, the author engages the reader emotionally and therefore, enhances readers’ involvement in the text. Hence, it supports our claim that the lexicogrammar of the emotional passages is instrumentally di?erent for projecting emotionally engaged responses. (shrink)

The study offers new insights by examining the influence of personality traits on tourists' intentions to visit ecotourism sites using the lens of the theory of planned behavior. It also investigates whether environmental knowledge moderates the effect of extraversion, neuroticism, and environmental concern on tourists' ecotourism intentions. We applied structural equation modeling on 350 responses collected through the Amazon M-Turk platform. Results highlight that extroverts are more likely to express ecotourism intentions than neurotic tourists. However, it was also noted that (...) neurotic tourists' intention to visit ecotourism sites could be influenced if their environmental concerns were emphasized. The study offers important new insights to managers, policy-makers, and practitioners about the roles of personality traits, environmental knowledge, and environmental concern vis-a-vis their relative significance in shaping tourists' decision-making and choices for ecotourism sites. As a result, managers/practitioners need to devise specific communication strategies to enhance awareness and a sense of responsibility among neurotic tourists. (shrink)

There is consensus that children have questionable decisional capacity and, therefore, in general a parent or a guardian must give permission to enroll a child in a research study. Moreover, freedom from duress and coercion, the cardinal rule in research involving adults, is even more important for children. This principle is embodied prominently in the Nuremberg Code and is embodied in various federal human research protection regulations. In a program named "SATURN", each school in the Oregon public-school system may implement (...) a mandatory drug-testing program for high school student athletes. A prospective study to identify drug use among student-athletes, SATURN is designed both to evaluate the influence of random drug testing and to validate the survey data through identification of individuals who do not report drug use. The enrollment of students in the drug-testing study is a requirement for playing a school sport. In addition to the coercive nature of this study design, there were ethically questionable practices in recruitment, informed consent, and confidentiality. This article concerns the question of whether research can be conducted with high school students in conjunction with a mandatory drug-testing program, while adhering to prevailing ethical standards regarding human-subjects research and specifically the participation of children in research. (shrink)

This book posits three ethical principles by which the concept of equal worth can be used in a practical manner to resolve conflicts and wars. Shamoo argues that once the principle of equal worth is adopted in foreign policy, humanity will be able to achieve peace.

Mimicry is often cited as a compelling demonstration of the power of natural selection. By adopting signs of a protected model, mimics usually gain a reproductive advantage by minimising the likelihood of being preyed upon. Yet while natural selection plays a role in the evolution of mimicry, it can be doubted whether it fully explains it. Mimicry is mediated by the emergence of formally analogous patterns between unrelated organisms and by the fact that these patterns are meaningfully perceived as similar. (...) The perception of similarity is always perceiver-dependent. Similarities between for instance colours are psychophysical phenomena, and their existence is conditioned by an intimate interdependence between perceivers and perceptible reality. In this sense, mimicry is by its very nature dualistic. The analogy in form needed to establish a mimicry does not emerge out of the blue. It depends on the ecological context and the morphogenetic potential of a species. In our proposal, we take into account both the developmental generators of formally analogous structures and the perceptual and cognitive processes that lead to the emergence of mimicry. We show that some of the rather controversial and nowadays largely neglected ideas found in non-Anglo-Saxon literature on mimicry deserve closer attention. We suggest that the diversity of mimicry types is due to differences in variational properties of form-generating and perceptual systems among diverse groups of organisms. We also anticipate that processes studied within social psychology and emotion research probably take place, at least in a simplified form, also in non-human animals. Finally, we argue that these meaning-attributive processes underlie the functionality of mimicry. (shrink)

Victor Tadros claims that punishment must be justified either instrumentally or on the grounds that deserved punishment is intrinisically good. However, if we have deontic reasons to punish wrongdoers then these reasons could justify punishment non-instrumentally. Morever, even if the punishment of wrongdoers is intrinsically good this fact cannot contribute to the justication of punishment because goodness is not a reason-giving property. It follows that retributivism is both true and important only if we have deontic reasons to punish. Tadros also (...) claims that the constitutive aim of punishment is to inflict harm or suffering on offenders. On the contrary, the constitutive aim of retributive punishment is to inflict wrongs on offenders that are proportionate to the wrongs they commit. Indeed, punishment should involve the least harmful wrong that is proportionate to the wrongfulness of the offense, adequate to facilitate recognition, and conducive to deterrence. (shrink)

For efficient energy distribution, microgrids provide significant assistance to main grids and act as a bridge between the power generation and consumption. Renewable energy generation resources, particularly photovoltaics, are considered as a clean source of energy but are highly complex, volatile, and intermittent in nature making their forecasting challenging. Thus, a reliable, optimized, and a robust forecasting method deployed at MG objectifies these challenges by providing accurate renewable energy production forecasting and establishing a precise power generation and consumption matching at (...) MG. Furthermore, it ensures effective planning, operation, and acquisition from the main grid in the case of superior or inferior amounts of energy, respectively. Therefore, in this work, we develop an end-to-end hybrid network for automatic PV power forecasting, comprising three basic steps. Firstly, data preprocessing is performed to normalize, remove the outliers, and deal with the missing values prominently. Next, the temporal features are extracted using deep sequential modelling schemes, followed by the extraction of spatial features via convolutional neural networks. These features are then fed to fully connected layers for optimal PV power forecasting. In the third step, the proposed model is evaluated on publicly available PV power generation datasets, where its performance reveals lower error rates when compared to state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)