The judicial system of Poland is at the forefront of public, constitutional, political and legal debates of the European Union. Different aspects of rule of law in Poland, such as independence of judges, their right to irremovability, the alleged intention of the government to occupy and impact Polish judicial sector are discussed among academics. The aim of this research conducted throughout the thesis is to add complete and all-inclusive analysis of the recent judgment of European Court of Justice (hereinafter: "ECJ") regarding lowering retirement age of judges to the ongoing academic literature. Furthermore, before reaching that conclusion, providing the reader with the review of Polish political debate, the responses of European Union institutions and analysis of the necessity of the reform for Polish judicial system. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

It has been suggested that polyploidization affects the ecological niche of a species, possibly ultimately leading to a shift in the distribution of the species, such as in geographical parthenogenesis. The phenomenon describes the wider distribution and shift of asexuals towards higher altitudes, northern latitudes and more extreme habitats when compared with their closely related sexual relatives. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain such patterns with lacking empirical evidence because investigations rather focused on single hypotheses, which were rather tested several times independently on multiple organisms than vice versa. Therefore, the present study aimed to tackle the phenomenon of geographical parthenogenesis from multiple angles, i.e. testing several hypotheses simultaneously using Hieracium alpinum as a model system. In the arcto-alpine Asteraceae H. alpinum sexually reproducing diploid individuals occur in a small isolated area in the Eastern and Southern Carpathians, while apomictically reproducing, i.e. asexual reproduction via seeds, triploid plants occupy the remaining and much larger part of the range from the Balkans to the arctic parts of Europe. This implies that asexual triploids have had some fitness / colonization advantage(s), leading to a replacement of sexual diploids...

Ignition delay time, τ_ign, is a key quantity of interest that is used to assess the predictability of a chemical kinetic model. This dissertation explores the sensitivity of τ_ign to uncertainties in: 1. rate-rule kinetic rates parameters and 2. enthalpies and entropies of fuel and fuel radicals using global and local sensitivity approaches. We begin by considering variability in τ_ign to uncertainty in rate parameters. We consider a 30-dimensional stochastic germ in which each random variable is associated with one reaction class, and build a surrogate model for τ_ign using polynomial chaos expansions. The adaptive pseudo-spectral projection technique is used for this purpose. First-order and total-order sensitivity indices characterizing the dependence of τ_ign on uncertain inputs are estimated. Results indicate that τ_ign is mostly sensitive to variations in four dominant reaction classes. Next, we develop a thermodynamic class approach to study variability in τ_ign of n-butanol due to uncertainty in thermodynamic properties of species of interest, and to define associated uncertainty ranges. A global sensitivity analysis is performed, again using surrogates constructed using an adaptive pseudo-spectral method. Results indicate that the variability of τ_ign is dominated by uncertainties in the classes associated with peroxy and hydroperoxide radicals. We also perform a combined sensitivity analysis of uncertainty in kinetic rates and thermodynamic properties which revealed that uncertainties in thermodynamic properties can induce variabilities in ignition delay time that are as large as those associated with kinetic rate uncertainties. In the last part, we develop a tangent linear approximation (TLA) to estimate the sensitivity of τ_ign with respect to individual rate parameters and thermodynamic properties in detailed chemical mechanisms. Attention is focused on a gas mixture reacting under adiabatic, constant-volume conditions. The proposed approach is based on integrating the linearized system of equations governing the evolution of the partial derivatives of the state vector with respect to individual random variables, and a linearized approximation is developed to relate ignition delay sensitivity to scaled partial derivatives of temperature. The computations indicate that TLA leads to robust local sensitivity predictions at a computational cost that is order-of-magnitude smaller than that incurred by finite-difference approaches.

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Ample evidence suggests that day-of-the-week patterns exist in US and foreign equity returns. We extend the evidence on the day-of-the-week effect in equity returns by examining the return patterns of iShares for 17 countries and Standard and Poor's Depository Receipts (SPDRs) to establish whether previously observed predictabilities in equity returns are reflected in iShares' returns. We utilize a split sample to examine return patterns and develop trading rules using the initial subsample. We then test those trading rules out of sample. Empirical results reveal that iShares exhibit day-of-the-week return patterns that can be exploited by informed traders.

In this thesis we study stochastic modeling and simulation methods for biochemical systems. The thesis is focused on systems with multi-state and multi-scale features and divided into two parts. In the first part, we propose new algorithms that improve existing multi-state simulation methods. We first compare the well known Gillespie\\\'s stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) with the StochSim, an agent-based simulation method. Based on the analysis, we propose a hybrid method that possesses the advantages of both methods. Then we propose two new methods that extend the Network-Free Algorithm (NFA) for rule-based models. Numerical results are provided to show the performance improvement by our new methods. In the second part, we investigate two simulation schemes for the multi-scale feature: Haseltine and Rawlings\\\' hybrid method and the quasi-steady-state stochastic simulation method. We first propose an efficient partitioning strategy for the hybrid method and an efficient way of building stochastic cell cycle models with this new partitioning strategy. Then, to understand conditions where the two simulation methods can be applied, we develop a way to estimate the relaxation time of the fast sub-network, and compare it with the firing interval of the slow sub-network. Our analysis are verified by numerical experiments on different realistic biochemical models. / Ph. D.

Corruption has flourished in Ukraine for years, making Ukraine one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. However, since the Maidan in 2014, Ukraine has turned its political course towards the west, taken several steps in order to tackle corruption and tightened its cooperation with the European Union. The purpose of this research is to assess what measures has the EU undertaken between 2014-2018 to help Ukraine in its aspiration to combat corruption and to achieve rule of law. This research has found out that the EU has supported Ukraine to tackle corruption by suggesting changes and reforms with the aim to foster overall development, while simultaneously keeping in mind the anti-corruption priority. One significant outcome of the fight against corruption has been the creation of NABU, the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, which is today the central element in the anti-corruption campaign. Secondly, the EU has backed Ukraine economically, and thirdly, the EU has granted visa liberation for Ukrainian citizens, which is contributing to the broader cooperation between Ukraine and the EU. In the theoretical scale, this study found out that there is an ongoing identity building, whereas Ukraine seeks to exclude corruption as a societal norm and obtain the values of the EU instead.

Includes bibliographical references / The development of subjecting government procurement awards to judicial review is a relatively recent development in South African law. It accords with a similar development in the United States, as well as South Africa's own constitutional requirements of transparency and public accountability. Given the often lucrative nature of public contracts, challenges to the lawfulness of government procurement awards have become a regular occurrence in South Africa. However, the setting aside of such an award does not automatically follow upon a finding of unlawfulness. For a number of reasons, a court may decline to set aside an unlawful government procurement award. This raises a number of interesting questions, particularly with regard to how such a decision may be reconciled with, and the implications this may have for, the principle of legality and the Rule of Law. This dissertation will address these issues, arguing that, ultimately, the concerns are resolved by appreciating the nature of the principle of legality, and the Rule of Law's place as a value in society.

Le développement rapide des techniques d’extraction d’information a permis de construire de vastes bases de connaissances généralistes. Ces bases de connaissances contiennent des millions de faits portant sur des entités du monde réel, comme des personnes, des lieux, ou des organisations. Ces faits sont accessibles aux ordinateurs, et leur permettent ainsi de “comprendre” le monde réel. Ces bases trouvent donc de nombreuses applications, notamment pour la recherche d’information, le traitement de requêtes, et le raisonnement automatique. Les nombreuses informations contenues dans les bases de connaissances peuvent également être utilisées pour découvrir des motifs intéressants et fréquents dans les données. Cette tâche, l’extraction de règles d’association, permet de comprendre la structure des données ; les règles ainsi obtenues peuvent être employées pour l’analyse de données, la prédiction, et la maintenance de données, entre autres applications. Cette thèse présente deux contributions principales. En premier lieu, nous proposons une nouvelle méthode pour l’extraction de règles d’association dans les bases de connaissances. Cette méthode s’appuie sur un modèle d’extraction qui convient particulièrement aux bases de connaissances potentiellement incomplètes, comme celles qui sont extraites à partir des données du Web. En second lieu, nous montrons que l’extraction de règles peut être utilisée sur les bases de connaissances pour effectuer de nombreuses tâches orientées vers les données. Nous étudions notamment la prédiction de faits, l’alignement de schémas, la mise en forme canonique de bases de connaissances ouvertes, et la prédiction d’annotations de complétude. / The continuous progress of information extraction (IE) techniques has led to the construction of large general-purpose knowledge bases (KBs). These KBs contain millions of computer-readable facts about real-world entities such as people, organizations and places. KBs are important nowadays because they allow computers to “understand” the real world. They are used in multiple applications in Information Retrieval, Query Answering and Automatic Reasoning, among other fields. Furthermore, the plethora of information available in today’s KBs allows for the discovery of frequent patterns in the data, a task known as rule mining. Such patterns or rules convey useful insights about the data. These rules can be used in several applications ranging from data analytics and prediction to data maintenance tasks. The contribution of this thesis is twofold : First, it proposes a method to mine rules on KBs. The method relies on a mining model tailored for potentially incomplete webextracted KBs. Second, the thesis shows the applicability of rule mining in several data-oriented tasks in KBs, namely facts prediction, schema alignment, canonicalization of (open) KBs and prediction of completeness.