Suchergebnisse

THIS SECTION CONSIDERS THE VIABILITY OF A PLAN TO ESTABLISH A NUCLEAR FREE ZONE OR CORRIDOR ON EACH SIDE OF THE WEST GERMAN BORDER WITH THE EAST. THE TERMS FOR THE EXTENSION OF THE ZONE ARE ALSO DESCRIBED. INTEREST HAS BEEN TAKEN IN THE PROPOSAL BY BOTH SIDES. THE GDR HAS ALSO STATED ITS READINESS TO MAKE THE TERRITORY AVAILABLE FOR THE IDEA. THE ORIGINAL PROPOSAL WAS PUT FORTHER BY THE PALME COMMISSION TO THE SWEDISH GOVERNMENT.

With the Council position of 12 June on the proposal for a EU Directive on improving working conditions in platform work, a presumption of employment status for digital platform work is now becoming the subject of trilogue negotiations. A lot could be said about the proposal, the process, and the innovation that would come with an EU Directive on platform work as such. This comment focuses on one central part of the proposal: the presumption of employment. The Commission's and Council's proposals suggest a well meant, but timid instrument. Given the already limited scope of te proposals in their definition of "digital labour platforms", only the Parliament's position that does not condition the presumption to any additional criteria is able to convince.

[In essays first published earlier this year in mainstream Australian media to considerable fanfare, Bagaric and Clarke, two Australian academics, develop a modest proposal for the justification of torture under excep- tional circumstances. This essay rebuts the proposal and defends the abso- lute prohibition against torture. Their attempt to abstract torture from the social context – including the "war on terror" – in which the question of government sanctioned torture is now being raised, is condemned as in- genuous. A rhetorical analysis further demonstrates that the authors them- selves do not believe their argument is either hypothetical or limited. Furthermore, when the actual "defence of torture" is examined, it is shown to be illogical, incoherent, and lacking any sophisticated under- standing of the nature, purpose, or effects of torture. This is not the first time that half-baked reasoning and careless analogies have been devel- oped in order to defend the indefensible. Drawing on Voltaire and Jona- than Swift as well as Guantanamo Bay, this essay puts an important social issue into its immediate and its larger historical context.]

The paper presents an approach for defining ICT investment proposals. The approach was developed on the authority of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management. The Ministry was confronted with a growing amount of ICT investment proposals. Since there was no format for describing a proposal and no procedure for obtaining the data on the basis of which a proposal was described, the decision to select proposals for funding missed any kind of rationality. Proposals differed enormously and hence were incomparable. The evaluation of existing ICT assessment methods showed that there was not any method that would meet the expectations and demands of the Ministry. The main points of criticism concentrated on the limitation of applying a fixed set of data for describing a project proposal and the absence of a process to support the selection of a meaningful set of data to describe a project. Inspired by the multi‐criteria score method of Parker a tailor‐made approach for defining ICT investment proposals was developed, taking into account the characteristics of the governmental organization. In this paper, the approach as well as the developmental process with regard to this approach are presented. The overall conclusion is that a tailor‐made approach, which is developed with the full cooperation of the user organization, has considerable advantages since local knowledge and expertise is incorporated in this type of approach.