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The contribution focuses on the complex dynamics of maritime transport in the Mediterranean basin, with particular attention to local and regional implications arising from global crisis contexts. In particular, it will focus on the impact of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the resulting bottlenecks on logistics chains, such as the Houthi conflict and the blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint, on the strategic choices of ship owners and the reconfiguration of maritime routes.The events of the last few years have highlighted the fragility of globalised logistics chains and the strategic importance of certain chokepoints. Tensions in the Middle East have triggered a series of chain reactions in the maritime sector, with some shipowners opting for alternative solutions, such as circumnavigating Africa, to avoid the risks associated with transit through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. However, other actors have continued to use traditional routes, carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each option.The analysis will focus on the case of the Port of Trieste, a strategic logistics node in the Mediterranean, to understand how the new dynamics of maritime transport are affecting port activities and trade relations with countries in the basin. The opportunities and challenges for the port of Trieste in this context will be examined, with particular reference to the potential effects of reshoring and nearshoring on the region's production and logistics activities1.Through a multi-scalar approach, which integrates elements of geopolitics, maritime economics and logistics, the study aims to provide an original contribution to the understanding of the transformations taking place in the maritime transport sector and their implications for local and regional economies, including the Weberian logic of localisation, in the light of the transformations taking place in the circular economy. In particular, an attempt will be made to answer the following questions:– How have the geopolitical crises in the Middle East influenced the strategic choices of shipowners operating in the Mediterranean?– What are the main consequences of the reconfiguration of maritime routes for ports in the Mediterranean basin, and for the Port of Trieste in particular?– What are the opportunities and challenges related to reshoring and nearshoring for local and regional economies?– What are the policies and interventions that can be adopted at local, national and international level to strengthen the resilience of logistics chains and promote the sustainable development of maritime transport?

The movements to understand the self, free will, and choice have gained new meaning through the rise of brain studies. Further explorations about intentions, reasons, and deception have re-examined the meaning of self and agency. However, a triangulated picture with other scientific evidence may make the picture clear. The aim will be to ponder free will, law and brain determinism. Since brain studies are emerging as an essential interdisciplinary domain engaging with law and psychology, it may be interesting to have some knowledge about the common-sense understanding of brain functioning and how it connects to the philosophical problems of knowledge of other minds, freedom of actions, purpose and the will. The conceptual errors and further debates speculated by legal theorists and social scientists in integrating law and neuroscience, which has empirical, practical and ethical implications, will be highlighted.

At the outset, the authors propose two selected methods of estimating the overall social and psychological condition of society. One of the tools suggested is the objective ranking compiled by the World Justice Project[1].According to the authors, a preliminary review and analysis of the current geopolitical situation and the manifestations of people’s present mental state lead to the conclusion that a reasonable and justified way to counteract adverse social processes would be to disseminate knowledge derived from scientific and intellectual inquiries in psychology.However, the authors then review available data, which indicate that only a handful of countries worldwide include “psychology” as a compulsory subject in their school curricula.This prompts the authors to reflect on why this state of affairs exists and then to design a survey study. The study’s aim would be to estimate how a selected group of young individuals — who recently completed their secondary education—perceive the suggested reasons behind the absence of psychology instruction in schools.A discussion of the findings of this survey, along with several other facts concerning current social processes, leads the authors to conclude that the causes of this situation include a lack of approval from parents and even teachers for implementing compulsory psychology education in schools. In the authors’ view, this reluctance is rooted in fundamental, specific cultural factors that are prevalent in most societies — factors previously discussed in the authors’ earlier works[2][3][4][5].Because the authors believe that the possible introduction of compulsory psychology education in schools in most countries could serve as a form of self-defense — potentially helping to avert further wars, conflicts, enslavement, and injustice — there is a need to outline the possible actions that would facilitate the implementation of psychology education in schools.

This paper introduces CASESUMM, a novel dataset for long-context summarization in the legal domain that addresses the need for longer and more complex datasets for summarization evaluation. We collect 25.6K U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) opinions and their official summaries, known as "syllabuses." Our dataset is the largest open legal case summarization dataset, and is the first to include summaries of SCOTUS decisions dating back to 1815.We also present a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-generated summaries using both automatic metrics and expert human evaluation, revealing discrepancies between these assessment methods. Our evaluation shows Mistral 7b, a smaller open-source model, outperforms larger models on most automatic metrics and successfully generates syllabus-like summaries. In contrast, human expert annotators indicate that Mistral summaries contain hallucinations. The annotators consistently rank GPT-4 summaries as clearer and exhibiting greater sensitivity and specificity. Further, we find that LLM-based evaluations are not more correlated with human evaluations than traditional automatic metrics. Furthermore, our analysis identifies specific hallucinations in generated summaries, including precedent citation errors and misrepresentations of case facts. These findings demonstrate the limitations of current automatic evaluation methods for legal summarization and highlight the critical role of human evaluation in assessing summary quality, particularly in complex, high-stakes domains.CASESUMM is available on HuggingFace.1

Information prioritization plays an important role in how humans perceive and understand the world. Homepage layouts serve as a tangible proxy for this prioritization. In this work, we present NewsHomepages, a large dataset of over 3,000 new website homepages (including local, national and topic-specific outlets) captured twice daily over a three-year period. We develop models to perform pairwise comparisons between news items to infer their relative significance. To illustrate that modeling organizational hierarchies has broader implications, we applied our models to rank-order a collection of local city council policies passed over a ten-year period in San Francisco, assessing their “newsworthiness”. Our findings lay the groundwork for leveraging implicit organizational cues to deepen our understanding of information prioritization.

Mortality forecasting is crucial for demographic planning and actuarial studies, particularly for predicting population ageing rates and future longevity risks. Traditional approaches largely rely on extrapolative methods, such as the Lee-Carter model and its variants which use mortality rates as inputs. In recent years, compositional data analysis (CoDA), which adheres to summability and non-negativity constraints, has gained increasing attention from researchers for its application in mortality forecasting. This study explores the use of the $\alpha$-transformation as an alternative to the commonly applied centered log-ratio (CLR) transformation for converting compositional data from the Aitchison simplex to unconstrained real space. The $\alpha$-transformation offers greater flexibility through the inclusion of the $\alpha$parameter, enabling better adaptation to the underlying data structure and handling of zero values, which are the limitations inherent to the CLR transformation. Using age-specific life table death counts for males and females in 31 selected European countries/regions from 1983 to 2018, the proposed method demonstrates comparable performance to the CLR transformation in most countries with improved forecast accuracy in some cases. These findings highlight the potential of the $\alpha$-transformation as a competitive alternative transformation technique for real-world mortality data within a non-functional CoDA framework.