Wise men, clear guidance and the Common Statute for the Members of the European Parliament. An argumentative Analysis.

To set the context for the more technical argumentative analysis, the Common Statute for the Members of the European Parliament will be introduced with its historical background. In the following methodology section, the Toulmin model of argumentation will be explained briefly. The main part consists of an argumentative analysis of “The Recommendation of the Group of Eminent Persons”, the most important document in the context of the Common Statute. The arguments will be reconstructed and evaluated separately. The paper concludes with a resume and critical evaluation of the findings

European Asylum Support Office: An effective answer to Europeanization of Asylum Policy?

Supranational agencies may solve problems of incomplete contracting.” The various parties to a contract pledge to behave in a certain way in the future in order to achieve a certain goal. However, all contracts are inevitably incomplete since they cannot spell out explicitly all the obligations of the parties throughout the life of the contract. Let us imagine that the contracting parties are the Union Member States and that the relevant obligation of the parties to the contract is the implementation of the Asylum Union acquis aimed at achieving the goal of a Common Asylum Support System. The agreement among the Member States fixes the general performance expectation (i.e. the implementation duties) but forgets to take into account a peculiar aspect of asylum law: its high dependency on the national administrative practices of dealing with applications for international protection. The contract among the Member States presents, thus, a gap that now has to be filled which is the convergence of administrative decision-making practices in granting asylum protection. The problem of incompleteness of the contract will be faced by a brand new supranational agency, as suggested by the contract paradigm of Pollack

Political Trust. A Question of Transparency?

In 2009, the Global Language Monitor frequently encountered ‘transparency’ in worldwide print and electronic media and therefore ranked it ‘tenth top word’ of that year (TGLM, 2010). According to their observation, transparency is an “elusive goal for which many 21st c. governments are striving” (ibid.) and will hence accompany us in the years to come. But what motivates governments to strive for transparency? This chapter suggests that transparency is omnipresent because of its potential to function as an instrument for higher political goals, the most important of which is the establishment of political trust. On a similar note, scholars have stressed the importance of transparency in establishing trust in processes of risk governance (e.g. Lofstedt, 2005; Peters, Covello, & McCallum, 1997). My main argument is that politicians throughout Western democracies are increasingly confronted with cynical citizens and hence in search for more public confidence (cf. also Dalton, 2005; Pharr & Putnam, 2000). The underlying logic is straightforward. If someone is more open to the public, s/he is considered more trustworthy

Non-choreographed Robot Dance

This research aims at investigating the difficulties of enabling the humanoid robot Nao to dance on music. The focus is on creating a dance that is not predefined by the researcher, but which emerges from the music played to the robot. Such an undertaking can not be fully tackled in a small-scale project. Nevertheless, rather than focusing on a subtask of the topic, this research tries to maintain a holistic view on the subject, and tries to provide a framework based on which work in this area can be continued in the future. The need for this research comes from the fact that current approaches to robot dance in general, and Nao dance in particular, focus on predefined dances built by the researcher. The main goal of this project is to move away from the current choreographed approaches to Nao dance, and investigate how to make the robot dance in a non-predefined fashion. Moreover, given the fact that previous research has focused mainly on the analysis of musical beat, a secondary goal of this project is to focus not only on the beat, but other elements of music as well, in order to create the dance