The Lisbon Treaty: a constitutional document, not a constitution–a British perspective

The European Union has undergone a constitutional transformation in the past half century. It has evolved from its origins as the European Economic Community, promoting economic integration, into a supranational polity that has come to be perceived in constitutional and even federal terms. This paper will explore the extent to which the modern-day EU can be said to possess some sort of constitution. In doing this, it will be necessary to decouple such a constitution from the notion of state constitutionalism and instead define it as a unique transnational constitution. Despite this, useful comparisons can be drawn between state constitutions and that of the EU, in order to ascertain the form the latter may take. Particularly useful in this regard is the analogy between the British constitutional model and the EU constitution. This paper concludes that the EU possesses a composite constitution more akin to that of the United Kingdom rather than a formal written text, as is typical in continental Europe. As such, in the present writer’s view, the Lisbon Treaty would feature, along with the other treaties, as a constitutional document within the constitutional arrangements of the EU, without it becoming a formal constitution itsel

On the new Kenyan sovereign wealth fund

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have been established in several countries to manage the revenues arising from exhaustible natural resources. SWFs allow consumption to be spread between generations, and between periods of high and low natural resource prices. In this paper the arguments for and against establishing an SWF in Kenya are considered. A first section considers the argument that Kenya is too poor to allocate oil revenues to such a fund. A second section discusses the principles underlying such a fund. A final section concludes by considering the steps that are being taken to establish a Kenyan SWF

Sensor systems: a hierarchical approach

The concept of a reference model has been well known in the communications industry for many years. This has provided clearly defined layers and interface standards which allow different organisations and across the industry to develop products independent of each other in the knowledge that their products will function correctly within the greater system. With the move towards massively parallel sensor systems networks, a similar approach needs to be adopted in order to permit concurrent developments in sensor networks. This paper summarises the need for such a reference model, and proposes a reference model applicable to sensor system

Analysing the IoT Ecosystem: the Barriers to Commercial Traction

The Internet of Things (IoT) has come to mean all things to all people. Combined with the huge amount of interest and investment into this emerging opportunity, there is a real possibility that the arising confusion will hamper adoption by the mass market. This paper proposes a phased model of the IoT ecosystem development, starting with infrastructure establishment, and culminating in exploitation through the creation of new companies and business models. It does not attempt to quantify the emerging opportunities, relying instead on the many publications dedicated to detailed market analysis. The focus is to place the opportunities in context, demonstrate the importance of sensor system technology underpinning the emerging IoT revolution, and suggests areas where Europe can establish a leadership position. Throughout the paper, examples of the likely protagonists have been used by way of illustration

One-parameter deformations of the diassociative and dendriform operads

Livernet and Loday constructed a polarization of the nonsymmetric associative operad A with one operation into a symmetric operad SA with two operations (the Lie bracket and Jordan product), and defined a one-parameter deformation of SA which includes Poisson algebras. We combine this with the dendriform splitting of an associative operation into the sum of two nonassociative operations, and use Koszul duality for quadratic operads, to construct one-parameter deformations of the nonsymmetric dendriform and diassociative operads into the category of symmetric operads.Comment: 8 page