On the correctness of a branch displacement algorithm

The branch displacement problem is a well-known problem in assembler design. It revolves around the feature, present in several processor families, of having different instructions, of different sizes, for jumps of different displacements. The problem, which is provably NP-hard, is then to select the instructions such that one ends up with the smallest possible program. During our research with the CerCo project on formally verifying a C compiler, we have implemented and proven correct an algorithm for this problem. In this paper, we discuss the problem, possible solutions, our specific solutions and the proofs

Risk and protective factors for meningococcal disease in adolescents: matched cohort study

Objective: To examine biological and social risk factors for meningococcal disease in adolescents. Design: Prospective, population based, matched cohort study with controls matched for age and sex in 1:1 matching. Controls were sought from the general practitioner. Setting: Six contiguous regions of England, which represent some 65% of the country’s population. Participants: 15-19 year olds with meningococcal disease recruited at hospital admission in six regions (representing 65% of the population of England) from January 1999 to June 2000, and their matched controls. Methods: Blood samples and pernasal and throat swabs were taken from case patients at admission to hospital and from cases and matched controls at interview. Data on potential risk factors were gathered by confidential interview. Data were analysed by using univariate and multivariate conditional logistic regression. Results: 144 case control pairs were recruited (74 male (51%); median age 17.6). 114 cases (79%) were confirmed microbiologically. Significant independent risk factors for meningococcal disease were history of preceding illness (matched odds ratio 2.9, 95% confidence interval 1.4 to 5.9), intimate kissing with multiple partners (3.7, 1.7 to 8.1), being a university student (3.4, 1.2 to 10) and preterm birth (3.7, 1.0 to 13.5). Religious observance (0.09, 0.02 to 0.6) and meningococcal vaccination (0.12, 0.04 to 0.4) were associated with protection. Conclusions: Activities and events increasing risk for meningococcal disease in adolescence are different from in childhood. Students are at higher risk. Altering personal behaviours could moderate the risk. However, the development of further effective meningococcal vaccines remains a key public health priority

Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change: Problems, Policies and Politics.

How do global and regional climate targets, rules, policies, and standards emerge and under which conditions are they effectively enabled within domestic political systems? When and how do national policy innovations diffuse and who are the principle actors involved? This paper aims to shed light on the multilevel intermediation processes that shape climate policy development and implementation, with a particular focus the interplay between the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), regional multilateral institutions, and their member states. As per the original project deliverable, the aim of this study is both descriptive – providing a detailed and historical perspective on “multi-level implementation of the UNFCCC regime through coordinated action within and between member states” – as well as analytical, namely, to assess its “effectiveness and ability to accelerate climate governance implementation”. It builds upon earlier ground-clearing research that produced a comprehensive mapping of the current UNFCCC regime and the wider climate governance regime complex, illuminating scope for action by a wide variety of actors at all scales, from the sub-national to the highest global level of political assembly (Coen, Kreienkamp, and Pegram 2020). By focusing on interscalar interactions on the regional level, this paper zeroes in on particularly important dynamics within this complex ecosystem of global climate governance. More specifically, we compare governance arrangements in the European Union (EU), where supranational climate policymaking is most advanced, to those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), where regional cooperation on climate change remains very limited.1 Regional organizations provide an instructive domain of analysis because they sit neither at the “top” nor at the “bottom” of the global climate change regime, providing vital governance (regulatory) as well as meta-governance (steering) functions.2 Although there are significant differences between the EU and ASEAN, both case studies point to linkages between global, regional, and national climate governance, with the international framework setting boundary conditions for regional and national policy development and vice versa. However, while these linkages have, at several points in time, accelerated policymaking processes in the EU, they have created few opportunities for significant policy change within ASEAN. Whereas our previous mapping of the global climate governance landscape employed scholarship on regime complexity to illustrate the growing institutional diversity on the inter- 1 This emulates recent scholarship seeking to advance comparative leverage between the EU and ASEAN focused on institutional design, in light of temporal and spatial variation in regional integration processes (Hofmann and Yeo 2017). 2 Meta-governance arrangements do not regulate or govern directly but rather engage in the “organization of self-organization” by providing ground rules for and ensuring the coherence and consistency of different governance regimes and mechanisms, whether through networks, markets, or hierarchical steering (Jessop 1998, p. 42). 4 and transnational level, this paper aims to provide a more sophisticated account of the governance dynamics playing out within this cluster of institutional arrangements through a multilevel governance (MLG) lens. Given space constraints, our focus is on the UNFCCC regime, which remains at the core of the broader climate regime complex (Keohane and Victor 2011). While the regime complexity literature is primarily concerned with the rising density of institutions on the same level of governance and the resulting proliferation of overlapping rules (Alter and Meunier 2009), MLG is more concerned with linkages and interactions between multiple scales and levels of governance and how this affects where policymaking authority is located. This provides a useful frame for exploring if, how, when, and why the UNFCCC regime affects the design of regional and national institutional arrangements and how, in turn, actors at various levels of governance seek to shape the rules and institutions that make up the regime. We show how MLG structures can be exploited by progressive policy entrepreneurs, who advance novel policy solutions, as well as policy obstructers who, for various reasons, are invested in the status-quo. To do so, we employ John Kingdon’s (1984) multiple streams framework (MSF), which highlights both the structural conditions that facilitate or impede non-incremental policy change – problem perception, availability of policy solutions, and political willingness – as well as the ability of different agents to exploit these conditions. Understanding these processes, and under which conditions they result in more ambitious climate action, is vital for any efforts to make existing governance arrangements more effective. As such, this paper speaks not just to scholars of global governance, International Relations, public policy, and related disciplines but first and foremost to policymakers at various levels of decision-making, seeking to better understand and reform policy processes. We supplement the EU and ASEAN case studies – which focus primarily on vertical interactions in multilevel governance arrangements – with a case study on transnational policy diffusion, tracing how national climate framework laws have emerged as important governance tools for internalizing UNFCCC rules and norms, mostly in Europe but increasingly beyond. Climate laws are significant because they enshrine binding long-term mitigation targets and establish overarching governance frameworks to realize these targets. While they have primarily diffused horizontally, we also document how policy entrepreneurs have recently managed to “upload” the concept to the EU-level. Some design elements of climate framework laws are even reflected in the Paris Agreement. Because the latter does not set legally binding mitigation targets for individual countries, relying instead on voluntary national commitments, climate laws can provide an important “link between international obligations and national policymaking” (Nash and Steurer 2019, p. 1061). However, for mitigation commitments to be meaningful, accountability structures must be in place to ensure that targets are grounded in science and implemented effectively. As we will show, independent climate advisory bodies 5 (ICABs) can play an important role in this regard – but only if they are properly resourced and vested with requisite powers. To date, only a handful of countries, primarily in Europe, have implemented strong and robust climate laws, with ambitious and quantifiable long-term targets, clear governance provisions, and ICABs that are not just offering scientific advice but also rigid progress monitoring. Meanwhile, in the ASEAN region, long-standing structural limitations to political accountability, participation, and civil society engagement have impeded the development of climate laws and formal ICABs. However, as we will argue, the emergence of informal monitoring regimes comprised of domestic civil society organizations could provide an alternative, albeit “softer”, avenue for driving more ambitious climate action and holding governments to account. This paper begins by introducing multilevel governance (MLG) and the multiple streams framework (MSF), which provide the theoretical anchor for our case studies. We then apply these concepts to reflect on the development of climate governance in the EU, with particular focus on the interplay between the EU and the UNFCCC. This is followed by a case study on ASEAN, where regional climate governance structures are much less developed and there is little coordinated engagement with the UNFCCC regime. To illustrate the diversity of national approaches within ASEAN and identify obstacles and opportunities for more sophisticated climate governance arrangements, we supplement the regional case study with reflections on the current situation in Indonesia and Singapore. The next part of the paper focuses on national climate framework laws, explaining their emergence and ongoing diffusion as well as weighing in on their potential as innovative governance solutions. The paper concludes by reflecting on the future of global, regional, and national climate governance in light of conflicting problem definitions and the need for urgent action, even in the face of other pressing challenges, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: procedural mechanisms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi-level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multilevel governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria— accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness— and points towards substantive institutional reforms.Published versio

SmartTools: a generator of interactive environments tools

SmartTools is a development environment generator that provides a structure editor and semantic tools as main features. The well-known visitor pattern technique is commonly used for designing semantic analysis, it has been automated and extended. SmartTools is easy to use thanks to its graphical user interface designed with the Java Swing APIs. It is built with an open architecture convinient for a partial or total integration of SmartTools in other environments. It makes the addition of new software components in SmartTools easy. As a result of the modular architecture, we built a distributed instance of SmartTools which required minimal effort. Being open to the XML technologies offers all the features of Smart Tools to any language defined with those technologies. But most of all, with its open architecture, SmartTools takes advantage of all the developments made around those technologies, like DOM, through the XML APIs. The fast development of SmartTools (which is a young project, one year old) validates our choices of being open and generic. The main goal of this tool is to provide help and support for designing software development environments for programming languages as well as application languages defined with XML technologies

An Algebraic Approach to Linear-Optical Schemes for Deterministic Quantum Computing

Linear-Optical Passive (LOP) devices and photon counters are sufficient to implement universal quantum computation with single photons, and particular schemes have already been proposed. In this paper we discuss the link between the algebraic structure of LOP transformations and quantum computing. We first show how to decompose the Fock space of N optical modes in finite-dimensional subspaces that are suitable for encoding strings of qubits and invariant under LOP transformations (these subspaces are related to the spaces of irreducible unitary representations of U(N)). Next we show how to design in algorithmic fashion LOP circuits which implement any quantum circuit deterministically. We also present some simple examples, such as the circuits implementing a CNOT gate and a Bell-State Generator/Analyzer.Comment: new version with minor modification

Aberrant Cortical Activity In Multiple GCaMP6-Expressing Transgenic Mouse Lines

Transgenic mouse lines are invaluable tools for neuroscience but as with any technique, care must be taken to ensure that the tool itself does not unduly affect the system under study. Here we report aberrant electrical activity, similar to interictal spikes, and accompanying fluorescence events in some genotypes of transgenic mice expressing GCaMP6 genetically-encoded calcium sensors. These epileptiform events have been observed particularly, but not exclusively, in mice with Emx1-Cre and Ai93 transgenes, across multiple laboratories. The events occur at >0.1 Hz, are very large in amplitude (>1.0 mV local field potentials, >10% df/f widefield imaging signals), and typically cover large regions of cortex. Many properties of neuronal responses and behavior seem normal despite these events, though rare subjects exhibit overt generalized seizures. The underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon remain unclear, but we speculate about possible causes on the basis of diverse observations. We encourage researchers to be aware of these activity patterns while interpreting neuronal recordings from affected mouse lines and when considering which lines to study

Airports at Risk: The Impact of Information Sources on Security Decisions

Security decisions in high risk organizations such as airports involve obtaining ongoing and frequent information about potential threats. Utilizing questionnaire survey data from a sample of airport employees in European Airports across the continent, we analyzed how both formal and informal sources of security information affect employee's decisions to comply with the security rules and directives. This led us to trace information network flows to assess its impact on the degree employees making security decisions comply or deviate with the prescribed security rules. The results of the multivariate analysis showed that security information obtained through formal and informal networks differentially determine if employee will comply or not with the rules. Information sources emanating from the informal network tends to encourage employees to be more flexible in their security decisions while formal sources lead to be more rigid with complying with rules and protocols. These results suggest that alongside the formal administrative structure of airports, there exists a diverse and pervasiveness set of informal communications networks that are a potent factor in determining airport security levels

Together forever? Explaining exclusivity in party-firm relations

Parties and firms are the key actors of representative democracy and capitalism respectively and the dynamic of attachment between them is a central feature of any political economy. This is the first article to systematically analyse the exclusivity of party-firm relations. We consider exclusivity at a point in time and exclusivity over time. Does a firm have a relationship with only one party at a given point in time, or is it close to more than one party? Does a firm maintain a relationship with only one party over time, or does it switch between parties? Most important, how do patterns of exclusivity impact on a firm’s ability to lobby successfully? We propose a general theory, which explains patterns of party-firm relations by reference to the division of institutions and the type of party competition in a political system. A preliminary test of our theory with Polish survey data confirms our predictions, establishing a promising hypothesis for future research