Evaluation of the Turkish accession to the European Union, the structural changes and EU cohesion.

The main question that this research attempts to tackle is whether the Turkish accession to the EU will threaten or not the cohesion of the EU. This question is answered in the framework of: 1) The evaluation of the Turkish accession to the EU, especially through the relevant EU decisions and the Turkish political, economic, social, military and institutional reality. 2) The various theories of International Relations (Realism, Structural Realism, Functionalism, Neo-Functionalism). What I try to do is examine the structural changes which could occur as a result of the Turkish accession to the EU. Therefore, my aim is to analyse the EU -Turkey relations in the context of the EU Enlargement taking into consideration the policy of the US, which is the dominant actor of the international system in the current era. This study attempts to investigate and identify the factors influencing the policy of the EU on the Turkish accession to the European Union and vice versa. These factors constitute, in fact, variables upon which a model of EU cohesion can be based in order to find out whether the European system -as defined on legal, institutional, economic, military and social level- can be threatened or not by Turkey or even other new member states

Interactive public broadcasting: reflecting and improving practice

This research study has been carried out for the purpose of thoroughly examining and evaluating "liNE 1088 ", an interactive live cultural / informational TV programme, on the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CYBC, the State Channel of Cyprus), of which I am the researcher and presenter. The CYBC, as a public service institution, is the only TV channel in Cyprus to offer programmes of this kind on a regular basis. At this point in time, especially now that Cyprus has joined the ED, the people of Cyprus need to be educated and informed on many matters that concern them, especially those which are relevant to the multicultural dimensions of Europe, and the many ways in which they affect their life. The aim of the project is to examine ways and forms of improving the TV programme "LINE 1088" in order to maximise the viewers' participation in the programme in accordance with the EU's directives on public broadcasting. The objectives of the study have been, mainly through an extensive audience research, to ascertain the strong points and the shortcomings of the programme as a whole, to what extent it meets the expectations of its audience, as well as how its overall quality may be improved. For this research a "mixed method" approach was adopted in order to collect data., using quantitative and qualitative research techniques. For the purpose of achieving validity, I used multiple data collection techniques and a range of sources of information namely four different kinds of surveys: literature review, existing viewing pools and the review of five transcripts with findings from one research technique checked against the findings from the research of another type. The results of the project led to a set of recommendations for the overall improvement of my programme as well as to a working model (pro to-type), for the CYBC which could fit into a more global picture of broadcasting and thus motivate society to become more actively concerned with cultural socialisation A working model which should not be static, but embody the time dimension and gradually become polymorphic. This vision should have as broad a range as possible. This working model could become a manual for public television and contribute to cultural development and to a society of active citizens. The project is the product of lifelong research, learning and experience in the media and in culture. Being the fIrst of its kind in Cyprus it will, I hope, contribute to a new body of knowledge in this field and will also become a valuable tool in a wider context

Parameterized Concurrent Multi-Party Session Types

Session types have been proposed as a means of statically verifying implementations of communication protocols. Although prior work has been successful in verifying some classes of protocols, it does not cope well with parameterized, multi-actor scenarios with inherent asynchrony. For example, the sliding window protocol is inexpressible in previously proposed session type systems. This paper describes System-A, a new typing language which overcomes many of the expressiveness limitations of prior work. System-A explicitly supports asynchrony and parallelism, as well as multiple forms of parameterization. We define System-A and show how it can be used for the static verification of a large class of asynchronous communication protocols.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432

What is really in the economic partnership agreements for the Southern African region? A perspective from Botswana’s beef export markets

The signing of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and the African Caribbean Pacific (ACP) nations dominated the multilateral trade agenda in late 2007 and early 2008. While the Caribbean nations signed the full EPAs, some of the African countries only singed interim agreements with the EU and a number of West African countries chose not to sign any EPA. Using the case of Botswana’s export markets, especially in agriculture, it is argued that the interim Southern African Development Community (SADC) EPA, which was signed by Botswana and her neighbours, with the exception of South Africa, may have been economically sensible in protecting Botswana’s rural poor, at least in the short run. By tracing trade flows from the border to specifically poor sectors of the country, the importance of the beef exports sector to the poor and rural communities was found. The potential effects on the most significant exports of tariff bands associated with preferential agreements with the EU were found to be most beneficial in comparison to the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) and the South Africa-EU Trade Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) tariff bands. But it is also argued that the EPA will most likely have far reaching long run costs on regional economic development and institutional integration, within the SADC and Southern African Customs Union (SACU).Botswana, economic partnership agreements, European Union, exports, beef,

Isometries and Equivalences Between Point Configurations, Extended To ε\varepsilon-diffeomorphisms

In this paper, we deal with the Orthogonal Procrustes Problem, in which two point configurations are compared in order to construct a map to optimally align the two sets. This extends this to $\varepsilon$-diffeomorphisms, introduced by [1] Damelin and Fefferman. Examples will be given for when complete maps can not be constructed, for if the distributions do match, and finally an algorithm for partitioning the configurations into polygons for convenient construction of the maps.Comment: version: 11.26.1

Non-central generalized q-factorial coefficients and q-Stirling numbers

AbstractThe qs-differences of the non-central generalized q-factorials of t of order n, scale parameter s and non-centrality parameter r, at t=0, are thoroughly examined. These numbers for s→0 and s→∞ converge to the non-central q-Stirling numbers of the first and the second kind, respectively. Explicit expressions, recurrence relations, generating functions and other properties of these q-numbers are derived. Further, a sequence of Bernoulli trials is considered in which the conditional probability of success at the nth trial, given that k successes occur before that trial, varies geometrically with n and k. Then, the probability functions of the number of successes in n trials and the number of trials until the occurrence of the kth success are deduced in terms of the qs-differences of the non-central generalized q-factorials of t of order n, scale parameter s and non-centrality parameter r