‘Relais actors’ and co-decision first reading agreements in the European Parliament : the case of the advanced therapies regulation

The processing of the advanced therapies regulation is of particular interest to scholars of the European Union's (EU) legislative process and students of the European Parliament (EP) because it provides a case study which throws light upon assumptions commonly made about the role of the EP's ‘relais actors’, the promotion of consensus-building within and between parliamentary committees, and the development of intraorganizational rules in response to early agreements in the co-decision procedure. An examination of the EP's processing of the advanced therapies dossier provides an ‘unusual’ but vivid illustration of how the identification of committee rapporteurs as the most important parliamentary ‘relais actors’ fails to capture the increasingly important roles performed by shadow rapporteurs. Significantly, the ‘unusual’ occurrences associated with the processing of the advanced therapies regulation came at a crucial juncture in the reconsideration of the EP's intraorganizational rules in relation to early agreements and the subsequent adoption of new Rules of Procedure in 2009

Early days : the European parliament, codecision and the European union legislative process post-Maastricht

Since the European Parliament's first vote on a Council common position submitted under the co-decision procedure in January 1994 the practice of co-decision has been scrutinized carefully within Parliament and the other European Union (EU) institutions. However, such scrutiny has produced differing interpretations. This article seeks to assess these respective claims by analysing the first thirty-two legislative proposals processed under co-decision, and so to make an initial assessment of the legislative impact of the European Parliament under the new procedure. Under co-decision Parliament is a more equal partner in the EU's legislative process, and now has a rightful place alongside Council in several important policy areas - despite the weighting of the procedure towards Council. Certainly, informal inter-institutional linkages have expanded as a result of co-decision and, whatever their qualitative effect, there has been an undeniable quantitative increase in the interactions between Parliament and Council. The net result of the dialogue between Parliament and Council is the confirmation of an increasingly bipartite bargaining process and this, in turn, has placed the Commission in a considerably more ambiguous, and weaker, position than in the co-operation or consultation procedures

Wigner-Crystal Formulation of Strong-Coupling Theory for Counter-ions Near Planar Charged Interfaces

We present a new analytical approach to the strong electrostatic coupling regime (SC), that can be achieved equivalently at low temperatures, high charges, low dielectric permittivity etc. Two geometries are analyzed in detail: one charged wall first, and then, two parallel walls at small distances, that can be likely or oppositely charged. In all cases, one type of mobile counter-ions only is present, and ensures electroneutrality (salt free case). The method is based on a systematic expansion around the ground state formed by the two-dimensional Wigner crystal(s) of counter-ions at the plate(s). The leading SC order stems from a single-particle theory, and coincides with the virial SC approach that has been much studied in the last 10 years. The first correction has the functional form of the virial SC prediction, but the prefactor is different. The present theory is free of divergences and the obtained results, both for symmetrically and asymmetrically charged plates, are in excellent agreement with available data of Monte-Carlo simulations under strong and intermediate Coulombic couplings. All results obtained represent relevant improvements over the virial SC estimates. The present SC theory starting from the Wigner crystal and therefore coined Wigner SC, sheds light on anomalous phenomena like the counter-ion mediated like-charge attraction, and the opposite-charge repulsion

Constraints on stable equilibria with fluctuation-induced forces

We examine whether fluctuation-induced forces can lead to stable levitation. First, we analyze a collection of classical objects at finite temperature that contain fixed and mobile charges, and show that any arrangement in space is unstable to small perturbations in position. This extends Earnshaw's theorem for electrostatics by including thermal fluctuations of internal charges. Quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field are responsible for Casimir/van der Waals interactions. Neglecting permeabilities, we find that any equilibrium position of items subject to such forces is also unstable if the permittivities of all objects are higher or lower than that of the enveloping medium; the former being the generic case for ordinary materials in vacuum.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Performance of the Colorado wind-profiling network, part 1.5A

The Wave Propagation Laboratory (WPL) has operated a network of radar wind Profilers in Colorado for about 1 year. The network consists of four VHF (50-MHz) radars and a UHF (915-MHz) radar. The Platteville VHF radar was developed by the Aeronomy Laboratory (AL) and has been operated jointly by WPL and AL for several years. The other radars were installed between February and May 1983. Experiences with these radars and some general aspects of tropospheric wind measurements with Doppler radar are discussed

Computer animation for virtual humans.

YesAdvances in computer animation techniques have spurred increasing levels of realism and movement in virtual characters that closely mimic physical reality. Increases in computational power and control methods enable the creation of 3D virtual humans for real-time interactive applications. Artificial intelligence techniques and autonomous agents give computer-generated characters a life of their own and let them interact with other characters in virtual worlds. Developments and advances in networking and virtual reality (VR) let multiple participants share virtual worlds and interact with applications or each other

A Black Hole Levitron

We study the problem of spatially stabilising four dimensional extremal black holes in background electric/magnetic fields. Whilst looking for stationary stable solutions describing black holes kept in external fields we find that taking a continuum limit of Denef et al's multi-center solutions provides a supergravity description of such backgrounds within which a black hole can be trapped in a given volume. This is realised by levitating a black hole over a magnetic dipole base. We comment on how such a construction resembles a mechanical Levitron.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Viscous instabilities in flowing foams: A Cellular Potts Model approach

The Cellular Potts Model (CPM) succesfully simulates drainage and shear in foams. Here we use the CPM to investigate instabilities due to the flow of a single large bubble in a dry, monodisperse two-dimensional flowing foam. As in experiments in a Hele-Shaw cell, above a threshold velocity the large bubble moves faster than the mean flow. Our simulations reproduce analytical and experimental predictions for the velocity threshold and the relative velocity of the large bubble, demonstrating the utility of the CPM in foam rheology studies.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Replaced with revised version accepted for publication in JSTA

DNA content of a functioning chicken kinetochore

© The Author(s) 2014. In order to understand the three-dimensional structure of the functional kinetochore in vertebrates, we require a complete list and stoichiometry for the protein components of the kinetochore, which can be provided by genetic and proteomic experiments. We also need to know how the chromatin-containing CENP-A, which makes up the structural foundation for the kinetochore, is folded, and how much of that DNA is involved in assembling the kinetochore. In this MS, we demonstrate that functioning metaphase kinetochores in chicken DT40 cells contain roughly 50 kb of DNA, an amount that corresponds extremely closely to the length of chromosomal DNA associated with CENP-A in ChIP-seq experiments. Thus, during kinetochore assembly, CENP-A chromatin is compacted into the inner kinetochore plate without including significant amounts of flanking pericentromeric heterochromatin. © 2014 The Author(s).Wellcome Trust [grant number 073915]; Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology (core grant numbers 077707 and 092076); Darwin Trust of Edinburg