The heart of political steering: the EU's areana of power as template for a governance typology

The literature on the so-called new modes of governance in the European Union focuses on steering instruments beyond hierarchy and coercion. While it has repeatedly been put into question how ‘new’ these instruments are, no systematic attention has been paid to the mutual dependency between policy types marked by the specific conflict lines and choice of governance tools. On the contrary, some attempts to classify modes of governance explicitly disregard policy typologies. The paper argues conversely that in order to arrive at a comprehensive mapping of modes of governance – ‘old’ and ‘new’ – the most promising doorway is indeed to start from the actor constellations characteristic for the different policy types. A review of the European Union’s policies and modes of governance illustrates how modes of governance are pre-defined by the structures between policy-makers and –takers innate to the policy types that dominate supranational policy-making

Structuring the European Administrative Space - Channels of EU Penetration and Mechanisms ofNational Change

The author provides an analytical model to capture mechanisms of supranational impact on national public administrations. The aim is to understand how we can perceive a European administrative space given the persistent diversity between member states. In face of the overly complex subject matter, it is argued that a typology that presents ideal types of interaction modes between supranational and national levels of administration provides in fact a suitable pragmatic approach to understand the potential impact of European integration on national civil services. Scrutinizing which mechanisms of possible influence-taking the European Union (EU) invokes shows that administrative integration does actually not suggest overall convergence. Instead the shared administrative space works precisely because it preserves state-sensitive diversity. Only in the context of enlargement did the EU need to present a single model to the candidate states and thus the notion of an ever more converging single administrative space was invented. Despite the external promotion of a single model, the driving dynamic of the emerging European administrative space remains increased cooperation and common administration that respects and sustains differences between independent national public administrations. The theoretical framework and empirical application therefore provide a first step for further research to tackle how supranational integration changes national public administration.public administration; identity; ideas; integration theory; public administration; closer cooperation; Europeanization; Europeanization

Attractor Explosions and Catalyzed Vacuum Decay

We present a mechanism for catalyzed vacuum bubble production obtained by combining moduli stabilization with a generalized attractor phenomenon in which moduli are sourced by compact objects. This leads straightforwardly to a class of examples in which the Hawking decay process for black holes unveils a bubble of a different vacuum from the ambient one, generalizing the new endpoint for Hawking evaporation discovered recently by Horowitz. Catalyzed vacuum bubble production can occur for both charged and uncharged bodies, including Schwarzschild black holes for which massive particles produced in the Hawking process can trigger vacuum decay. We briefly discuss applications of this process to the population and stability of metastable vacua.Comment: 26 pages harvmac big; 2 figure

Structural transitions in the 309-atom magic number Lennard-Jones cluster

The thermal behaviour of the 309-atom Lennard-Jones cluster, whose structure is a complete Mackay icosahedron, has been studied by parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations. Surprisingly for a magic number cluster, the heat capacity shows a very pronounced peak before melting, which is attributed to several coincident structural transformation processes. The main transformation is somewhat akin to surface roughening, and involves a cooperative condensation of vacancies and adatoms that leads to the formation of pits and islands one or two layers thick on the Mackay icosahedron. The second transition in order of importance involves a whole scale transformation of the cluster structure, and leads to a diverse set of twinned structures that are assemblies of face-centred-cubic tetrahedra with 6 atoms along their edges, i.e., one atom more than the edges of the 20 tetrahedra that make up the 309-atom Mackay icosahedron. A surface reconstruction of the icosahedron from a Mackay to an anti-Mackay overlayer is also observed, but with a lower probability.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Privacy sets for constrained space-filling

The paper provides typology for space filling into what we call "soft" and "hard" methods along with introducing the central notion of privacy sets for dealing with the latter. A heuristic algorithm based on this notion is presented and we compare its performance on some well-known examples

Scheduling of Early Quantum Tasks

An Early Quantum Task (EQT) is a Quantum EDF task that has shrunk its first period into one quantum time slot. Its purpose is to be executed as soon as possible, without causing deadline overflow of other tasks. We will derive the conditions under which an EQT can be admitted and can have an immediate start. The advantage of scheduling EQTs is shown by its use in a buffered multi-media server. The EQT is associated with a multimedia stream and it will use its first invocation to fill the buffer, such that a client can start receiving data immediately

University teacher judgments in problem-based learning: Their accuracy and reasoning

This study investigated the accuracy of 14 university teachers’ judgments. Early in the first year, university teachers ratedthe chance each university student intheir groupwould successfullycomplete theirfirst year as well as the entire bachelor’s program. Results showthat university teachers’ chance ratingswere predictive of actual academic success. However, they were more accurate in predicting success than failure. Moreover, results revealed that university teachers mostly built upon their observations of university students’ engagement andmotivation, instead of students’ cognitive ability in their judgments. Unsuccessful university students received relatively more negatively framed statements than successful students did