Governmental Positions on European Treaty Reforms: Towards a Dynamic Approach.

Governmental positions are a powerful predictor of European treaty reforms. Yet, few empirical studies analyze the conditionalies between positions over different issues or conflict dimensions. If governmental positions are conditional upon the real or expected outcome on other issues, the sequence of decisions becomes increasingly important for our understanding of European treaty reforms. So far, not many studies analyze the sequence of intergovernmental decisions. In the present paper, I argue that governmental preferences over the reform of the EU decision rule dependent on the delegation of competences to the EU and vice versa. Moreover, I present a statistical model which allows for estimating this conditionality. Subsequently, I apply this model to an extensive data set of reform positions revealed by national governments at the Intergovernmental Conferences (IGC) 2003/4. Next, I analyze the sequence of decision taken by this particular IGC in chronological order. For this purpose, I predict the change of governmental position in response to the decisions over subsets of issues and I compare these predictions to public statements issued by governmental leaders at the time. Finally, I discuss the implications for our understanding of the intergovernmental bargaining outcome

Peter Finke

Em ECO-REBEL v. 5, n. 2, 2019, p. 6-7, já se encontra um “A short autobiographical background” (breve pano de fundo autobiográfico). Para acessá-lo, clique em: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/erbel/article/view/27657/23795    In ECO-REBEL v. 5, n. 2, 2019, p. 6-7, there is “A short autobiographical background”, available here: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/erbel/article/view/27657/2379

Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology, and Literary Studies

Key words: German ecocriticism, cultural ecology, Peter Finke, Gregory Bateson, cultural ecosystem, cultural self-renewal, Turkish ecocriticism, discursive representation Ecocriticism is gaining increasing international recognition as a field of research that opens up new perspectives reaffirming the relevance and responsibility of the humanities, in an age of pressing social and political problems seemingly incapable of purely technological and economic solutions. Many of its most significant practitioners in Germany subscribe to the theory of Cultural Ecology. Drawing on the ideas of Gregory Bateson, Peter Finke and others, Cultural Ecology presents a new framework for understanding the particular contribution of literature and art to our general social knowledge, including knowledge about our relationship with the natural environment.  Palabras clave: ecocrítica alemana, ecología cultural, Peter Finke, Gregory Bateson, ecosistema cultural, renacimiento cultural, ecocrítica turca, representación discursiva La ecocrítica está obteniendo cada vez más reconocimiento internacional como un campo de investigación que establece nuevas perspectivas que reafirman la relevancia y la responsabilidad de las humanidades en una era de problemas políticos y sociales urgentes que, aparentemente, no encuentran solución puramente tecnológica ni económica. Muchos de sus profesionales más importantes en Alemania se adhieren a la teoría de la Ecología Cultural. Valiéndose de las ideas de Gregory Bateson, Peter Finke y otros, se ha desarrollado un nuevo marco para entender la contribución particular de la literatura y del arte a nuestro conocimiento social general, incluyendo el conocimiento sobre nuestra relación con el entorno natural

Spatio-temporal modeling of soil characteristics for soilscape reconstruction

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Finke explores religious freedom in Birkett Williams Lecture

Emphasizing that almost every country has some sort of assurance of religious freedoms, Dr. Roger Finke recently delivered Ouachita Baptist University\u27s spring 2014 Birkett Williams Lecture

High-frequency-peaked BL Lacertae objects as spectral candles to measure the Extragalactic Background Light in the Fermi and air Cherenkov telescopes era

The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) is the integrated light from all the stars that have ever formed, and spans the IR-UV range. The interaction of very-high-energy (VHE: E>100 GeV) gamma-rays, emitted by sources located at cosmological distances, with the intervening EBL results in electron-positron pair production that leads to energy-dependent attenuation of the observed VHE flux. This introduces a fundamental ambiguity in the interpretation of measured VHE gamma-ray spectra: neither the intrinsic spectrum, nor the EBL, are separately known -- only their combination is. In this paper we propose a method to measure the EBL photon number density. It relies on using simultaneous observations of BL Lac objects in the optical, X-ray, high-energy (HE: E>100 MeV) gamma-ray (from the Fermi telescope), and VHE gamma-ray (from Cherenkov telescopes) bands. For each source, the method involves best-fitting the spectral energy distribution (SED) from optical through HE gamma-rays (the latter being largely unaffected by EBL attenuation as long as z<1) with a Synchrotron Self-Compton (SSC) model. We extrapolate such best-fitting models into the VHE regime, and assume they represent the BL Lacs' intrinsic emission. Contrasting measured versus intrinsic emission leads to a determination of the photon-photon opacity to VHE photons. Using, for each given source, different states of emission will only improve the accuracy of the proposed method. We demonstrate this method using recent simultaneous multi-frequency observations of the high-frequency-peaked BL Lac object PKS 2155-304 and discuss how similar observations can more accurately probe the EBL.Comment: ApJ Letters, in press. 18 pages (ApJ referee style), 2 figures