"The European Community and Japan: Bi(tri)lateral Trade in World Context"

This paper first examines the institutional context of EC trade policy and assesses the real level of protection that policy has afforded. It then examines the question of how "common" the policy has in fact been and how it has related to competition policy, devoting a special section to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The next two sections discuss crucial issues in the trilateral relationship between the EC, Japan, and the US by focusing on the manufacturing sectors of electronics and cars. In shifting the perspective towards the future this paper focuses first on the concept of "strategic trade policy" and then at the special issues raised by the reform process that "1992 has brought, if it has, in Eastern Europe. The paper ends by posing two fundamental and interrelated questions. Has "1992" brought the European Community closer to the rest of the world? And what is the future position of Europe in the international division of labor

Quantum spin-Hall effect on the M\"obius graphene ribbon

Topological phases of matter have revolutionized quantum engineering. Implementing a curved space Dirac equation solver based on the quantum Lattice Boltzmann method, we study the topological and geometrical transport properties of a M\"obius graphene ribbon. In the absence of a magnetic field, we measure a quantum spin-Hall current on the graphene strip, originating from topology and curvature, whereas a quantum Hall current is not observed. In the torus geometry a Hall current is measured. Additionally, a specific illustration of the equivalence between the Berry and Ricci curvature is presented through a travelling wave-packet around the M\"obius band.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1810.0210

Large-scale Parallel Stratified Defeasible Reasoning

We are recently experiencing an unprecedented explosion of available data from the Web, sensors readings, scientific databases, government authorities and more. Such datasets could benefit from the introduction of rule sets encoding commonly accepted rules or facts, application- or domain-specific rules, commonsense knowledge etc. This raises the question of whether, how, and to what extent knowledge representation methods are capable of handling huge amounts of data for these applications. In this paper, we consider inconsistency-tolerant reasoning in the form of defeasible logic, and analyze how parallelization, using the MapReduce framework, can be used to reason with defeasible rules over huge datasets. We extend previous work by dealing with predicates of arbitrary arity, under the assumption of stratification. Moving from unary to multi-arity predicates is a decisive step towards practical applications, e.g. reasoning with linked open (RDF) data. Our experimental results demonstrate that defeasible reasoning with millions of data is performant, and has the potential to scale to billions of facts

Global dimensions in the educational legislation, social studies curriculum and textbooks of Greek compulsory education (grades 1-9)

This study involves a content analysis of Greek educational legislation as well as of the social studies curriculum and textbooks in Greece. The purpose of the study is to determine if global themes and supranational elements are contained in these materials and to what degree they translate into teachable knowledge. The analysis revealed that the above dimensions are, to some degree, evident, but they have not been adequately adapted to correspond to the pronouncements of the Greek educational establishment and to the new realities of the European and international space. The global dimensions found in these materials mainly address the geophysical aspects of the globe and to a lesser degree the human, political and socio-cultural issues and problems. It is recommended that Greece, as well as other nation states, undertake an in-depth examination of their curricula and textbooks, especially in the area of social studies, so that a balanced and globalised curriculum is developed.peer-reviewe

On Measuring Bias in Online Information

Bias in online information has recently become a pressing issue, with search engines, social networks and recommendation services being accused of exhibiting some form of bias. In this vision paper, we make the case for a systematic approach towards measuring bias. To this end, we discuss formal measures for quantifying the various types of bias, we outline the system components necessary for realizing them, and we highlight the related research challenges and open problems.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Global themes in the social studies curriculum of Greek primary education : the case of the 1982 and 2000 reforms

This study features a content analysis of the Greek primary school social studies curriculum of two consecutive educational reforms—those of 1982 and of 2000—both of which are used in schools today. The purpose of the study is to determine if there are global themes in the curricula of both reforms, and to compare which of the reforms includes the most references regarding global themes. The analysis revealed that even though the majority of references address national orientations, both of the reforms contain references to global themes; however, the 1982 reform has more references than that of the year 2000. It is recommended that countries in the European Union and beyond revisit their curricula in order to enhance global orientations and international perspectives, especially in the area of social studies, so that students are better able to make the leap from being national citizens to becoming ‘cosmo-citizens’.peer-reviewe