The EU should take inspiration from Switzerland in its attempts to increase democratic legitimacy.

One perceived problem for the democratic legitimacy of the EU is that linguistic diversity across Europe makes it difficult for there to be a viable European democratic community. Joseph Lacey assesses the potential for the EU to take inspiration from multilingual Switzerland in its attempts to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the EU policy process. He argues that, much like Switzerland, the EU requires a more radical form of democracy to accommodate the diversity that exists between European citizens. He proposes a number of specific measures for improving EU democracy, including the capacity to hold EU-wide referendums, and making the European Commission open to electoral competition via the European Parliament

What was wrong with the Brexit referendum and what would be wrong with a second

Depending on their design, referendums can be bad for democracy, writes Joseph Lacey. He argues that the central problem with the Brexit referendum was its ad hoc nature. Any second referendum would be of a similar sort and so should be avoided. But there is a way of legitimately deciding upon questions of EU membership: through the mandatory referendum

Allowing transnational voting during European elections could alleviate the EU’s democratic deficit

European Parliament elections are often criticised for lacking the required level of voter engagement to confer democratic legitimacy to the integration process. Jonathan Bright, Diego Garzia, Joseph Lacey and Alexander Trechsel assess whether ‘transnationalising’ European elections by allowing voters to back parties in other EU countries would help alleviate the problem. They argue that language barriers may represent a challenge, but suggest that internet-based ‘voting advice applications’ could help bridge this gap and offer a more representative range of choices to national electorates

Factors Affecting Posterior Capsule Opacification in the Development of Intraocular Lens Materials

Posterior capsule opacification (PCO) is the most common complication arising from the corrective surgery used to treat cataract patients. PCO arises when lens epithelial cells (LEC) residing in the capsular bag post-surgery undergo hyper-proliferation and transdifferentiation into myofibroblasts, migrating from the posterior capsule over the visual axis of the newly implanted intraocular lens (IOL). The developmental pathways underlying PCO are yet to be fully understood and the current literature is contradictory regarding the impact of the recognised risk factors of PCO. The aim of this review is firstly to collate the known biochemical pathways that lead to PCO development, providing an up-to-date chronological overview from surgery to established PCO formation. Secondly, the risk factors of PCO are evaluated, focussing on the impact of IOLs’ properties. Finally, the latest experimental model designs used in PCO research are discussed to demonstrate the ongoing development of clinical PCO models, the efficacy of newly developed IOL technology, and potential therapeutic interventions. This review will contribute to current PCO literature by presenting an updated overview of the known developmental pathways of PCO, an evaluation of the impact of the risk factors underlying its development, and the latest experimental models used to investigate PCO. Furthermore, the review should provide developmental routes for research into the investigation of potential therapeutic interventions and improvements in IOL design in the aid of preventing PCO for new and existing patients

Fusões e aquisições internacionais: um estudo de caso brasileiro

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Sócio-Econômico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Economia.O presente estudo, de modo qualitativo e teórico-analítico, apresenta o caso da aquisição da Empresa Brasileira de Compressores, S.A., Embraco, pela empresa multinacional (EMN) Whirlpool Corporation. O objetivo principal do trabalho é avaliar o processo da aquisição da Empresa Brasileira de Compressores, S.A., Embraco, pela empresa multinacional Whirlpool Corporation, um caso prático da venda da maior produtora de compressores para refrigeração para o líder mundial de produtos da linha branca na indústria de eletrodomésticos. Objetivos específicos são: Investigar os motivos determinantes para esta aquisição; Realizar a análise de fatos da trajetória a aquisição das empresas Brasmotor S.A., Embraco S.A. e Multibrás S.A.; Esclarecer o processo histórico da aquisição tendo como foco a relação existente entre estas empresas. Baseou-se na orientação teórica do modelo da estrutura OLI de Dunning e da estratégia de negócios. Os dados foram obtidos através de entrevista elaborada pelo autor, em conjunto com pesquisa secundária das empresas multinacionais Whirlpool Corporation e Embraco S.A. Os resultados demonstram que a aquisição da Embraco S.A. explica-se por um conjunto de fatores, dos quais a teoria da estratégia de negócios mais aproximadamente acompanha os eventos realizados na aplicação do Investimento Direto Externo (IDE) pela parte da Whirlpool Corporation

The representative deficit in different European Party Systems: an analysis of the elections to the European Parliament 2009-2014

This paper explores the extent to which different party systems in Europe effectively represent their citizens. We argue that many European countries suffer from a “representative deficit”, which occurs when a significant portion of citizens have to vote for a political party whose stated views are actually quite different from their own. We measure the extent of this deficit in different European countries using data from EU Profiler and euandi, two Voting Advice Applications which served millions of users during the EP elections in 2009 and 2014 respectively. We find wide variation in the extent to which political parties are accurately tuned in to the preferences of their voters, a variation which is not clearly linked to the number of political parties or the proportionality of the electoral system. We attempt to explain some of this variation, and explore the reasons why some party systems offer better representation than others

Recovery of silver from photographic waste: electrolysis behavior

Photographic waste is one of the wastes produced by the paper and printing industries. Photographic waste usually contains metal ions mostly silver, sodium, potassium and iron. Since silver is photosensitivity material and its valuable increasing price, people tends to recover the silver from photographic waste to reuse it in paper and printing industries. A lot of research had been done to effectively recover the silver from photographic waste. This research is to investigate the ability of electrolysis process to recover the silver from photographic waste. In the process of electrolysis, or commonly known as electrolytic silver recovery, a direct current is passed through a silver-rich solution between a positive electrode (the anode) and a negative electrode (the cathode). During the process, an electron is transferred from the cathode to the positively charged silver, converting it to its metallic state, which adheres to the cathode. There are two parameters that have been focused on; the effects of current supply to the electrolysis process on the yield of silver and the effects of distance between two electrodes on the yield of silver. The results show that the electrolysis is able to recover silver from photographic waste. For the current supply variable, the best current supply for the electrolysis process is 40 mA and variable of distance between electrodes contribute minor effect to the process. Electrolysis process is one of the cheapest processes since it is able to recover silver from photographic waste

Characterizing the Cluster Lens Population

We present a detailed investigation into which properties of CDM halos make them effective strong gravitational lenses. Strong lensing cross sections of 878 clusters from an N-body simulation are measured by ray tracing through 13,594 unique projections. We measure concentrations, axis ratios, orientations, and the amount of substructure of each cluster, and compare the lensing weighted distribution of each quantity to that of the cluster population as a whole. The concentrations of lensing clusters are on average 34% larger than the typical cluster in the Universe. Despite this bias, the anomalously high concentrations (c >14) recently measured by several groups, appear to be inconsistent with the concentration distribution in our simulations, which predict < 2% of lensing clusters should have concentrations this high. No correlation is found between lensing cross section and the amount of substructure. We introduce several types of simplified dark matter halos, and use them to isolate which properties of CDM clusters make them effective lenses. Projections of halo substructure onto small radii and the large scale mass distribution of clusters do not significantly influence cross sections. The abundance of giant arcs is primarily determined by the mass distribution within an average overdensity of ~ 10,000. A multiple lens plane ray tracing algorithm is used to show that projections of large scale structure increase the giant arc abundance by a modest amount <7%. We revisit the question of whether there is an excess of giant arcs behind high redshift clusters in the RCS survey and find that the number of high redshift (z > 0.6) lenses is in good agreement with LCDM, although our simulations predict more low redshift (z < 0.6) lenses than were observed. (abridged)Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures. Submitted to Ap