Interest group influence on EU policy-making: A quantitative analysis across issues

This paper presents a large-scale empirical analysis of interest group influence on EU policy-making across a wide range of issues. The explanation of policy outcomes as well as the democratic legitimacy of the EU crucially depends on how much influence interest groups have and how influence is distributed among them. However, only few studies have addressed the question of influence and most are limited to case studies focusing only on one single issue. Recent literature however suggests that interest group influence varies considerably across issues. It is assumed that influence is not a mere function of interest group characteristics, but strongly shaped by the issue context. The lack of large-N studies controling for issue variables is mainly due to methodological difficulties in measuring influence. Hence, this paper employs a new approach: Drawing on a quantitative text analysis performed with Wordfish, policy preferences of interest groups will be compared with the policy proposal in order to identify the winners and the losers of the decision-making process. While controling for interest group characteristics, the effect of issue-related variables on interest group influence will be tested across 15 policy issues

The usefulness of fair value: the users' views within the context of the conceptual framework for financial reporting

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) defines the objective of financial reporting as the provision of information that is useful for decision making. Fair value is a prominent measurement basis in the financial reports of financial sector organisations. The current research integrates the concepts of fair value and usefulness in order to ascertain the extent to which fair value is deemed useful. The literature tends to group financial reporting stakeholders into distinct groups such as users, preparers and auditors. This thesis focuses on the perspective of the user whom, prior research has shown, is the least responsive when stakeholders are approached concerning accounting matters. NVivo, a qualitative analysis software, is employed to allow the thematic analysis of twenty semi-structured interviews with financial sector analysts. The results of prior studies are confirmed: fair value is more useful than not. While several studies have indicated that usefulness is impacted by certain factors, the contribution of the current study is its investigation into a comprehensive list of factors that impact fair value’s usefulness in a systematic and detailed way. A further contribution is this study’s extensive use of the Conceptual Framework to measure usefulness. The current study considers analysts’ perceptions of fair value’s usefulness against the qualitative characteristics of the Conceptual Framework. Issues are identified with modelled fair values’ neutrality, accuracy and verifiability. Reported fair values also need to improve in terms of the completeness, understandability and comparability. Fair value under IFRS is deemed both relevant and timely enough to impact decisions. Of the qualitative characteristics, interviewees view faithful representation and comparability as the most important. This should assist standard-setters in prioritising improvements. Finally, this study contributes by allowing users to influence the academic literature through direct quotes. As such, the research bridges the gap between theory and practice

Saint Patrick: A Hagiographical Study

Reflecting on her semester abroad in Galway, Ireland, the author was inspired to write about the conflicting images of St. Patrick’s personal writings and various accounts of his life written by hagiographers in the centuries following his death. This essay is an attempt to articulate the intersection of fact and fiction, and how they play a role in shaping the Irish saint

“What is that to you?”: The Johannine Community’s Beloved Disciple

Considering his significance within the Fourth Gospel, the Beloved Disciple’s absence within the synoptic gospels is puzzling. And as modern biblical scholars continue to challenge his traditional identification as John, Son of Zebedee, the question looms ever greater: Who – or, perhaps what – is the Beloved Disciple? Though his name may be lost to history, the character’s role within the gospel narrative still informs our understanding of the Christian community that sprung up around his testimony. This paper seeks to articulate how this unnamed disciple influenced the development of the Johannine Community’s unique theological identit

Breaking the PayPal HIP: A Comparison of classifiers

Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) are a method used to differentiate between humans and machines on the internet. Providers of online services such as PayPal.com use HIPs to prevent automated signups and abuse of their services. In this experiment, a three step algorithm has been developed to break the PayPal.com HIP. The image is preprocessed to remove noise using thresholding and a simple cleaning technique, and then segmented using vertical projections and candidate split positions. Four classification methods have been implemented: pixel counting, vertical projections, horizontal projections and template correlations. The system was trained on a sample of twenty PayPal.com HIPs to create thirty-six training templates (one for each character: 0-9 and A-Z). A sample of 100 PayPal.com HIPs were used for testing. The following HIP success rates have been achieved using the different classifiers: 8% pixel counting, vertical projections 97%, horizontal projections 100%, template correlations 100%. Three of the classifiers out perform the 88% HIP success rate of [6]

Relationships Between Water Developments and Select Mammals on the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, Utah

Water is essential to life. Three general forms of water exist: pre-formed water that is available in food, metabolic water that is created as a byproduct of life processes (e.g., metabolism of fat or breakdown of carbohydrates), and free water (i.e., water available for drinking). As humans settle arid environments, the addition of man-made free water sources (e.g., sewage ponds, catchment ponds) often occurs. In addition, a tool commonly used to increase the abundance or distribution of wildlife species in desert environments is the addition of water sources, usually specifically designed to benefit game species like bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and chukar partridge (Alectoris chukar). In recent decades, some scientists have argued that adding water sources to deserts may have little to no effect on desert species because they are adapted to living in desert conditions, and have thus evolved to obtain their water needs in preformed and/or metabolic form. Scientists have also suggested that adding water sources to desert environments may actually harm some individual species and alter the arraignments of groups of similarly related species, known as communities. I conducted four studies at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground to determine if man-made water sources have an influence on the rodent community, jackrabbits, and the canid community at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. I found that turning off water sources had no effect on abundance of rodent communities or jackrabbits. I found that a portion of coyotes used water sources and coyotes were only slightly less common near water sources once they were turned off. In addition, a portion of coyotes rarely or never drink from water sources and that coyotes did not leave their territories if water sources accessible to them were turned off. My final study revealed that turning off water sources did not influence kit fox survival or abundance, and that kit fox territories differed from areas associated with water sources in several key environmental characterizes, which may suggest that areas associated with water sources were not historically used by kit foxes. In summary, these findings suggest that water developments have little impact on the species that I studied

Evaluating the usability and security of a video CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a variation of the Turing test, in which a challenge is used to distinguish humans from computers (`bots\u27) on the internet. They are commonly used to prevent the abuse of online services. CAPTCHAs discriminate using hard articial intelligence problems: the most common type requires a user to transcribe distorted characters displayed within a noisy image. Unfortunately, many users and them frustrating and break rates as high as 60% have been reported (for Microsoft\u27s Hotmail). We present a new CAPTCHA in which users provide three words (`tags\u27) that describe a video. A challenge is passed if a user\u27s tag belongs to a set of automatically generated ground-truth tags. In an experiment, we were able to increase human pass rates for our video CAPTCHAs from 69.7% to 90.2% (184 participants over 20 videos). Under the same conditions, the pass rate for an attack submitting the three most frequent tags (estimated over 86,368 videos) remained nearly constant (5% over the 20 videos, roughly 12.9% over a separate sample of 5146 videos). Challenge videos were taken from YouTube.com. For each video, 90 tags were added from related videos to the ground-truth set; security was maintained by pruning all tags with a frequency 0.6%. Tag stemming and approximate matching were also used to increase human pass rates. Only 20.1% of participants preferred text-based CAPTCHAs, while 58.2% preferred our video-based alternative. Finally, we demonstrate how our technique for extending the ground truth tags allows for different usability/security trade-offs, and discuss how it can be applied to other types of CAPTCHAs

Optimal and sub-optimal, low-thrust, Earth-Moon trajectories using sequential quadratic programming

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2293979

“Thus seyden sadde folk” : Chaucer’s Oxford Clerk on theological controversy in the 14th century

Of all of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Clerk’s Tale is perhaps the most disturbing. The alarmingly submissive Griselda and her husband-cum-tormenter Walter have horrified and frustrated scholars with their irrational behavior for centuries. Although considered a teller of one of Chaucer’s “religious tales,” the Clerk’s seeming ambivalence about his tale’s moral has rendered most, if not all, theological readings unsatisfying and inconclusive. For this reason, the Clerk’s Tale has primarily been studied for the glimpse it provides into medieval gender politics. My research, however, attempts to situate the tale within its theological context by paying more attention to its teller – an Oxford-trained cleric. The 14th century witnessed several theological controversies, and Oxford University was often the hotbed of these debates. For instance, the general shift towards nominalism at medieval universities and the realist dissent that arose in response both introduced further ambiguity to the already-complicated problem of theodicy. And towards the end of the century, the rise of Wycliffism – and the eventual quagmire of lollardy – began with the work of John Wyclif and his early followers, all of whom were based at Oxford. Thus, the Oxford Clerk himself provides necessary context for the theological themes found within his tale. Using this context, my research suggests that the famously unsatisfying ambiguity of the story of Griselda may have been Chaucer’s intended theological reading, after all

Parties in coalitions find themselves caught between the need to cooperate and differentiate

The UK’s first coalition government during peacetime since 1945 ended with the electoral decimation of the Liberal Democrats at the 2015 election, with the party seemingly punished for its inability to create a compelling justification for its 2010 voters to back them again in the post-Coalition UK political landscape. Here, Inaki Sagarzazu and Heike Kluever show that the dilemma for coalition partners is finding an appropriate balance between the incompatible needs to cooperate and differentiate