Spins of (dis)integration: What might 'reformers' in Canada learn from the 'social dimension' of the European Union?

In the Canadian discussion, the EU model ('Social Europe') has inspired a range of proposals for restructuring Canada. The article gives an introduction to 'where the social dimension and social policy are at' in the EU. Then the political relevance of the EU experience for Canada is explored whether this be for a Québécois independence perspective or for a Canadian interprovincial-compact as outlined in 1996 by Thomas Courchene. Finally, I shall conclude with some remarks on 'globalization and the welfare state' - a powerfully related issue, wherein welfare states can turn out to be foundations for both opening up and thence ensuring the openness of western economies for 'embedded liberalism' - as well as for 're-embedding liberalism' - as against being perceived purely as the inevitable victims of an unstoppable 'march of [the forces of] globalization' (Thomas Courchene), as has been most often envisioned. --

In the soft-to-hard technical spectrum: Where is software engineering?

In the computer journals and tabloids, there have been a plethora of articles written about the software engineering field. But while advocates of the need for an engineering approach to software development, it is impressive how many authors have treated the subject of software engineering without adequately addressing the fundamentals of what engineering as a discipline consists of. A discussion is presented of the various related facets of this issue in a logical framework to advance the thesis that the software development process is necessarily an engineering process. The purpose is to examine more of the details of the issue of whether or not the design and development of software for digital computer processing systems should be both viewed and treated as a legitimate field of professional engineering. Also, the type of academic and professional level education programs that would be required to support a software engineering discipline is examined

An information-theoretic on-line update principle for perception-action coupling

Inspired by findings of sensorimotor coupling in humans and animals, there has recently been a growing interest in the interaction between action and perception in robotic systems [Bogh et al., 2016]. Here we consider perception and action as two serial information channels with limited information-processing capacity. We follow [Genewein et al., 2015] and formulate a constrained optimization problem that maximizes utility under limited information-processing capacity in the two channels. As a solution we obtain an optimal perceptual channel and an optimal action channel that are coupled such that perceptual information is optimized with respect to downstream processing in the action module. The main novelty of this study is that we propose an online optimization procedure to find bounded-optimal perception and action channels in parameterized serial perception-action systems. In particular, we implement the perceptual channel as a multi-layer neural network and the action channel as a multinomial distribution. We illustrate our method in a NAO robot simulator with a simplified cup lifting task.Comment: 8 pages, 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

Das Staatsschiff Europa: Eine kleine Bildgeschichte

Europa wird meist mit dem Stier dargestellt. Allerdings gibt es auch eine lange Tradition Europa als Schiff abzubilden und damit an die Tradition des Staatsschiffs anzuknüpfen. In dem Artikel werden unterschiedliche Formen des Staatsverständnisses herausgearbeitet, die sich mit dieser Schiffsdarstellung verbinden.Europe ist often shown with the bull (taurus). But there is also a long tradition of imaging Europe as a ship, and to build on the old ship of state metaphor. In this essay different approaches to the sort of state Europe is are shown in the different ways the ship of state metaphor is used in images