The Awkward New Member: Poland's Changing European Identity

Like those in other post-communist Central and East European countries, successive Polish governments were consistently eager to join the European Union although popular enthusiasm for membership took a notable dip in the late 1990s and two vociferous 'Eurosceptic' parties were elected to parliament in 2001. Since joining, however, public opinion has been very much in favour of the country's new European status and the considerable economic benefits it has brought. It seemed rather strange, then, that in September 2005 a parliament was elected distinguished by the nationalist sentiments of several major parties which fed into the adoption of what was seen as a strongly Eurosceptic stance on the part of Polish representatives in the European arena. Polish interests were pursued aggressively and in a manner that many thought was fundamentally un-European throughout much of 2007 at the several summits critically concerned with relaunching the constitutional project and formulating what has become the Reform Treaty. This behaviour played a significant part in the defeat of the incumbent government in the October 2007 and the subsequent installation of a new leadership generally perceived to be significantly more EU-friendly. Ironically for a government that promulgated the principle of 'Nice or death', it secured an agreement for the Nice provisions to stay in force until 2014 but then itself expired at the polls. It should not be assumed, however, that the new Civic Platform/Peasant Party coalition will not be an equally energetic proponent of the Polish national interest. 'Poland' has therefore had several identities in recent years, and seen considerable variation both among and between the different areas of public opinion, political parties and government policy. It will probably see several more in coming years

The European Union and party politics in Central Europe

It is only recently that political scientists have begun to focus on the influence of European Union involvement on national parties. Mair's study of the impact of Europe on the parties of Western Europe is now a standard point of reference, and relatively little divergence can be seen from his view that the direct impact of EU involvement has been strictly limited. An extensive research project on the Europeanization of national party organizations has recently been completed and it, too, seems to have found little evidence that European-level decision-making has greatly changed the balance of power within national political parties. In the past few years, publications on Central Europe developments have also begun to appear. Empirical studies of the Europeanization of CE parties have, however, been less common than work on EU effects in related fields. We conclude here that in CE party politics the logic of national competition has overridden other logics, including that of the EU. But integration has still shaped party systems in various ways. Parties converge, though with significant exceptions, towards the classic European ideological patterns and are rapidly integrating with the European party federations. Coalition alternatives and policy options have generally been constrained by the integration process, but it is not possible to state generally whether the EU has affected the stability of CE party systems. Integration may well have increased the distance between elites and citizens and depoliticized certain issues but, in contrast to claims made of WE, we cannot really speak of a 'hollowing out' of party competition. Some organizational changes can be identified. The EU has had an impact on the internal norms of some parties as far as gender quotas are considered. But party organization as a whole has not greatly changed, although MEPs have often been given representation in the party leadership. The pervasiveness of EU impacts is nevertheless highly differentiated and far from unambiguous, leaving considerable scope for continuing variation in post-accession party politics in Central Europe

A Gateway to Future Problems: Concerns about the State by-State Legalization of Medical Marijuana

[Excerpt] “Before 2009, every American presidential administration had been uniform in its policy of consistently enforcing the nation’s drug laws. Pursuant to federal law, possession, use, or cultivation of any drug deemed illegal by Congress was, universally, a prosecutable offense. Notwithstanding this unwavering policy, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the marijuana industry continued to grow, and several states legalized medicinal marijuana despite the standing federal prohibition. Moreover, President Barrack Obama, shortly after taking office, broke precedent with his predecessors when he put forth a policy of non-enforcement through a publicly released memorandum authored by the then Deputy Attorney General, David Ogden, (hereinafter Ogden Memo or Memo) “provid[ing] clarification and guidance to federal prosecutors in states that have enacted laws authorizing the medical use of marijuana.” In this Memo, Ogden discouraged expenditure of “limited investigative and prosecutorial resources” on “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” Following the release of this Memo, many more states have enacted legislation that would legalize medical marijuana, and accordingly, during the Obama administration, the medical marijuana industry has demonstrated incredible growth. Furthermore, it is projected to continue to grow exponentially over the next five years.

Party system institutionalisation in east-central Europe: empirical dimensions and tentative conclusions

The nationalisation of party systems is a topic closely related to processes of party system institutionalisation, an area that has developed its own literature and dimensions of analysis. Institutionalisation is understood to comprise four main dimensions: the growth of stability in the rules and nature of inter-party competition, the development of stable roots in society that help ensure a measure of regularity in how people vote, the acquisition of legitimacy by parties and the electoral process, and the establishment of party organisation that have an independent status and some value in their own right. The idea of party system institutionalisation was first presented by S. Mainwaring and T. Scully in 1995 and has been developed in a range of other publications, mostly by Mainwaring with a number of different contributors. It was first developed in a Latin American context but has an obvious relevance to developments in other newly democratising countries. In terms of outcomes, party system institutionalisation is understood to have a strong impact on the quality of democracy and to reduce tendencies to clientelism, political populism and the growth of anti-politics sentiments, and to foster mechanisms of democratic accountability and effective policy formulation. Over the years, a substantial literature on the process of party system institutionalisation has been produced and, in recent years, a growing proportion of this has concerned systems in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper will, firstly, survey and evaluate some of the most recent literature with a view to establishing what light it sheds on the process in East-Central Europe and, secondly, identify and assess the key data that enable any judgement to be made on the course of this process in the region and to identify the contributions in this area of various data-bases relating to party politics

Automatically Annotating the MIR Flickr Dataset: Experimental Protocols, Openly Available Data and Semantic Spaces

The availability of a large, freely redistributable set of high-quality annotated images is critical to allowing researchers in the area of automatic annotation, generic object recognition and concept detection to compare results. The recent introduction of the MIR Flickr dataset allows researchers such access. A dataset by itself is not enough, and a set of repeatable guidelines for performing evaluations that are comparable is required. In many cases it also is useful to compare the machine-learning components of different automatic annotation techniques using a common set of image features. This paper seeks to provide a solid, repeatable methodology and protocol for performing evaluations of automatic annotation software using the MIR Flickr dataset together with freely available tools for measuring performance in a controlled manner. This protocol is demonstrated through a set of experiments using a “semantic space” auto-annotator previously developed by the authors, in combination with a set of visual term features for the images that has been made publicly available for download. The paper also discusses how much training data is required to train the semantic space annotator with the MIR Flickr dataset. It is the hope of the authors that researchers will adopt this methodology and produce results from their own annotators that can be directly compared to those presented in this work

Rotator cuff tears: is non-surgical management effective?

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Physical therapy Reviews on 28 December 2016, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10833196.2016.1271504.Background: Rotator cuff-related shoulder pain is a common musculoskeletal complaint with an increasing number of people with shoulder pain undergoing surgical repair each year. The relationship between rotator cuff tendon tears and shoulder pain remains equivocal due to the high prevalence of tears in people without symptoms, which suggests that a proportion of people will undergo surgery on tissues not related to their symptoms. As a result there have been suggestions to initially manage atraumatic tears non-surgically. Objectives: The objective of this narrative review was to present current evidence regarding the assessment and management of full-thickness rotator cuff tears. Major findings: To date, three randomised controlled trials have compared surgical with non-surgical management of rotator cuff tears. Outcomes show a small but non-significant effect in favour of surgery. Only one study has looked at long-term outcomes of greater than one year. Overall 129 subjects have completed a course of non-surgical management and therefore low participant numbers may not be sufficient to draw firm conclusions. Conclusions: Current evidence currently supports the consideration of a non-surgical approach in the management of people with shoulder symptoms and identified rotator cuff tears, for a period of time.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Semantic Retrieval and Automatic Annotation: Linear Transformations, Correlation and Semantic Spaces

This paper proposes a new technique for auto-annotation and semantic retrieval based upon the idea of linearly mapping an image feature space to a keyword space. The new technique is compared to several related techniques, and a number of salient points about each of the techniques are discussed and contrasted. The paper also discusses how these techniques might actually scale to a real-world retrieval problem, and demonstrates this though a case study of a semantic retrieval technique being used on a real-world data-set (with a mix of annotated and unannotated images) from a picture library

Congruences in ordered pairs of partitions

Dyson defined the rank of a partition (as the first part minus the number of parts) whilst investigating certain congruences in the sequence p−1(n). The rank has been widely studied as have been other statistics, such as the crank. In this paper a “birank” is defined which relates to ordered pairs of partitions, and is used in an elementary proof of a congruence in p−2(n