The Quest for a Regional Order in the Middle East. Security Policy Brief, No. 94 February 2018

The Middle East is once again going through a period of war and upheaval, including mass murder of civilians, state failure, transnational terrorism, sectarian wars, physical and societal destruction, massive arms purchases, use of nonconventional weapons (notably chemical) and a permanent risk of proliferation of WMD. These developments are a threat to the region, but also to the rest of the world and to Europe in particular. The current turmoil should not be underestimated for its potential to trigger an even bigger hot war that could involve other players, if only because of miscalculations by some of the parties involved

The EU-MENA partnership: time for a reset. Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 135 February 2021.

The storm raging across the Southern Neighbourhood, as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is also known in European terminology, is not about to subside any time soon. Beyond crisis management, current dysfunctions need a long-term, sustained and transformative approach. That was the spirit of the Barcelona Declaration and the original concept of the European neighbourhood policy. Obviously, it didn’t work as expected. The question is why, and how to put the train back on the tracks

Entropy-based strategies for physical exploration of the environment's degrees of freedom

Abstract — Physical exploration refers to the challenge of autonomously discovering and learning how to manipulate the environment’s degrees of freedom (DOF)—by identifying promising points of interaction and pushing or pulling object parts to reveal DOF and their properties. Recent existing work focused on sub-problems like estimating DOF parameters from given data. Here, we address the integrated problem, focusing on the higher-level strategy to iteratively decide on the next exploration point before applying motion generation methods to execute the explorative action and data analysis methods to interpret the feedback. We propose to decide on exploration points based on the expected information gain, or change in entropy in the robot’s current belief (uncertain knowledge) about the DOF. To this end, we first define how we represent such a belief. This requires dealing with the fact that the robot initially does not know which random variables (which DOF, and depending on their type, which DOF properties) actually exist. We then propose methods to estimate the expected information gain for an exploratory action. We analyze these strategies in simple environments and evaluate them in combination with full motion planning and data analysis in a physical simulation environment. I

Integrating complementary survey methods to estimate catches in Norway’s complex marine recreational hook-and-line fishery

Marine recreational fishing is popular in Norway, but current estimates of the catches by resident and tourist anglers are lacking due to several challenges, in particular Norway’s long and intricate coastline with no defined access points and the large tourist fishery. To test methods for long-term monitoring of boat-based marine recreational anglers, estimate their catches, and characterize the fishery, we conducted a roving creel survey based on a novel spatial sampling frame and a survey of tourist fishing businesses in Troms and Hordaland County. These surveys showed that cod (Gadus morhua) and saithe (Pollachius virens) dominated the catches in Troms, while mackerel (Scomber scombrus) and saithe dominated the catches in Hordaland. The estimated total annual harvest of cod by all marine recreational anglers was 2 160 tonnes (relative standard error, or RSE 44%) in Troms and 73 tonnes (RSE 29%) in Hordaland, of which ∼40% (in weight) were landed in registered tourist fishing businesses, based on data from the tourist fishing survey. The results indicate that recreational anglers in Hordaland harvest more cod in coastal waters than commercial fishers. This study provides information for developing marine recreational fisheries monitoring in challenging survey situations to support science-based fisheries management.publishedVersio

Several Distinct Polycomb Complexes Regulate and Co-Localize on the INK4a Tumor Suppressor Locus

Misexpression of Polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1) components in human cells profoundly influences the onset of cellular senescence by modulating transcription of the INK4a tumor suppressor gene. Using tandem affinity purification, we find that CBX7 and CBX8, two Polycomb (Pc) homologs that repress INK4a, both participate in PRC1-like complexes with at least two Posterior sex combs (Psc) proteins, MEL18 and BMI1. Each complex contains a single representative of the Pc and Psc families. In primary human fibroblasts, CBX7, CBX8, MEL18 and BMI1 are present at the INK4a locus and shRNA-mediated knockdown of any one of these components results in de-repression of INK4a and proliferative arrest. Sequential chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) reveals that CBX7 and CBX8 bind simultaneously to the same region of chromatin and knockdown of one of the Pc or Psc proteins results in release of the other, suggesting that the binding of PRC1 complexes is interdependent. Our findings provide the first evidence that a single gene can be regulated by several distinct PRC1 complexes and raise important questions about their configuration and relative functions

All-sky Medium Energy Gamma-ray Observatory: Exploring the Extreme Multimessenger Universe

The All-sky Medium Energy Gamma-ray Observatory (AMEGO) is a probe class mission concept that will provide essential contributions to multimessenger astrophysics in the late 2020s and beyond. AMEGO combines high sensitivity in the 200 keV to 10 GeV energy range with a wide field of view, good spectral resolution, and polarization sensitivity. Therefore, AMEGO is key in the study of multimessenger astrophysical objects that have unique signatures in the gamma-ray regime, such as neutron star mergers, supernovae, and flaring active galactic nuclei. The order-of-magnitude improvement compared to previous MeV missions also enables discoveries of a wide range of phenomena whose energy output peaks in the relatively unexplored medium-energy gamma-ray band

The Greater Middle East and the Mediterranean five years from now. Egmont Commentary, 29 October 2015

The crises in Europe’s neighbourhood seem to get worse by the day. The recent decision by Russia to intervene in Syria, supposedly to fight against DAESH has raised new questions about the cohesion of the international response to the war going on in the Levant and the Middle East.While this new turn of events could open the door to hard headed diplomacy as the meetings in Vienna past and future seem to indicate, there are serious questions about the coherence of the strategy between international players and between them and the regional actors. If we are in there for the long haul, how can and should we plan for a succesful exit and what are the stakes and the role of Europe

The EU at a crossroad. Egmont Commentary, 27 August 2015

Speech given by Marc Otte, Director-General Egmont Institute, on the occasion of the Opening Day of the School for Young leaders in Ohrid