Transatlantic Relations: Past, Present, and Future. College of Europe Policy Brief #7.November 2019

> The United States and Europe have a rich history of cooperation which played a fundamental role in the establishment of the post-World War II international order with its tissue of multilateral structures that helped to generate an unprecedented period of peace and stability in the world. > The new millennium posed a number of difficult challenges to the partners with 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, financial crisis and a global recession that exploded confidence in financial institutions, economic policy and, ultimately, political institutions, the effects of which are still felt today. > However, it was the election of President Trump in 2016 that led to the most sustained divergence across the entire spectrum of relations: from defence and security to climate change and trade. It has also exposed the structural features of a divide which pose a more fundamental threat to the longterm future of the transatlantic alliance. > The present drift towards disconnection can only be overcome by ensuring that common ground is found and that all parties are comfortable with the balance of rights and responsibilities. The European Union could play a leading role in reinventing the transatlantic relationship for the next generation by seeking to achieve a reinvigorated transatlantic partnership with the United States covering, in particular, security, trade, and common approaches to the emergence of a new global order

Māori education and principles of self-determination in the twenty-first century.

This paper argues that self-determination to the greatest extent possible is a legitimate aspiration for Maori people. It is argued that in education this requires a philosophical and policy response more focused on Maori autonomy than can be provided within the bicultural framework that has lately informed Maori relationships with other actors in the education arena. The paper considers the place of kohanga reo, kura kaupapa Maori and wananga in relation to broader Maori aspirations for self-determination and discusses proposals that these aspirations be furthered through the establishment of a Maori Education Authority. It is also argued that opportunities for self-determination in New Zealand are compromised by the government's unwillingness to alter a tightly controlled centralised education market to provide genuine Māori autonomy over what type of education might be available and to what end

House Prices in the Measurement of Inflation - An Application Using Irish Data

This paper illustrates the impact on Irish inflation of including a house-price series with the current components of the harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP). We construct a dynamic factor index of inflation that weights the individual price series according to the strength of their signal about the common trend in prices. As the relatively noisy house-price series attracts a weight of only 3 per cent in the index, the inclusion of house prices in this way does not hugely alter the recent pattern of inflation for Ireland, despite house prices exhibiting much stronger growth on average than the current measure of consumer prices.

Funding and providing social services: The good, the bad and the third way?

The funder/provider split in the area of social services is now a long-established reality in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It has been the subject of much debate and criticism see, for example, Boston et at 1996. However, it remains the principal means by which a range of NGO service providers gains access to State funding. At the same time, with the advent of a new Labour-Alliance coalition government in 1999, the possibility arises that one of the social policy reforms the government might consider would be to amend or even to abolish the funder/provider system

Supervision of the Irish Banking System: A Critical Perspective

Bankenaufsicht, Bankrecht, Bankensystem, Irland, Banking supervision, Banking law, Banking system, Ireland

THE EARLY IMPACT OF THE REVISED LEAVING CERTIFICATE GRADING SCHEME ON STUDENT PERCEPTIONS AND BEHAVIOUR. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 85 JANUARY 2019

This report examines the early effects, on student perceptions and behaviour, of a change in the grading structure for the Leaving Certificate (LC) examination, which took place in 2017. Potential change in LC outcomes is an important policy issue, given the crucial role played by upper secondary grades in access to higher education (HE) and in (higher quality) employment in Ireland (Hannan et al., 1998; McCoy et al., 2010a; Smyth and McCoy, 2009). In Ireland, the terminal, externally assessed system, with its high-stakes character, has been found to profoundly influence the nature of learning and skills development experienced by young people (McCoy et al., 2014b; Burns et al., 2018; Smyth et al., 2011). This report assesses whether an adjustment in the grading system has had an impact on the perceptions and behaviour of the first cohort of students experiencing the new scheme, in their final year of school

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach

Contact based void partitioning to assess filtration properties in DEM simulations

Discrete element method (DEM) simulations model the behaviour of a granular material by explicitly considering the individual particles. In principle, DEM analyses then provide a means to relate particle scale mechanisms with the overall, macro-scale response. However, interpretative algorithms must be applied to gain useful scientific insight using the very large amount of data available from DEM simulations. The particle and contact coordinates as well as the contact orientations can be directly obtained from a DEM simulation and the application of measures such as the coordination number and the fabric tensor to describe these data is now well-established. However, a granular material has two phases and a full description of the material also requires consideration of the voids. Quantitative analysis of the void space can give further insight into directional fabric and is also useful in assessing the filtration characteristics of a granular material. The void topology is not directly given by the DEM simulation data; rather it must be inferred from the geometry of particle phase. The current study considers the use of the contact coordinates to partition the void space for 3D DEM simulation datasets and to define individual voids as well as the boundaries or constrictions between the voids. The measured constriction sizes are comparable to those calculated using Delaunay-triangulation based methods, and the contact-based method has the advantage of being less subjective. In an example application, the method was applied to DEM models of reservoir sandstones to establish the relationship between particle and constriction sizes as well as the relationship between the void topology and the coordination number and the evolution of these properties during shearing

Functional Literacy, Educational Attainment and Earnings - A Multi-Country Comparison

In this paper a rich and innovative dataset, the International Adult Literacy Survey, is used to examine the impact of functional literacy on earnings. We show that the estimated return to formal education is sensitive to the inclusion of literacy - excluding it biases the return to education in many countries by significant amounts. Literacy itself has a well-determined effect on earnings in all countries though with considerable variation in the size of the effect. The benefits of literacy do not only arise from increasing low levels of literacy: increases at already high levels generate substantial increases in earnings in some countries. In general we find little interaction between schooling and literacy though for a few countries they appear to complement each other.

Money, Mentoring and Making Friends : The Impact of a Multidimensional Access Program on Student Performance

There is a well established socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment, despite much effort in recent decades to address this inequality. This study evaluates a university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic status (SES) students using a natural experiment which exploits the time variation in the expansion of the program across schools. The program has parallels with US affirmative actions programs, although preferential treatment is based on SES rather than ethnicity. Evaluating the effectiveness of programs targeting disadvantaged students in Ireland is particularly salient given the high rate of return to education and the lack of intergenerational mobility in educational attainment. Overall, we identify positive treatment effects on first year exam performance, progression to second year and final year graduation rates, with the impact often stronger for higher ability students. We find similar patterns of results for students that entered through the regular system and the ‘affirmative action’ group i.e. the students that entered with lower high school grades. The program affects the performance of both male and female students, albeit in different ways. This study suggests that access programs can be an effective means of improving academic outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged students. JEL Codes: I21Education inequality ; Access programs ; Natural experiment ; Economics of education