The European Union’s response to the Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’: The normalisation of securitisation

The goal of this chapter is to explore the European Union's (EU) response to the Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’ mainly from 2013/4 to 2016, as well as beyond this ‘peak’ period, by means of the triangulation of document and discourse analysis, newspaper articles and secondary scholarly literature. We provide an overview of the main events, the EU’s responses (including the Member States), and discuss the consequences of what we identify as the ‘normalisation of securitisation’. We conclude that this increasingly common practice is detrimental to the European integration project as well as to the freedoms of its citizens in addition to promoting the exclusion of non-EU citizens.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Enhanced Optical Dichroism of Graphene Nanoribbons

The optical conductivity of graphene nanoribbons is analytical and exactly derived. It is shown that the absence of translation invariance along the transverse direction allows considerable intra-band absorption in a narrow frequency window that varies with the ribbon width, and lies in the THz range domain for ribbons 10-100nm wide. In this spectral region the absorption anisotropy can be as high as two orders of magnitude, which renders the medium strongly dichroic, and allows for a very high degree of polarization (up to ~85) with just a single layer of graphene. The effect is resilient to level broadening of the ribbon spectrum potentially induced by disorder. Using a cavity for impedance enhancement, or a stack of few layer nanoribbons, these values can reach almost 100%. This opens a potential prospect of employing graphene ribbon structures as efficient polarizers in the far IR and THz frequencies.Comment: Revised version. 10 pages, 7 figure

Diplomacy, hybrid leadership, and EU actorness: assessing the role of EU High Representative Catherine Ashton in the 2013 Kosovo-Serbia agreement

Over the last decade, the role of the European Union (EU) High Representative (HR/VP) became increasingly salient. However, a systematic understanding of how this figure’s leadership shaped the character of EU diplomacy and actorness in peacekeeping is lacking. To address this issue, we analyse Catherine Ashton’s leadership (as the first HR/VP post Lisbon Treaty) in the 2013 Kosovo-Serbia agreement, a high point of her tenure. We argue that Ashton’s success is largely due to her hybrid leadership, alternating between transactional and transformational and capitalising on the EU’s presence and opportunities as an international actor. We propose the concept of hybrid leadership as an analytical tool and illustrate its relevance in an empirical case study. Our examination of Ashton’s hybrid leadership contributes to shedding light on the potential role of the future HR/VPs and on how these can reinforce EU leadership, diplomacy, and actorness, contributing to reinforcing the corresponding academic debates.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Damage detections in nonlinear vibrating thermally loaded plates

In this work, geometrically nonlinear vibrations of fully clamped rectangular plates subjected to thermal changesare used to study the sensitivity of some vibration response parameters to the presence of damage and elevated temperature. The geometrically nonlinear version of the Mindlin plate theory is used to model the plate behaviour.Damage is represented as a stiffness reduction in a small area of the plate. The plates are subjected to harmonicloading leading to large amplitude vibrations and temperature changes. The plate vibration response is obtained by a pseudo-load mode superposition method. The main results are focussed on establishing the influence of damage on the vibration response of the heated and the unheated plates and the change in the time-history diagrams and the Poincaré maps caused by damage and elevated temperature. The damage criterion formulated earlier for nonheated plates, based on analyzing the points in the Poincaré sections of the damaged and healthy plate, is modified and tested for the case of plates additionally subjected to elevated temperatures. The importance of taking into account the actual temperature in the process of damage detection is shown

Automatic detection of hyperarticulated speech

Hyperarticulation is a speech adaptation that consists of adopting a clearer form of speech in an attempt to improve recognition levels. However, it has the opposite effect when talking to ASR systems, as they are not trained with such kind of speech. We present approaches for automatic detection of hyperarticulation, which can be used to improve the performance of spoken dialog systems. We performed experiments on Let’s Go data, using multiple feature sets and two classification approaches. Many relevant features are speaker dependent. Thus, we used the first turn in each dialog as the reference for the speaker, since it is typically not hyperarticulated. Our best results were above 80 % accuracy, which represents an improvement of at least 11.6 % points over previously obtained results on similar data. We also assessed the classifiers’ performance in scenarios where hyperarticulation is rare, achieving around 98 % accuracy using different confidence thresholds.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Nanometric pitch in modulated structures of twist-bend nematic liquid crystals

The extended Frank elastic energy density is used to investigate the existence of a stable periodically modulate structure that appears as a ground state exhibiting a twist-bend molecular arrangement. For an unbounded sample, we show that the twist-bend nematic phase $N_{TB}$ is characterized by a heliconical structure with a pitch in the nano-metric range, in agreement with experimental results. For a sample of finite thickness, we show that the wave vector of the stable periodic structure depends not only on the elastic parameters but also on the anchoring energy, easy axis direction, and the thickness of the sample.Comment: 11 page