The Constitutional Legitimacy of the EU Committees

An impressive number of transnational committees populates theEU institutional system. Their statutes and internal regulations arealmost all unpublished, their composition and agendas are largelyunknown, their meetings inaccessible. Nevertheless, this almostimpenetrable «jungle» is actually the life force animating EU decisionmaking:all implementing measures are defined and approved by thecomitology committees; agreement on the substance of most legislativemeasures is reached at the level of Council working groups; theCommission’s power of initiative is exercised by – or, at least, sharedwith – committees composed of national officials. Is this seeminglytechnocratic nightmare radically unconstitutional? The answer I putforward in this paper is negative. After a brief discussion of the ECJ’sformalistic approach to the comitology issue, I shall argue that: a) thecommittee system coheres with a functional (or vertical) understanding ofthe principle of institutional balance anchoring the European compositesystem; b) in such a multi-level system, the existing mechanisms forensuring the accountability of administrative bodies cannot beunderstood by the classic hierarchical «transmission belt model»; c)notwithstanding recent improvements in the transparency and therationality of certain kinds of committees, there are still parts of thisjungle in which law’s legitimising potential remains hidden.regulations; constitution building; constitutional change

Nonequilibrium electron energy distribution in Au under subpicosecond laser irradiation: A kinetic study

We have performed a kinetic study of the electron dynamic relaxation inside a Au film subjected to a subpicosecond laser pulse. For this purpose, we have developed a time-dependent numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation for the electrons inside the film considering the collision integrals due to electron–electron and electron–phonon collisions and a perturbation term due to the laser pulse. Our results show that, after the pulse excitation, electron distributions are very far from equilibrium. Therefore it is not possible, especially in the first part of the temporal evolution, to describe the relaxation of the electron distribution through a two-temperature model

Special Issue on Approximate Computing: Challenges, Methodologies, Algorithms, and Architectures for Dependable and Secure Systems

The current trend in energy resources shapes how computing systems will address new challenges in the following years. As a matter of fact, following the current trend, by 2040, computers will require more energy than the world’s resources can generate. In the very upcoming future, by 2025, data centers alone will consume 20% of all available electricity. A similar trend already impacts the communications side where, for example, energy consumption in mobile broadband networks and mobile terminals is comparable to data centers. These trends can only accelerate by broadening the spectrum of possible mobile applications to the Internet of Things (IoT), which will connect 50 billion devices through wireless connections to the cloud infrastructure within a few years

An inverse validation for detecting pipe leaks with a TDR-based method

Recently, an innovative system based on time domain reflectometry (TDR) for the individuation of leaks in underground pipes has been proposed and validated. Starting from the results obtained so far, the present works aims at further investigating the practical applicability of the aforementioned system. In particular, the goal of this work is to assess the system in the detection of two close leaks (i.e. leakages that may occur on the same length of pipe). To this purpose, an experimental setup was arranged: two "leakage conditions" were imposed, and the position of the leaks were considered as unknown and calculated through the dedicated developed algorithm. Results show that, differently from traditional leak detection methods (in which the presence of a leak may "mask" the presence of other leaks), the TDR-based system successfully individuates and correctly localizes the presence of two leaks