London and Berlin are not speaking the same language when it comes to EU reform

The UK and Germany have both expressed a desire to reform the way the EU functions. Almut Möller and Tim Oliver argue that due to their contrasting constitutional traditions and outlooks, the two countries risk misunderstanding or antagonising one another. They point out that the German discussion around EU competences is part of a country-wide debate on federalism, while the UK’s proposition of a competences review is informed by the ideas of Parliamentary sovereignty and the repatriation of power

Written evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s inquiry into 'the costs and benefits of EU membership for the UK's role in the world'

Written evidence from Dr Tim Oliver (Dahrendorf Fellow, LSE IDEAS) and Almut Möller (Head of Office and Senior Policy Fellow, ECFR) (EUM0019

Introduction of image-based water transparency descriptors to quantify marine snow and turbidity features. A study with data from a stationary observatory

Möller T, Nilssen I, Nattkemper TW. Introduction of image-based water transparency descriptors to quantify marine snow and turbidity features. A study with data from a stationary observatory. Presented at the MIW 2014 - Marine Imaging Workshop, Southampton

Relaxed Attention for Transformer Models

The powerful modeling capabilities of all-attention-based transformer architectures often cause overfitting and - for natural language processing tasks - lead to an implicitly learned internal language model in the autoregressive transformer decoder complicating the integration of external language models. In this paper, we explore relaxed attention, a simple and easy-to-implement smoothing of the attention weights, yielding a two-fold improvement to the general transformer architecture: First, relaxed attention provides regularization when applied to the self-attention layers in the encoder. Second, we show that it naturally supports the integration of an external language model as it suppresses the implicitly learned internal language model by relaxing the cross attention in the decoder. We demonstrate the benefit of relaxed attention across several tasks with clear improvement in combination with recent benchmark approaches. Specifically, we exceed the former state-of-the-art performance of 26.90% word error rate on the largest public lip-reading LRS3 benchmark with a word error rate of 26.31%, as well as we achieve a top-performing BLEU score of 37.67 on the IWSLT14 (DE$\rightarrow$EN) machine translation task without external language models and virtually no additional model parameters. Code and models will be made publicly available

EU views on the British vote to leave: Italy, Germany, Slovenia and Spain

In the run-up to the referendum, the LSE BrexitVote blog ran a series setting out the potential positions of various EU member states if Britain voted for leave. Written by authors based at universities and research institutions across Europe, and compiled by the LSE’s Tim Oliver, the series showed the variety of positions and concerns found across the EU. A full list of the views can be found here. In this post authors from Italy, Germany, Slovenia and Spain, each of whom contributed to the original series, give a brief insight into how politics in their country has responded to the British vote to leave the EU

PROTECTION OF FEMALE C3H MICE AGAINST WHOLE-BODY gamma-IRRADIATION WITH 2,3-DIMETHYL-6-((2-DIMETHYLAMINO)ETHYL)-6H-INDOLO[2,3-b]QUINOXALINE (B220)

Radioprotection by 2,3-dimethyl-6-(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl)-6H-indolo[2,3-b]quinoxaline (B220) on survival and growth of female C3H mice exposed to acute whole-body gamma-radiation was evaluated for 7.5-8 months following irradiation in two separate experiments. For adult (12 weeks old) mice, B220 administration increased median survival after 8 Gy by a factor of 1.27 when given within 24 h pre-irradiation, administration up to 24 h post-irradiation had a similar effect (1.20) but in addition resulted in 1 of 9 (11 %) mice alive after 32 weeks. For adult mice irradiated with 10-14 Gy, B220 had no significant effect on survival. For very young mice (4 weeks old), however, B220 administration within 24 h pre-irradiation protected from growth retardation at both 1 and 6 Gy, and from gray-hairing at 6 Gy. In conclusion, the well tolerated drug B220 offered radioprotection in both studies and its administration could be further optimized

Blood flow in cylindrical stenosed channel – numerical approach

Arthrosclerosis means literally “arteries hardening”. However, arthrosclerosis it is a generic term that is related with three patterns of vascular diseases, which have the hardening and loss of elasticity of the arteries walls as a common factor [1]. The dominant pattern is atherosclerosis, characterized by the formation of atheroma, which is comprised by fibrous plaques that generally exhibit a centre rich in lipids. In the present work, the flow of blood in a cylindrical channel, containing an atheroma at the walls, has been numerically studied using the finite-element software package POLYFLOW®. In the simulations, blood was considered an incompressible homogenous fluid and the flow regime was the laminar regime. The rheology of the mentioned fluid was described by distinct constitutive equations [2] - constant viscosity, power-law model and Carreau model. The local behaviour of properties such as pressure, interstitial velocities, shear rate and shear stress was explored in the present investigation. The local behaviour of these properties can help to understand the formation and detachment of thrombi