The Europeanization of the political system and the public administration in Germany

No abstractThis article is an analysis of the main patterns of institutional continuity and change that characterize the German federal political system under the influence of ‘Europeanization’. It shows the different degrees of Europeanization to which the German political institutions and public policies have already adapted. Introducing some guiding theoretical approaches that have been applied to raise the analytical validity of Europeanization, it attempts to explain the range and the degree to which the German state and its domestic polities, politics and public policies have been integrated into the EU governance system. After analyzing the core institutional features of the German federal system which generally resist European integration, it presents some evidence on the adjustments made to the (reunified) German intergovernmental system, designed to further stimulate European integration. Finally, it presents a brief summary of the lessons learnt from ‘Europeanizing German federalism’ in order to examine whether typical patterns explaining the Europeanization of the EU member states can be identified

The Europeanization of the political system and the public administration in Germany

No abstractThis article is an analysis of the main patterns of institutional continuity and change that characterize the German federal political system under the influence of ‘Europeanization’. It shows the different degrees of Europeanization to which the German political institutions and public policies have already adapted. Introducing some guiding theoretical approaches that have been applied to raise the analytical validity of Europeanization, it attempts to explain the range and the degree to which the German state and its domestic polities, politics and public policies have been integrated into the EU governance system. After analyzing the core institutional features of the German federal system which generally resist European integration, it presents some evidence on the adjustments made to the (reunified) German intergovernmental system, designed to further stimulate European integration. Finally, it presents a brief summary of the lessons learnt from ‘Europeanizing German federalism’ in order to examine whether typical patterns explaining the Europeanization of the EU member states can be identified

Hydrology and circulation in the North Aegean (eastern Mediterranean) throughout 1997 and 1998

The combination of two research projects offered us the opportunity to perform a comprehensive study of the seasonal evolution of the hydrological structure and the circulation of the North Aegean Sea, at the northern extremes of the eastern Mediterranean. The combination of brackish water inflow from the Dardanelles and the sea-bottom relief dictate the significant differences between the North and South Aegean water columns. The relatively warm and highly saline South Aegean waters enter the North Aegean through the dominant cyclonic circulation of the basin. In the North Aegean, three layers of distinct water masses of very different properties are observed: The 20-50 m thick surface layer is occupied mainly by Black Sea Water, modified on its way through the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. Below the surface layer there is warm and highly saline water originating in the South Aegean and the Levantine, extending down to 350-400 m depth. Below this layer, the deeper-than-400 m basins of the North Aegean contain locally formed, very dense water with different θ /S characteristics at each subbasin. The circulation is characterised by a series of permanent, semi-permanent and transient mesoscale features, overlaid on the general slow cyclonic circulation of the Aegean. The mesoscale activity, while not necessarily important in enhancing isopycnal mixing in the region, in combination with the very high stratification of the upper layers, however, increases the residence time of the water of the upper layers in the general area of the North Aegean. As a result, water having out-flowed from the Black Sea in the winter, forms a separate distinct layer in the region in spring (lying between “younger” BSW and the Levantine origin water), and is still traceable in the water column in late summer

Red Blood Cell Unit Utilization in the ICU: Evidence and Confidence

Anemia is an almost universal phenomenon (ninety five percent) among critically ill patients, especially if they stay in the ICU more than 3 days. Forty to fifty percent of such patients receive red blood cell transfusions. Blood loss (due to blood sampling), iron reduced availability and utilization and cytokine mediated bone marrow suppression account for this loss of red blood cell mass. Anemia is itself associated with worse outcomes, independently of the nature of underlying disease. Transfusion therapy nevertheless, probably is not the ideal solution as it is related to increased mortality and hospital infections. Both the degree of anemia and transfusion intensity could represent either causative influences or merely surrogate markers of severe illness, posing significant difficulties on the interpretation of investigational results. Currently, restriction of red blood cell transfusion threshold to 7g/l has become the standard practice. Following the famous TRICC trial which introduced the low threshold concept, the few predicted exceptions regarding sepsis, hemorrhage or cardiac disease were addressed with new studies. The results of these studies force towards the implementation of the restrictive strategy throughout the whole transfusion indications spectrum in the ICU, with the exception of the symptomatic coronary patients. In order to minimize transfusion intensity however, acute context care must be optimum, multidisciplinary treatment approaches and support being timely provided.&nbsp

Design automation of approximate circuits with runtime reconfigurable accuracy

Leveraging the inherent error tolerance of a vast number of application domains that are rapidly growing, approximate computing arises as a design alternative to improve the efficiency of our computing systems by trading accuracy for energy savings. However, the requirement for computational accuracy is not fixed. Controlling the applied level of approximation dynamically at runtime is a key to effectively optimize energy, while still containing and bounding the induced errors at runtime. In this paper, we propose and implement an automatic and circuit independent design framework that generates approximate circuits with dynamically reconfigurable accuracy at runtime. The generated circuits feature varying accuracy levels, supporting also accurate execution. Extensive experimental evaluation, using industry strength flow and circuits, demonstrates that our generated approximate circuits improve the energy by up to 41% for 2% error bound and by 17.5% on average under a pessimistic scenario that assumes full accuracy requirement in the 33% of the runtime. To demonstrate further the efficiency of our framework, we considered two state-of-the-art technology libraries which are a 7nm conventional FinFET and an emerging technology that boosts performance at a high cost of increased dynamic power

North-eastern Aegean sea: an effort to estimate steady-state N & P budgets during September 1998

The north-eastern Aegean sea, characterised by a complex topographical structure, is the area where highly saline waters of Levantine and South-Central Aegean origin are diluted by the outflowing through the Dardanelles of less saline waters of Black Sea origin and by river runoff from the Greek and Turkish mainland. Salinity and nutrient data collected during the INTERREG-I project are used to develop budget calculations and empirical models according to the LOICZ biogeochemical modelling guidelines. The results of the study indicate that the dissolved inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus fluxes imported into the NE Aegean through the Dardanelles are less important than it was believed in the past. Overall, the system acts as a net sink of DIN and DIP, as well as being a net producer of organic matter, as primary production exceeds respiration. Moreover, the system appears to fix more nitrogen than is lost through denitrification

HF Radar observations of the Dardanelles outflow current in North Eastern Aegean using validated WERA HF radar data

A two-site WERA HF radar station was installed in November 2009 at the eastern coast of Lemnos Island in North Aegean Sea, aiming to monitor the surface inflow of Black Sea waters exiting from the Dardanelles Strait, as well as to constitute a coastal management tool for incidents of oil-pollution or save-and-rescue operations. Strong interference by foreign transmissions is a source of noise deteriorating the quality of the backscattered signal, thus significantly reducing the HF radar’s effective data return rate. In order to ameliorate this problem, further quality-control and data gap interpolating procedures have been developed and applied, to be used in addition to the procedures incorporated and used by the manufacturer’s signal processing software. The second-level processing involves traditional despiking in the temporal domain, preceding Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis. The latter is used not only to filter high-frequency noise but also to fill data gaps in time and space. The data reconstruction procedure has been assessed via comparison of (a) HF radial with CODE-type drifter radial velocities as well as (b) HF-derived virtual drifter tracks with actual drifter tracks. The main circulation features and their variability, as revealed by the reconstructed fields, are presented

Altered rich club and frequency-dependent subnetworks organization in mild traumatic brain injury: A MEG resting-state study

Functional brain connectivity networks exhibit “small-world” characteristics and some of these networks follow a “rich-club” organization, whereby a few nodes of high connectivity (hubs) tend to connect more densely among themselves than to nodes of lower connectivity. The Current study followed an “attack strategy” to compare the rich-club and small-world network organization models using Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings from mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) patients and neurologically healthy controls to identify the topology that describes the underlying intrinsic brain network organization. We hypothesized that the reduction in global efficiency caused by an attack targeting a model’s hubs would reveal the “true” underlying topological organization. Connectivity networks were estimated using mutual information as the basis for cross-frequency coupling. Our results revealed a prominent rich-club network organization for both groups. In particular, mTBI patients demonstrated hypersynchronization among rich-club hubs compared to controls in the d band and the d-g1, "-g1, and b-g2 frequency pairs. Moreover, rich-club hubs in mTBI patients were overrepresented in right frontal brain areas, from " to g1 frequencies, and underrepresented in left occipital regions in the d-b, d-g1, "-b, and b-g2 frequency pairs. These findings indicate that the rich-club organization of resting-state MEG, considering its role in information integration and its vulnerability to various disorders like mTBI, may have a significant predictive value in the development of reliable biomarkers to help the validation of the recovery frommTBI. Furthermore, the proposed approachmight be used as a validation tool to assess patient recovery