The Institutional Foundations Of European Union Foreign Aid Policy

Introduction: The Ukrainian civil war and associate Russian intervention are linked to the European Union’s (EU) foreign relations with Ukraine. Whether the EU’s policy in Ukraine can be said to be a success or not, it is certainly having an impact on world affairs. Despite this increasing impact of EU foreign policy, most analyses of it view EU foreign policy as a tool of the larger member states. In this paper, we examine one aspect of EU foreign policy, the distribution of foreign aid. We argue that rather than being driven by the greater powers within the EU, EU foreign aid policy is driven by the unanimity voting of Council of Ministers. We further argue that the EU’s foreign policy decisions will therefore be constrained by the preferences of those member state governments with the most restrictive criteria for judging the appropriateness of a foreign aid recipient. Finally, we argue that this restrictive criterion is human rights. Applying a combination of factor analysis and regression data set of foreign aid receipts by over 150 countries between 1981 and 2001, we examine the factors associated with EU foreign aid disbursement. We find that far from being a tool of the larger member states, EU foreign aid policy is most similar to the foreign aid policies of the smaller Nordic members, Ireland and the Netherlands. Finally, we find measures of the human rights records of potential recipients significantly predict the amount of aid the EU disburses to those countries. The remainder of this paper is divided into several sections. First, we examine the current research on foreign aid with particular attention to the foreign policy of the EU. Second, we discuss the institutional politics of EU foreign aid decision making. We then explain our data collection and methodological approaches. Finally, we discuss the results of our factor analysis and regression models

Wearable toe band system for monitoring of peripheral artery disease

Approximately 8 to 12 million people in the United States suffer from peripheral artery disease (PAD). PAD causes narrowed arteries and reduces blood flow to the lower extremities. People with PAD begin to experience discomfort and pain while walking. Untreated PAD can lead to ulcers, gangrene, and amputation. Before experiencing those severe conditions, detection of narrowing blood vessel enables early diagnosis and treatment. Therefore, accurate and timely diagnosis is necessary. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Localization Uncertainty Estimation for Anchor-Free Object Detection

Since many safety-critical systems, such as surgical robots and autonomous driving cars, are in unstable environments with sensor noise and incomplete data, it is desirable for object detectors to take into account the confidence of localization prediction. There are three limitations of the prior uncertainty estimation methods for anchor-based object detection. 1) They model the uncertainty based on object properties having different characteristics, such as location (center point) and scale (width, height). 2) they model a box offset and ground-truth as Gaussian distribution and Dirac delta distribution, which leads to the model misspecification problem. Because the Dirac delta distribution is not exactly represented as Gaussian, i.e., for any $\mu$ and $\Sigma$. 3) Since anchor-based methods are sensitive to hyper-parameters of anchor, the localization uncertainty modeling is also sensitive to these parameters. Therefore, we propose a new localization uncertainty estimation method called Gaussian-FCOS for anchor-free object detection. Our method captures the uncertainty based on four directions of box offsets~(left, right, top, bottom) that have similar properties, which enables to capture which direction is uncertain and provide a quantitative value in range~[0, 1]. To this end, we design a new uncertainty loss, negative power log-likelihood loss, to measure uncertainty by weighting IoU to the likelihood loss, which alleviates the model misspecification problem. Experiments on COCO datasets demonstrate that our Gaussian-FCOS reduces false positives and finds more missing-objects by mitigating over-confidence scores with the estimated uncertainty. We hope Gaussian-FCOS serves as a crucial component for the reliability-required task

Using dynamic vascular optical spectroscopy to monitor patients with peripheral arterial disease - three exemplary cases

In this study, Dynamic Vascular Optical Spectroscopy (DVOS) was used to monitor the blood flow in patients affected by peripheral arterial disease (PAD) who underwent lower extremity revascularization procedures. Four different angiosomes on the foot were considered, collecting point-based measurements of the vascular dynamics during a venous cuff occlusion (@ 60 mmHg) in the lower extremity with the system shown in Fig. 1. Over 70 patients were monitored from before the intervention to up to one year later. Among them, we selected 3 exemplary cases that can highlight different hemodynamics flows in the foot of these patients. The general idea behind our research is that if a patient has a healthy vasculature, when we interrupt the venous return using a thigh cuff occlusion the saturation of the blood in the foot will be swifter than in the case of a patient in which its arterial tree is occluded and less blood can pool in the lower extremities. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Design of a Wideband Printed Patch Dipole Antenna with a Balanced On-Board Feeding Network

This paper proposes a wideband printed patch dipole antenna with a simple on-board feeding network. The proposed antenna is composed of two dipole radiators, a transmission line, and an on-board feeding network with a chip balun. The dipole radiators are printed on a substrate, and the edges of the radiators are truncated to create a hexagonal shape with wide impedance-matching characteristics. The chip balun is embedded in an RO4003C printed circuit board (PCB) to excite differential feeding to each radiator with a 180° phase difference. The proposed antenna is optimized using a CST Studio full electromagnetic software tool, and it is fabricated and measured in an anechoic chamber. The measured fractional bandwidth for the reflection coefficient below −10 dB is 79.5%, and the proposed antenna has a measured gain of 7.1 dBi at 3.5 GHz

OF@TEIN: An OpenFlow-enabled SDN Testbed over International SmartX Rack Sites

In this paper, we will discuss our on-going effort for OF@TEIN SDN(Software-Defined Networking) testbed, which currently spans over Korea and fiveSouth-East Asian (SEA) collaborators with internationally deployed OpenFlowenabledSmartX Racks

Design of a Compact Indirect Slot-Fed Wideband Patch Array with an Air SIW Cavity for a High Directivity in Missile Seeker Applications

This research proposes a compact indirect slot-fed wideband patch array antenna for a missile seeker application. The proposed single antenna consists of three dielectric layers for a radiator, an air substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity, and an indirect feeding network. The rectangular patch is used as a radiator on the first substrate layer, and the air SIW cavity (ASIWC) is employed to obtain high directivity and low mutual coupling characteristics in the second substrate layer. In the third layer, an indirect feeding structure is used to achieve the wideband characteristics in the Ka-band. The single element is extended to a 4 x 1 linear array with fabrication, and the fabricated array characteristics are measured in a full anechoic chamber. The measured operating fractional frequency bandwidth is 9.2%, and the measured array gain is 11.7 dBi at the bore-sight direction (theta(0) = 0 degrees)

Color fine-tuning of optical materials through rational design

© 2017 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim We report on the feasibility for color fine-tuning of optical materials using rational design principles based on chemical reasoning. For this purpose, a modular framework for the construction of symmetrical cap-linker-cap compounds, using triarylamine caps and oligothiophene linkers, is applied. The chosen structural scaffolds are heavily used in recent industrial applications and provide five possibilities for altering their electronic and steric properties: electron donor/acceptor groups, planarization/deplanarization, and modulation of the π-conjugation length. Permutation of the used building blocks leads to a set of 54 different molecules, out of which 32 are synthesized and characterized in solution as well as in example fabricated OLED devices. This setup allows for color fine-tuning in the range of 412 nm to 540 nm with typical steps of 4 nm. In addition, to further benefit from the large experimental data set the spectroscopic results are used to benchmark quantum chemical computations, which show excellent agreement thus highlighting the potential of these calculations to guide future syntheses

PVDF-Based Piezoelectric Microphone for Sound Detection Inside the Cochlea: Toward Totally Implantable Cochlear Implants

We report the fabrication and characterization of a prototype polyvinylidene fluoride polymer-based implantable microphone for detecting sound inside gerbil and human cochleae. With the current configuration and amplification, the signal-to-noise ratios were sufficiently high for normally occurring sound pressures and frequencies (ear canal pressures >50–60 dB SPL and 0.1–10 kHz), though 10 to 20 dB poorer than for some hearing aid microphones. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the prototype devices as implantable microphones for the development of totally implantable cochlear implants. For patients, this will improve sound reception by utilizing the outer ear and will improve the use of cochlear implants