Discursive Constructions of the EU's Identity in the Neighbourhood: An Equal Among Equals or the Power Centre?

Using critical discourse analysis, this article explores the discursive self-representations of the EU in its official documents related to the European Neighbourhood Policy. Its main claim is that the EU's position towards its neighbourhood basically oscillates between two contradictory positions - that of a power centre, asymmetrically dominating its neighbourhood, and that of an equal among equals, thus offering a more benign face to its neighbours. Two discursive areas frequently mentioned in the documents are analysed: the notion of joint ownership and the EU's stance towards the frozen conflict, showing that each of the two facets of EU's identity may become dominant under particular circumstances.EU, European Neighbourhood Policy, critical discourse analysis, identity constructions

Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in Cross-Correlation: The Observer's Manual

The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect is a direct signature of the presence of dark energy in the universe, in the absence of spatial curvature. A powerful method for observing the ISW effect is through cross-correlation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with a tracer of the matter in the low redshift universe. In this paper, we describe the dependence of the obtained cross-correlation signal on the geometry and other properties of a survey of the low redshift universe. We show that an all-sky survey with about 10 million galaxies, almost uniformly distributed within 0<z<1 should yield a near optimal ISW detection, at ~ 5\sigma level. In order to achieve this level of signal-to-noise, the systematic anisotropies in the survey must be below ~ 0.1 %, on the scale of ~ 10 degrees on the sky, while the systematic error in redshift estimates must be less than 0.05. Then, we argue that, while an ISW detection will not be a good way of constraining the conventional properties of dark energy, it could be a valuable means of testing alternative theories of gravity on large physical scales.Comment: 9 pages, 9 Figures, Extended discussion of different observational systematics, Accepted for publication in PR

Wild or Domestic? Biometric Variation in the Cat Felis silvestris Schreber

Investigation of modern biometric data indicates that it may be possible to distinguish wildcats from house cats in many instances. Applying the log-ratio (log-difference) technique to archaeological samples from medieval northern Europe, and to mixed samples of wildcats and house cats, shows that the differentiation may not always be clear, and the possibility that some samples include hybrids is discussed. The technique is applied to samples from the Orkney Islands to demonstrate that single wildcat specimens can be identified in small samples. Copyright (C) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Subjective Quality Assessment of the Impact of Buffer Size in Fine-Grain Parallel Video Encoding

Fine-Grain parallelism is essential for real-time video encoding performance. This usually implies setting a fixed buffer size for each encoded block. The choice of this parameter is critical for both performance and hardware cost. In this paper we analyze the impact of buffer size on image subjective quality, and its relation with other encoding parameters. We explore the consequences on visual quality, when minimizing buffer size to the point of causing the discard of quantized coefficients for highest frequencies. Finally, we propose some guidelines for the choice of buffer size, that has proven to be heavily dependent, in addition to other parameters, on the type of sequence being encoded. These guidelines are useful for the design of efficient realtime encoders, both hardware and software