2,753 research outputs found
Spins of (dis)integration: What might 'reformers' in Canada learn from the 'social dimension' of the European Union?
In the Canadian discussion, the EU model ('Social Europe') has inspired a range of proposals for restructuring Canada. The article gives an introduction to 'where the social dimension and social policy are at' in the EU. Then the political relevance of the EU experience for Canada is explored whether this be for a Québécois independence perspective or for a Canadian interprovincial-compact as outlined in 1996 by Thomas Courchene. Finally, I shall conclude with some remarks on 'globalization and the welfare state' - a powerfully related issue, wherein welfare states can turn out to be foundations for both opening up and thence ensuring the openness of western economies for 'embedded liberalism' - as well as for 're-embedding liberalism' - as against being perceived purely as the inevitable victims of an unstoppable 'march of [the forces of] globalization' (Thomas Courchene), as has been most often envisioned. --
In the soft-to-hard technical spectrum: Where is software engineering?
In the computer journals and tabloids, there have been a plethora of articles written about the software engineering field. But while advocates of the need for an engineering approach to software development, it is impressive how many authors have treated the subject of software engineering without adequately addressing the fundamentals of what engineering as a discipline consists of. A discussion is presented of the various related facets of this issue in a logical framework to advance the thesis that the software development process is necessarily an engineering process. The purpose is to examine more of the details of the issue of whether or not the design and development of software for digital computer processing systems should be both viewed and treated as a legitimate field of professional engineering. Also, the type of academic and professional level education programs that would be required to support a software engineering discipline is examined
An information-theoretic on-line update principle for perception-action coupling
Inspired by findings of sensorimotor coupling in humans and animals, there
has recently been a growing interest in the interaction between action and
perception in robotic systems [Bogh et al., 2016]. Here we consider perception
and action as two serial information channels with limited
information-processing capacity. We follow [Genewein et al., 2015] and
formulate a constrained optimization problem that maximizes utility under
limited information-processing capacity in the two channels. As a solution we
obtain an optimal perceptual channel and an optimal action channel that are
coupled such that perceptual information is optimized with respect to
downstream processing in the action module. The main novelty of this study is
that we propose an online optimization procedure to find bounded-optimal
perception and action channels in parameterized serial perception-action
systems. In particular, we implement the perceptual channel as a multi-layer
neural network and the action channel as a multinomial distribution. We
illustrate our method in a NAO robot simulator with a simplified cup lifting
task.Comment: 8 pages, 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots
and Systems (IROS
Through the funhouse looking glass: Europe's ship of states
What is the nature of the European Union? Does it have the characteristics of a state, and if so, which? We employ a single imagea poster that won a Marshall Plan competition in 1950to examine the various legal perspectives of the EU that have emerged over the past six decades. Created as a symbol of European unity at the outset of European integration, the image was used half a century later on the book cover of Andrew Moravcsik's instant classic on intergovernmentalism. Here, we reinterpret the image yet againin four different ways. This attempt to sort out the legal perspectives of the EU was inspired by the Lisbon Treaty Case that is currently before the German Constitutional Court and will be decided in May 2009. --
Pulsed force sequences for fast phase-insensitive quantum gates in trapped ions
We show how to create quantum gates of arbitrary speed between trapped ions,
using a laser walking wave, with complete insensitivity to drift of the optical
phase, and requiring cooling only to the Lamb-Dicke regime. We present pulse
sequences that satisfy the requirements and are easy to produce in the
laboratory.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure
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