The European Union’s contributions to international stability: the role of education and study mobilities

The efforts of the European Union for stabilisation and democratisation in Eastern Europe and the Balkan region covered a range of areas. While the impact of such measures and incentives testify for the progress on the path of regional reconciliation and democratisation, this record remains largely a top-down account, with governments and political leaders acting as principal agents of change and drivers of stability. The long-term efficiency of this type of approach cannot be guaranteed without genuine transformations at all society levels and layers. The role of the European Union’s educational exchange schemes, particularly Erasmus, may prove to be an instilling factor for regional reconciliation and a stability generator. The Erasmus scheme has been extremely successful and key to breaking cultural barriers and working across borders and disciplines. This study seeks to understand student experiences of two postgraduate programmes which deal with issues associated with international stability. The study used a case study research methodology and selected the case studies of the “MITRA” Erasmus Mundus Masters programme on Intercultural Mediation: Identities Mobilities and Conflict and the EM2-STEM (Entrepreneurship and Management Training in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Erasmus Mundus programme. The study specifically investigates the experiences of students in these programmes and their experiences of intercultural interactions. From here an analysis is conducted to explore if European Union-funded study mobilities have shaped or transformed participating students’ views of international stability.     

Ship wakes in radar imagery

In 1989 an experiment in Loch Linnhe, Scotland, was conducted to improve the understanding of radar images of internal-wave wakes generated by ships. During the experiment a multi-frequency synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) image containing several bright narrow V-shaped wakes was obtained during a period of low wind speed. One of the wakes imaged is caused by internal waves generated by a ship that was participating in the experiment. Three other wakes were also imaged which were generated by fishing vessels. The wakes of the fishing vessels are different in appearance to the internal-wave wake generated by the experiment ship. Given that the displacement of the fishing vessels is about four orders of magnitude less than the experiment ship it is unlikely that they could produce internal waves that could be detected by the radar. The fishing vessel wakes observed at two different radar frequencies can, however, be explained by the mechanism proposed by Munk et al. in 1987.     

What Makes an Effective Representation of Information: A Formal Account of Observational Advantages

In order to effectively communicate information, the choice of representation is important. Ideally, a chosen representation will aid readers in making desired inferences. In this paper, we develop the theory of observation: what it means for one statement to be observable from another. Using observability, we give a formal characterization of the observational advantages of one representation of information over another. By considering observational advantages, people will be able to make better informed choices of representations of information. To demonstrate the benefit of observation and observational advantages, we apply these concepts to set theory and Euler diagrams. In particular, we can show that Euler diagrams have significant observational advantages over set theory. This formally justifies Larkin and Simon’s claim that “a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words”.     

A general method for drawing area-proportional Euler diagrams

Area-proportional Euler diagrams have many applications, for example they are often used for visualizing data in medical and biological domains. There have been a number of recent research efforts to automatically draw Euler diagrams when the areas of the regions are not considered, leading to a range of different drawing techniques. By contrast, substantially less progress has been made on the problem of automatically drawing area-proportional Euler diagrams, although some partial results have been derived. In this paper, we considerably advance the state-of-the-art in area-proportional Euler diagram drawing by presenting the first method that is capable of generating such a diagram given any area-proportional specification. Moreover, our drawing method is sufficiently flexible that it allows one to specify which of the typically enforced well-formedness conditions should be possessed by the to-be-drawn Euler diagram.     

The Ergonomics Society--the Society Lectures 1999: the Ergonomics Society: 50 years of growth

Developments in the Society are outlined since the early history was described by Edholm and Murrell. Major changes in the Society's operation and the context in which these changes took place are given. The changes in research directions, growth in educational facilities for professional education and the ever widening areas for the application of ergonomics are discussed. The consequences of these developments for the expansion of a recognition of the contribution of ergonomics, and the position of professionals in the international scene are touched upon.     

Determination of thresholds for detection of cerebellar blood flow deficits in brain SPECT images

Two observer studies were performed to determine the threshold (i.e., ratio of the counts in a lesion area to the counts in the corresponding contralateral region) at which two experienced observers diagnosed blood flow deficits in the cerebellum in 99mTc-HMPAO SPECT scans to be clinically significant, and investigate the effect of the intensity mapping scale on the detectability of lesions. METHODS: Lesions representing blood flow deficits varying from no decrease to a 12.5% decrease were simulated in 300 patient images. The first study, a receiver-operator characteristics (ROC) experiment, used two observers to compare the detectability of lesions with three intensity mapping scales: two pseudocolor scales, and a linear gray scale. A second "threshold-criterion" study was done to estimate the threshold at which observers determine deficits to be clinically significant. RESULTS: In the ROC study, the observers were more accurate in detecting lesions displayed in pseudocolor than in gray scale. In the threshold-criterion study, the threshold at which observers assessed clinically significant deficits was found to range between 0.900 and 0.950 (corresponding to a 5%-10% decrease in counts), depending on the observer, and the intensity mapping scale. For both observers, the detection threshold was higher (i.e., closer to 1.0) with the pseudocolor scale than with the gray scale. CONCLUSION: The definition of a threshold value for use in quantitative techniques is dependent on both the observer and the intensity mapping scale. Observers were more accurate with the pseudocolor scales.     

Book Review

During the various steps of the azo dye bleach process (ADBP) certain electrochemical conditions must be adjusted, otherwise the redox processes involved will not run. The maintaining of these conditions during the various steps of the process and the requirements for the individual reactants are discussed in general terms.     

Reliability and error estimations of mechanical shock recorders and impact indicators

There have been significant developments in the electronics industry over the past decade which have led to the development of a variety of electronic measuring devices that can be placed in packages to both record and save shock and vibration data related to shipment. Most of the earlier devices were purely mechanical in nature and used a paper graph or a visual indicator to quantify shock levels. There are many of these types of mechanical devices that are still being used today because of their low cost. This study was performed to determine the reliability and error for various types of commercial mechanical shock recorders and impact indicators. The results are presented in the form of mean per cent errors in measuring shock values. The study concluded that the Impact-O-Graph recorder measured shock values more accurately than the Impact Register and that the Omni-G, Mag 2000 and Shockranger were similar in accuracy and were better than the Shockwatch when used in a variety of packages judged to be typical for instrumented shipment.