The European Parliament : leadership and 'followership'

The weakened European Commission and the increasingly assertive European Council and Council of Ministers have contended for control of agenda-setting but it is in the sphere of foreign and security policy that the EU's logic of leaderlessness has been most conspicuous

Early days : the European parliament, codecision and the European union legislative process post-Maastricht

Since the European Parliament's first vote on a Council common position submitted under the co-decision procedure in January 1994 the practice of co-decision has been scrutinized carefully within Parliament and the other European Union (EU) institutions. However, such scrutiny has produced differing interpretations. This article seeks to assess these respective claims by analysing the first thirty-two legislative proposals processed under co-decision, and so to make an initial assessment of the legislative impact of the European Parliament under the new procedure. Under co-decision Parliament is a more equal partner in the EU's legislative process, and now has a rightful place alongside Council in several important policy areas - despite the weighting of the procedure towards Council. Certainly, informal inter-institutional linkages have expanded as a result of co-decision and, whatever their qualitative effect, there has been an undeniable quantitative increase in the interactions between Parliament and Council. The net result of the dialogue between Parliament and Council is the confirmation of an increasingly bipartite bargaining process and this, in turn, has placed the Commission in a considerably more ambiguous, and weaker, position than in the co-operation or consultation procedures

Stability of Two Doublet Electroweak Strings

Vortex solutions in the two Higgs doublet electroweak model are constructed, and their stability to small perturbations is studied. The most general perturbation is decomposed into angular momentum modes, the least stable mode is identified, and the linearised energy change of the vortex under this perturbation is calculated numerically for various choices of parameters, thus determining whether or not the string is stable. It is found that, for realistic values of the Higgs mass and Weinberg angle, the string is unstable.Comment: 20 pages (plain tex),DAMTP 93-3

Exploring a Learning Experience through an Internship: Embold Health Inc.

Embold Health Inc. is a start-up company created by leading physicians who saw a rising need in health care for accurate and comprehensive data regarding the quality, cost effectiveness, and appropriateness of care. Using one of the largest most comprehensive data sets in the United States and analytics lead by top scientist and physicians in the field, they are able to formulate a measurement of physician performance aimed at improving health care and outcomes for patients. Providing this data to employers, insurers and providers allows for a push to improve quality of non-recommended providers, reward for providers offering quality care and evaluates cost for the benefit of employers and payers. In the following subsections, I will discuss various areas that I devoted my learning to throughout this internship. The first area of focus was to develop a greater understanding of the United States Health Care System, employee-sponsored health insurance, and the rising health care costs affecting millions of Americans. Next gaining a comprehensive knowledge of the Embold Health methodology and how it is being used to further health care reform and quality improvement. Finally, a summary of my learning experience throughout my internship at Embold Health Inc

Dilational Viscosity of Langmuir monolayers

The dilational viscosity $\epsilon'$ of Langmuir monolayer is considered in a theoretical model taking into account an orientational effect of the dilational wave on surface molecules. This orientational order is described by the surface order parameter Q; the orientational part of the free surface energy is given by Landau's expansion in powers of Q. The magnitude of surface viscosity, driven by the surface tension derivative $\partial\gamma/\partial Q$, is in good accord with the experimentally observed $\epsilon'$. The sign of $\epsilon'$ is positive that indicates that increased in-plane ordering increases the surface tension.Comment: 11 pages, 2 Postscript figures, submitted to Physica A (September 1998

‘Relais actors’ and co-decision first reading agreements in the European Parliament : the case of the advanced therapies regulation

The processing of the advanced therapies regulation is of particular interest to scholars of the European Union's (EU) legislative process and students of the European Parliament (EP) because it provides a case study which throws light upon assumptions commonly made about the role of the EP's ‘relais actors’, the promotion of consensus-building within and between parliamentary committees, and the development of intraorganizational rules in response to early agreements in the co-decision procedure. An examination of the EP's processing of the advanced therapies dossier provides an ‘unusual’ but vivid illustration of how the identification of committee rapporteurs as the most important parliamentary ‘relais actors’ fails to capture the increasingly important roles performed by shadow rapporteurs. Significantly, the ‘unusual’ occurrences associated with the processing of the advanced therapies regulation came at a crucial juncture in the reconsideration of the EP's intraorganizational rules in relation to early agreements and the subsequent adoption of new Rules of Procedure in 2009

Start the Start

Short story/hybri

Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics : Four Case Studies from the Victorian Period

The article considers four examples from the nineteenth century when the stereotype of the habitual drunkard appears to give way to a figure that bears closer resemblance to the twentieth century’s “Existential drinker.” These case studies offer different illustrations of a newly emerging metaphysical landscape around heavy drinking. First, in the 1872 Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards, the panel cannot understand why a repeat offender would choose to drink rather than be cared for. Second, the heroine of George Eliot’s tale “Janet’s Repentance” encounters a spiritual “despair” through her drinking habit. Third, a group of pictures by the artist Honoré Daumier features two drinkers in what are here interpreted as Existential tableaux. Fourth, Émile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir is read as one of the first sustained accounts of excessive drinking that is both a visceral response to conditions under industrial capitalism, while also latching onto a type of metaphysical unsettling prompted by such drinking

Beiwelt

Short stor

Stability of an electroweak string with a fermion condensate

A solution of the standard electroweak theory with a single lepton family is constructed, consisting of a cosmic string and a fermion condensate within its core. The stability of this system to small perturbations is examined, and it is found that stability is not enhanced relative to the bare electroweak string. The presence of quark zero modes is shown to violate the existence criteria for embedded defects.Comment: 13 pages, preprint DAMTP 94-9, SWAT/2