Who remembers Turkey's pre-accession? CEPS Special Report No. 74/December 2012

In 2005 the EU and Turkey officially started accession negotiations that were intended to lead to Turkey’s full membership of the EU. Yet today, the Turkish accession process has virtually ground to a halt and lost all credibility. Talk of alternatives to full membership can be heard from various sides; we highlight four instances of what we call ‘parallelism’, namely the elusive concept of a ‘privileged partnership’, the EU-Turkey customs union, the recently launched ‘Positive Agenda’ and Turkish participation in the Energy Community Treaty. While a privileged partnership represents a more comprehensive but still remote framework for EU-Turkish relations, the latter three are merely an escape route from preaccession. We conclude our analysis with a discussion on Turkey’s possible membership of the European Economic Area, which in effect would serve none of the parties involved. We conclude that both partners, the EU and Turkey, would be well advised to remember their pre-accession commitments of 13 years ago – for their mutual benefit.

Oxygen precipitation in Czochralski grown silicon heat treated at 525 degrees C

The diffusion of interstitial oxygen In silicon at 525 degrees C is studied using time-of-flight small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to separate the elastic scattering from oxygen-containing aggregates from the inelastic scattering from neutron-phonon interactions. The growth of oxygen-containing aggregates as a function of time gives a diffusion coefficient, D, calculated from Ham's theory, that is I factor of similar to 3.8 +/- 1.4 times higher than that expected by extrapolation of higher and lower temperature data (D = 0.13 exp(-2.53 eV kT(-1)) cm(2) s(-1)). This result confirms previous observations of enhanced diffusion at intermediate temperatures (400 degrees C-650 degrees C) although the magnitude of the enhancement we find is Much smaller than that reported by some others.

Genetic evidence of frequent long-distance recruitment in a vertebrate-dispersed tree

The importance of dispersal for the maintenance of biodiversity, while long-recognized, has remained unresolved. We used molecular markers to measure effective dispersal in a natural population of the vertebrate-dispersed Neotropical tree, Simarouba amara (Simaroubaceae) by comparing the distances between maternal parents and their offspring and comparing gene movement via seed and pollen in the 50 ha plot of the Barro Colorado Island forest, Central Panama. In all cases (parent-pair, mother-offspring, father-offspring, sib-sib) distances between related pairs were significantly greater than distances to nearest possible neighbours within each category. Long-distance seedling establishment was frequent: 74% of assigned seedlings established > 100 m from the maternal parent [mean = 392 +/- 234.6 m (SD), range = 9.3-1000.5 m] and pollen-mediated gene flow was comparable to that of seed [mean = 345.0 +/- 157.7 m (SD), range 57.6-739.7 m]. For S. amara we found approximately a 10-fold difference between distances estimated by inverse modelling and mean seedling recruitment distances (39 m vs. 392 m). Our findings have important implications for future studies in forest demography and regeneration, with most seedlings establishing at distances far exceeding those demonstrated by negative density-dependent effects.

Large supersaturated designs

A supersaturated design (SSD) is an experimental plan, useful for evaluating the main effects of m factors with n experimental units when m > n - 1, each factor has two levels and when the first-order effects of only a few factors are expected to have dominant effects on the response. Use of these plans can be extremely cost-effective when it is necessary to screen hundreds or thousands of factors with a limited amount of resources. In this article we describe how to use cyclic balanced incomplete block designs and regular graph designs to construct E (s(2)) optimal and near optimal SSDs when m is a multiple of n - 1. We also provide a table that can be used to construct these designs for screening thousands of factors. We also explain how to obtain SSDs when m is not a multiple of n - 1. Using the table and the approaches given in this paper, SSDs can be developed for designs with up to 24 runs and up to 12,190 factors.