Constructing a ‘moment of crisis’ and its adequate solution

The rejection of the European Constitution marks an important crystallization point for debate about the European Union (EU) and the integration process. The European Constitution was envisaged as the founding document of a renewed and enlarged European Union and thus it was rather assumed to find wide public support. Its rejection was not anticipated. The negative referenda in France and the Netherlands therefore led to a controversial debate about the more fundamental meaning and the consequences of the rejection both for the immediate state of affairs as well as for the further integration process. The rejection of the Constitution and the controversy about its correct interpretation therefore present an intriguing puzzle for political analysis. Although the treaty rejection was taken up widely in the field of European Studies, the focus of existing analyses has predominantly been on explaining why the current situation occurred. Underlying these approaches is the premise that by establishing the reasons for the rejection it is possible to derive the ‘true’ meaning of the event for the EU integration process. In my paper I rely on an alternative, discourse theoretical approach which aims to overcome the positivist perspective dominating the existing analyses. I argue that the meaning of the event ‘treaty rejection’ is not fixed or inherent to it but discursively constructed. The critical assessment of this concrete meaning-production is of high relevance as the specific meaning attributed to the treaty rejection effectively constrains the scope for supposedly ‘reasonable’ options for action, both in the concrete situation and in the further European integration process more generally. I will argue that the overall framing suggests a fundamental technocratic approach to governance from part of the Commission. Political struggle and public deliberation is no longer foreseen as the concrete solutions to the citizens’ general concerns are designed by supposedly apolitical experts. Through the communicative diffusion and the active implementation of this particular model of governance the Commission shapes the future integration process in a more substantial way than is obvious from its seemingly limited immediate problem-solving orientation of overcoming the ‘constitutional crisis’. As the European Commission is a central actor in the discourse production my analysis focuses on the specific interpretation of the situation put forward by the Commission. In order to work out the Commission’s particular take on the event I conducted a frame analysis (according to Benford/Snow) on a body of key sources produced in the context of coping with the treaty rejection.

Learning Linear, Sparse, Factorial Codes

In previous work (Olshausen & Field 1996), an algorithm was described for learning linear sparse codes which, when trained on natural images, produces a set of basis functions that are spatially localized, oriented, and bandpass (i.e., wavelet-like). This note shows how the algorithm may be interpreted within a maximum-likelihood framework. Several useful insights emerge from this connection: it makes explicit the relation to statistical independence (i.e., factorial coding), it shows a formal relationship to the algorithm of Bell and Sejnowski (1995), and it suggests how to adapt parameters that were previously fixed.

Factorial Hidden Markov Models

We present a framework for learning in hidden Markov models with distributed state representations. Within this framework, we derive a learning algorithm based on the Expectation--Maximization (EM) procedure for maximum likelihood estimation. Analogous to the standard Baum-Welch update rules, the M-step of our algorithm is exact and can be solved analytically. However, due to the combinatorial nature of the hidden state representation, the exact E-step is intractable. A simple and tractable mean field approximation is derived. Empirical results on a set of problems suggest that both the mean field approximation and Gibbs sampling are viable alternatives to the computationally expensive exact algorithm.

Composición factorial de la versión española de la Spence Children Anxiety Scale (SCAS).

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An??lisis de la estructura factorial de las puntuaciones de la 'Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scale' en poblaci??n espa??ola

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Uso de R y GRASS para la obtención de mapas de disponibilidad de hábitat mediante análisis factorial de nicho

It is possible to obtain habitat suitability maps using several applications like "Biomapper" v. 3.1.5 (http://www2.unil.ch/biomapper) or the "adehabitat" library v. 1.2.1, developed to be used within R program (http//www.R-project.org)

Estructura factorial de la adaptaci??n espa??ola de la Escala de Identificaci??n Grupal de Tarrant

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El an??lisis factorial de datos ipsativos : un estudio de simulaci??n

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Evaluación de la equivalencia factorial y métrica de la Sexual Assertiveness Scale (SAS) por sexo.

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Desarrollo del cuestionario de agresividad proactiva-reactiva para profesores : estructura factorial y propiedades psicom??tricas

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Adaptaci??n al castellano y estructura factorial del Denison Organizational Culture Survey

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Procedimientos gr??ficos para evaluar la consistencia intra-individual en el an??lisis factorial de ??tems

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An??lisis factorial confirmatorio del ??ndice de Sensibilidad a la Ansiedad para Ni??os

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Liderazgo transformacional y liderazgo transaccional : un an??lisis de la estructura factorial del Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) en una muestra espa??ola

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Estructura factorial y consistencia interna de la versi??n espa??ola del Parenting Stress Index-Short Form

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