Turkey's boycott of the Cyprus EU presidency: context, meaning and its consequences. EU Centre in Singapore Working Paper No. 9, September 2012

In 2011 Turkish officials began indicating their intention to suspend all contact with Cyprus’s presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), slated for the second half of 2012, given the issues surrounding the unresolved Cyprus conflict. This came as the latest development in a long and arduous path of Turkey’s application for EU membership that began in 1987. This paper provides the context – the Cyprus conflict, Turkey’s EU accession negotiations, and the Cyprus reunification talks – in understanding the reasons and consequences of Ankara’s boycott of the Cyprus presidency. The article also considers the evolving nature and the role of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, especially after the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, and how this may have played into Turkey’s calculations in calling for the boycott.

Random generation of sentences from context free and context sensitive phrase structure grammars.

Bibliography: p. 67.

Predictive genetic test decisions for Huntington's disease: context, appraisal and new moral imperatives

Predictive testing is one of the new genetic technologies which, in conjunction with developing fields such as pharmacogenomics, promises many benefits for preventive and population health. Understanding how individuals appraise and make genetic test decisions is increasingly relevant as the technology expands. Lay understandings of genetic risk and test decision-making, located within holistic life frameworks including family or kin relationships, may vary considerably from clinical representations of these phenomena. The predictive test for Huntington's disease (HD), whilst specific to a single-gene, serious, mature-onset but currently untreatable disorder, is regarded as a model in this context. This paper reports upon a qualitative Australian study which investigated predictive test decision-making by individuals at risk for HD, the contexts of their decisions and the appraisals which underpinned them. In-depth interviews were conducted in Australia with 16 individuals at 50% risk for HD, with variation across testing decisions, gender, age and selected characteristics. Findings suggested predictive testing was regarded as a significant life decision with important implications for self and others, while the right not to know genetic status was staunchly and unanimously defended. Multiple contexts of reference were identified within which test decisions were located, including intra- and inter-personal frameworks, family history and experience of HID, and temporality. Participants used two main criteria in appraising test options: perceived value of, or need for the test information, for self and/or significant others, and degree to which such information could be tolerated and managed, short and long-term, by self and/or others. Selected moral and ethical considerations involved in decision-making are examined, as well as the clinical and socio-political contexts in which predictive testing is located. The paper argues that psychosocial vulnerabilities generated by the availability of testing technologies and exacerbated by policy imperatives towards individual responsibility and self-governance should be addressed at broader societal levels. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

An empirical examination of the strategic decision-making process:the relationship between context, process, and outcomes

Despite concerted academic interest in the strategic decision-making process (SDMP) since the 1980s, a coherent body of theory capable of guiding practice has not materialised. This is because many prior studies focus only on a single process characteristic, often rationality or comprehensiveness, and have paid insufficient attention to context. To further develop theory, research is required which examines: (i) the influence of context from multiple theoretical perspectives (e.g. upper echelons, environmental determinism); (ii) different process characteristics from both synoptic formal (e.g. rationality) and political incremental (e.g. politics) perspectives, and; (iii) the effects of context and process characteristics on a range of SDMP outcomes. Using data from 30 interviews and 357 questionnaires, this thesis addresses several opportunities for theory development by testing an integrative model which incorporates: (i) five SDMP characteristics representing both synoptic formal (procedural rationality, comprehensiveness, and behavioural integration) and political incremental (intuition, and political behaviour) perspectives; (ii) four SDMP outcome variables—strategic decision (SD) quality, implementation success, commitment, and SD speed, and; (iii) contextual variables from the four theoretical perspectives—upper echelons, SD-specific characteristics, environmental determinism, and firm characteristics. The present study makes several substantial and original contributions to knowledge. First, it provides empirical evidence of the contextual boundary conditions under which intuition and political behaviour positively influence SDMP outcomes. Second, it establishes the predominance of the upper echelons perspective; with TMT variables explaining significantly more variance in SDMP characteristics than SD specific characteristics, the external environment, and firm characteristics. A newly developed measure of top management team expertise also demonstrates highly significant direct and indirect effects on the SDMP. Finally, it is evident that SDMP characteristics and contextual variables influence a number of SDMP outcomes, not just overall SD quality, but also implementation success, commitment, and SD speed.

Expanding the evidence within evidence-based healthcare:thinking about the context, acceptability and feasibility of interventions

Evidence-based medicine is crucial to contemporary healthcare. It is dependent on systematic review methodology modelled on an arguably inadequate hierarchy of evidence. There has been a significant increase in medical and health research using qualitative and mixed method designs. The perspective taken in this article is that we need to broaden our evidence base if we are to fully take account of issues of context, acceptability and feasibility in the development and implementation of healthcare interventions. One way of doing this is to use a range of methods that better fit the different aspects of intervention development and implementation. Methods for the systematic review of evidence, other than randomised-controlled trials, are available and there is a readiness to incorporate these other types of evidence into good-practice guidance, but we need a clear methodology to translate these advances in research into the world of policy.

A modelling and simulation environment for self-aware and self-expressive systems

Self-awareness and self-expression are promising architectural concepts for embedded systems to be equipped with to match them with dedicated application scenarios and constraints in the avionic and space-flight industry. Typically, these systems operate in largely undefined environments and are not reachable after deployment for a long time or even never ever again. This paper introduces a reference architecture as well as a novel modelling and simulation environment for self-aware and self-expressive systems with transaction level modelling, simulation and detailed modelling capabilities for hardware aspects, precise process chronology execution as well as fine timing resolutions. Furthermore, industrial relevant system sizes with several self-aware and self-expressive nodes can be handled by the modelling and simulation environment.

The handbook of engineering self-aware and self-expressive systems

When faced with the task of designing and implementing a new self-aware and self-expressive computing system, researchers and practitioners need a set of guidelines on how to use the concepts and foundations developed in the Engineering Proprioception in Computing Systems (EPiCS) project. This report provides such guidelines on how to design self-aware and self-expressive computing systems in a principled way. We have documented different categories of self-awareness and self-expression level using architectural patterns. We have also documented common architectural primitives, their possible candidate techniques and attributes for architecting self-aware and self-expressive systems. Drawing on the knowledge obtained from the previous investigations, we proposed a pattern driven methodology for engineering self-aware and self-expressive systems to assist in utilising the patterns and primitives during design. The methodology contains detailed guidance to make decisions with respect to the possible design alternatives, providing a systematic way to build self-aware and self-expressive systems. Then, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated the methodology using two case studies. The results reveal that our pattern driven methodology covers the main aspects of engineering self-aware and self-expressive systems, and that the resulted systems perform significantly better than the non-self-aware systems.

Hungarian international development cooperation:context, stakeholders and performance

This paper explores the domestic and international context of Hungary's emerging international development policy. Specifically, it looks at three factors that may influence how this policy operates: membership in the European Union (EU) and potential ‘Europeanization’, Hungary's wider foreign policy strategy, and the influence of domestic stakeholders. In order to uncover how these factors affect the country's international development policy, semi-structured interviews were carried out with the main stakeholders. The main conclusions are: (1) While accession to the EU did play a crucial role in restarting Hungary's international development policy, the integration has had little effect since then; (2) international development policy seems to serve mainly Hungary's regional strategic foreign policy and economic interests, and not its global development goals; and (3) although all the domestic development stakeholders are rather weak, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) still seems to play a dominating role. Convergence with European requirements and best practices is, therefore, clearly hindered by foreign policy interests and also by the weakness of non- governmental stakeholders.

Self-aware and self-expressive camera networks

Smart cameras perform on-board image analysis, adapt their algorithms to changes in their environment, and collaborate with other networked cameras to analyze the dynamic behavior of objects. A proposed computational framework adopts the concepts of self-awareness and self-expression to more efficiently manage the complex tradeoffs among performance, flexibility, resources, and reliability. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/NKe31-OKLz4 is a video demonstrating CamSim, a smart camera simulation tool, enables users to test self-adaptive and self-organizing smart-camera techniques without deploying a smart-camera network.

Architectural aspects of self-aware and self-expressive computing systems:from psychology to engineering

Work on human self-Awareness is the basis for a framework to develop computational systems that can adaptively manage complex dynamic tradeoffs at runtime. An architectural case study in cloud computing illustrates the framework's potential benefits.

Beyond the particular and universal:dependence, independence, and interdependence of context, justice, and ethics

This article reflects on context effects in the study of behavioral ethics and organizational justice. After a general overview, we review three key challenges confronting research in these two domains. First, we consider social scientific versus normative approaches to inquiry. The former aims for a scientific description, while the latter aims to provide prescriptive advice for moral conduct. We argue that the social scientific view can be enriched by considering normative paradigms. The next challenge we consider, involves the duality of morally upright versus morally inappropriate behavior. We observe that there is a long tradition of categorizing behavior dichotomously (e.g., good vs. bad) rather than continuously. We conclude by observing that more research is needed to compare the dichotomous versus continuous perspectives. Third, we examine the role of “cold” cognitions and “hot” affect in making judgments of ethicality. Historically speaking, research has empathized cognition, though recent work has begun to add greater balance to affective reactions. We argue that both cognition and affect are important, but more research is needed to determine how they work together. After considering these three challenges, we then turn to our special issue, providing short reviews of each contribution and how they help in better addressing the three challenges we have identified.