Decision-making after the EU Intergovernmental Conference

Abstract: One central point of debate at the current EU Intergovernmental Conference will be the reform of EU decision-making. This article begins by briefly summarising the current decision-making system in the EU. It then approaches in a quantitative manner how a lowering of the qualified majority threshold in the Council of Ministers would increase EU decision-making capacity. Finally, it proposes new decision-making procedures which might be particularly well-suited to overcoming EU indecision.     

Correlation of age and ossification of the medial clavicular epiphysis using computed tomography

OBJECT: The aim of this study was the examination of relationship between the age and the ossification of medial epiphysis of the clavicle referred to CT examination. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Concerning the epiphyseal ossification of the clavicle CT's of 100 patients (50 male and 50 female) between 16 and 25 years (10 patients for each year) were analyzed by three viewers. RESULTS: In the legal relevant age segment (16-25a) we saw a turnover from stage 3 to stage 4 at the age of 21 years. The calculated empiric distribution function showed 95% of stage 4 over 21 years while 75% of the patients with stage 3 were under 21 years. A reconstruction kernel suitable for osseous structures should be used, images should be viewed or presented in a bone window. CONCLUSION: According to these results it can be concluded that a person with stage 4 is probably 21 years or older, while a stage 3 leads to an estimated age under 21 years. On the other hand, a confidence level of 99.67% is not reached. Therefore, CT of the medial epiphysis of the clavicle will only be suitable for age estimation around the age of 21 years, if this relevant statistic obstacle is defeated. Bearing this in mind, further studies are needed to evaluate slice thickness as the most critical parameter.     

Presidential prototypes

The American public expresses considerable consensus on those qualities of character and performance indispensable to a modern president. Contrary to expectations, however, such conceptions of an ideal president (or presidential prototypes) generally failed to provide standards by which actual presidential candidates were evaluated. Across five complementary tests, qualities that citizens thought important for an ideal president counted no more heavily in their evaluations of presidential hopefuls than did qualities thought less important—with one consistent and striking exception. Conceptions of an ideal president did set the standards by which the incumbent president was evaluated, and quite powerfully so. In the final section of the paper, we provide several interpretations of these results, suggest how public conceptions of an ideal president are acquired, and speculate about processes of presidential appraisal.     

Post-mortem examination prior to cremation--an instrument to verify the quality of medical post-mortems and uncover non-natural deaths?

The external post-mortem examination, its deficient quality and possible causes have been the subject of numerous political and professional discussions. The external post-mortem examination is the basis for the decision whether further criminal investigations are required to clarify the cause of death. It is thus an essential instrument to ensure legal certainty. Before cremation, a second external post-mortem examination is performed by a public medical officer to make sure that errors of the first post-mortem are corrected. In the present study, cases were retrospectively analyzed in which a forensic autopsy had been ordered on the basis of the results of the post-mortem examination performed before cremation. The entries on the death certificate regarding the manner and cause of death were compared with the autopsy results. Between 1998 and 2007, 387 autopsies were ordered after external examination before cremation. In 55 cases (14.2%), the autopsy revealed a non-natural death, although a natural death had been attested on the death certificate. In descending order, a wrong manner of death was attested by clinicians, general practitioners and emergency physicians. With regard to the place where the first external post-mortem had been performed the lowest error rate was seen in nursing homes. Concerning the cause of death, discrepancies between the first post-mortem and autopsy were found in 59.4% of the cases. In this respect, general practitioners and clinicians were ranking first, whereas in nursing homes the cause of death was wrongly assessed in over 70% of cases. At present, the medical post-mortem does not meet the required quality standards, especially with regard to legal certainty. Determination of the cause of death on the basis of the external post-mortem examination is a challenging task even for the experienced medical examiner. As to the categorization of the manner of death it has to be stated that non-natural deaths are often not recognized or that the possibility to certify a death as unclear is not sufficiently used. As a result, it seems important to demand intensive, qualified, additional training in external post-mortem examinations for physicians.     

Transitions in the negotiations on climate change: from prisoner’s dilemma to chicken and beyond

Frequently, international environmental negotiations have been analyzed in two-agent (2 × 2) games. Yet, in order to involve additional strategies, (3 × 3) games gained attention recently. We employ such a (3 × 3) game setting in order to depict international negotiations on climate change and integrate both the prisoner’s dilemma and the chicken games in this setting. We analyze transitions of negotiation states and describe how ancillary benefits and first-mover advantages influence agents’ behavior in the negotiations, when three different strategies or levels of climate protection efforts are available. Finally, we also integrate strategies to mitigate and to adapt to climate change into the analysis in the (3 × 3) game setting.     

Between man,woman and dog: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm

The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel – the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and the dog Doss, the paper tracks the way in which the dog refracts not only the relation between human and animal but also a range of other relations in the novel, social and metaphysical. Reading the novel and its late nineteenth-century contexts of thought from the retrospective standpoint of the present – a hermeneutic position that is itself the site of a split signification – the paper considers the dog good to think with.