Search results for "CRAC"
showing 10 items of 1418 documents
Good Intentions, Bad Results: The Effects of Newspaper Subsidies on Journalistic Quality
2013
News media play an irreplaceably important role in the successful working of democratic societies: they guarantee that citizens have access to information, are accurately informed, and actively take part in the political process. A crucial factor for the effective fulfillment of these democratic functions is an adequate level of journalistic quality.
Investigation of buckling characteristics of cracked variable stiffness composite plates by an eXtended Ritz approach
2021
Abstract Variable Angle Tow (VAT) composite plates are characterized by in-plane variable stiffness properties, which opens to new concepts of stiffness tailoring and optimization to achieve higher structural performance for advanced lightweight structures where damage tolerance consideration are often mandatory. In this paper, a single-domain eXtended Ritz formulation is proposed to study the buckling behaviour of variable stiffness laminated cracked plates. The plate behaviour is described by the first order shear deformation theory whose generalized displacements, namely reference plane translations and rotations, are expressed via suitable admissible trial functions. These consist of a …
From the Blogosphere into Real Politics: The Use of ICT by the Five Star Movement
2014
Research on ICT and the public discourse often focuses on how ICT can be used to increase citizen participation in political decision-making processes. The Italian Five Star Movement (5SM) represents a novel approach to using ICT to include citizens, and a big challenge for the traditional political actors. The 5SM was initiated outside the established political systems, with the use of Internet tools as cornerstones to promote political actions based on the directly expressed will of citizens. In this paper, based on an exploratory case study approach and informed by the introduction of E-Democracy models, we investigate the role of ICT in various phases of the 5SM, from its birth through …
Understanding TwitterTM Use among Parliament Representatives: A Genre Analysis
2011
Published version of a chapter published in the book: Electronic Participation. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23333-3_1 This article examines parliament representatives’ Twitter- contributions (tweets). First, the genre of communication approach is introduced to identify common characteristics and communication patterns. Second, the findings are analysed using various eDemocracy models and deliberative standards to identify to what extent these tweets could be characterized as part of a deliberative discussion. The tweets are mainly dominated by five communication purposes; providing links to information sources for other Twitter users, to inform …
Democracy in complex networks:political leaders and administrative professionals
2015
The core assumption in this chapter is that political actors and civil servants on the municipal level share in the common societal responsibility for the education and upbringing of the next generation. Using a filter of five core public-governance logics in the analysis of our data – the marketplace logic, the managerial, the public, the professional and the ethical –we find both similarities and differences between politicians and civil servants. We analyse how politicians and administrators are positioned in the system and how they develop their commitment to, and their competencies to take part in furthering, both a democratic education and an efficient and effective governance system,…
Agency as the Ability and Opportunity to Participate in Evaluation as Knowledge Construction
2011
School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and ‘evidence-based’ practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with potential meaning for practice. This raises questions of democratic purposes of education, of leaders' and teachers' agency and corresponding accountability. This article is therefore an empirically based discussion of the relationship between multiple understandings of democracy and multiple practices of evaluation. It presents certain results of three ethnographi…
European Political Science and Global Knowledge
2018
In this chapter, the author maintains that rankings of universities and their social carriers participate in the relatively successful practical realization of the academic standards they seek to codify and of the shaping of reality according to the criteria they promote. In this sense, global university rankings are becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prediction that becomes true through positive feedback of varying intensity. They have succeeded in establishing through quantitative objectification certain types of equivalences between scientific excellence and numerical indicators. The reasons for their success are their performative efficiency (‘scientific’, quantitative) and the prac…
Checks and balances and international openness
1991
In the course of a long digression within his famous inspection of Plato’s political philosophy, Karl Popper (1945: 121) argues that “the problem of politics” is the following: “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” Popper’s answer is: “the theory of checks and balances”, which he defines as the striving to establish “institutional control of the rulers by balancing their powers against other powers” (122). From that general approach to “the problem of politics”, it follows that democracy is definitely not the rule of the majority, or the sovereignty of the people (a conception that entails various paradoxe…
Optimal die Design for Cold Extrusion Processes
1999
The design of cold extrusion processes requires the optimisation of several process variables in order to obtain a defect free product. The fulfilment of different objectives, such as the minimisation of forming loads or the homogeneity of the deformations, is highly requested. Nevertheless, several other relevant aspects of extrusion processes have to be taken into account and require a suitable optimisation of the process parameters and in particular of the die shape. In this paper, tool life has been assumed as the most relevant goal and an effective die design procedure as been setup. It is well known that fatigue cracking of the dies is the principal cause of dies failure in cold extru…
Influence of the U3O7 domain structure on cracking during the oxidation of UO2
2010
Abstract Cracking is observed when a UO 2 single crystal is oxidised in air. Previous studies led to the hypothesis that cracking occurs once a critical depth of U 3 O 7 oxidised layer is reached. We present some μ-Laue X-ray diffraction results, which evidence that the U 3 O 7 layer, grown by topotaxy on UO 2 , is made of domains with different crystalline orientations. This observation was used to perform a modelling of oxidation coupling chemical and mechanical parameters, which showed that the domain patterning induces stress localisation. This result is discussed in comparison with stress localisation observed in thin layer deposited on a substrate and used to propose an interpretation…