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This report presents the outcome of the analysis and critical assessment of EU human rights engagement with other European regional organisations. Cooperation between the European Union and the Council of Europe has become more systematic, in particular in the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2007. This document inter alia identifies shared priorities and focal areas of cooperation among which are listed human rights and fundamental freedoms; rule of law and legal co-operation; democracy and good governance; democratic stability; intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity; education, youth and promotion of human contacts; and social cohesion. In the light of the Lisbon Treaty, including the new legal status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the commitment to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights, cooperation between the EU and the system of human rights protection established within the CoE should be significantly enhanced. However, the road leading up to the accession to the European Convention may be more difficult than expected as has been indicated by the Opinion 2/13 of the CJEU on the Draft Accession Agreement, adopted on 18 December 2014. In the case of the OSCE, although the role of the EU has never been formally defined in details, the EU participation in the work of OSCE bodies has been recognized by the established practice and formalised by the Rules of Procedure of the organisation adopted in 2006. The EU attaches particular importance to co-operation with the OSCE on security-related matters and conflict prevention in Europe. FP7 FRAME project, Deliverable No. 5.2 nrpages: 233 status: published

This report tries to get a sense of how coherence or incoherence appears in practice in the activities and discourse of policymakers in EU institutions, the Member States and in their vertical and horizontal interaction. The report is based almost entirely on interviews with policymakers, which includes primarily EU officials, but is interpreted broadly to include also Member States and non-state actors. Given the emphasis on actors for this Cluster and the Work Package, the report maintains the focus on them, in this case both as the basis for the choice of interview subjects and in terms of the research question, with an emphasis on different actors as potential ‘agents of coherence. The questions that have been posed during the interviews are based on the findings from previous reports in Work Package 8. They begin with the understanding of coherence developed in Deliverable 8.1, which sees incoherence arising from three potential sources: structural, policy (in terms of competing concepts and visions or policy regimes) and interests. Policymakers have been asked specifically about their own experiences of coherence/incoherence in the context of EU human rights policy. The main body of the report (section II) looks at EU institutions as potential 'agents of coherence' or avenues for incoherence. Through the views of policymakers working in the context of the principal EU institutions, it provides an account of the role of the institutions in promoting or undermining coherence in EU human rights policy, including examples of best practices of coherence, as well as what are considered to be the main sources of incoherence in the views of the policymakers involved. Section III is devoted to Member State policymakers with responsibility for EU policies, and is limited to the analysis of the views of representatives from two Member States interviewed for the present study. Finally section IV is devoted to a thematic case study on 'Coherence in EU Business and Human Rights Policy', which examines how coherence or incoherence appears in practice in the activities and discourse of EU institutions, the Member States and other actors on the subject of business and human rights. Overall, the report has found that different types of incoherence emerge in the work of all EU institutions and bodies. Each EU institution has a role as an ‘agent of coherence in EU human rights policy, while at the same time at risk of facing different types of incoherence in its work. (VLID)4959530 Version of record

A method was developed to quantify the effect of scanner instability on functional MRI data by comparing the instability noise to endogenous noise present when scanning a human. The instability noise was computed from agar phantom data collected with two flip angles, allowing for a separation of the instability from the background noise. This method was used on human data collected at four 3 T scanners, allowing the physiological noise level to be extracted from the data. In a "well-operating" scanner, the instability noise is generally less than 10% of physiological noise in white matter and only about 2% of physiological noise in cortex. This indicates that instability in a well-operating scanner adds very little noise to functional MRI results. This new method allows researchers to make informed decisions about the maximum instability level a scanner can have before it is taken off line for maintenance or rejected from a multisite consortium. This method also provides information about the background noise, which is generally larger in magnitude than the instability noise.

Video streaming over Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANS) is becoming an increasingly popular service. However, end user OoS is highly influenced by many factors. These include the video codec used, the packetization scheme, error concealment and correction techniques, the complexity of the video, propagation losses, and the line rate. In this paper the effect of the line rate on the capacity of the network when streaming multimedia content is analyzed experimentally. It is shown that as the line rate decreases the bandwidth load of the video stream dramatically increases leading to poor QoS at the client side. As automatic line rate adaptation schemes are typically employed in the majority of WLAN adapters, clients have no control over the line rate of their connection and consequently can suffer from a poor QoS for their video streaming services.