The various and diverse academic responses to the Conference on the Future of Europe’s efforts at democratic renewal, including those by Ben Crum, Markus Patberg and Sandra Seubert, speak not only to the lack of a clear institutional locus or pathway associated with the Conference, but also to differing understandings of the basic conditions of existence – or political ontology – of the European Union. These differing understandings are reflected in different attitudes to the European Union’s constitutional standing and prospects. This article explores how the special place of constitutional retrofitting in the European Union – of reconstructing and reimagining an originally pre-constitutional system in constitutional terms – helps to illuminate the different understanding of political ontology in play, and helps clarify what is at stake in the continuing debate over fundamental reform.

With the aid of recently proposed word embedding algorithms, the study of semantic relatedness has progressed rapidly. However, word-level representations are still lacking for many natural language processing tasks. Various sense-level embedding learning algorithms have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we present a generalized model derived from existing sense retrofitting models. In this generalization, we take into account semantic relations between the senses, relation strength, and semantic strength. Experimental results show that the generalized model outperforms previous approaches on four tasks: semantic relatedness, contextual word similarity, semantic difference, and synonym selection. Based on the generalized sense retrofitting model, we also propose a standardization process on the dimensions with four settings, a neighbor expansion process from the nearest neighbors, and combinations of these two approaches. Finally, we propose a Procrustes analysis approach that inspired from bilingual mapping models for learning representations that outside of the ontology. The experimental results show the advantages of these approaches on semantic relatedness tasks.

Circular Economy (CE) and the potential of reusing and recycling the products after the end of their life, becomes imperative for environmental, economic and social reasons. Especially during the 4th Industrial Revolution that is taking place nowadays, an increasing number of out-of-date equipment has to be replaced, which constitutes a chance and necessity to be reused, through recycling, redesigning and remanufacturing. The paper presents proof-of-concept studies regarding upcycling of obsolete and outdated equipment into novel test rigs mainly addressing research activities. Three such case studies are presented, namely the upcycling of an injection moulding machine into a modular test bench for power hydraulic components, the upcycling of scrap components into a hybrid hydraulic/ ICE powertrain rig and the functional augmentation of a gear roll tester to accommodate single and double flank tests. Significant savings in cost, raw materials and time are demonstrated in all cases and adherence to the CE objectives are observed.

In November 2017, a disruptive earthquake occurred in Western Iran. After the major earthquake in Kermanshah, most affordable buildings such as a hospital in Islamabad and a dozen schools were destroyed. According to experts, a dangerous location (construction on the fault), poor quality of concrete, inappropriate connection of the facade to the structure, the use of undesirable construction materials, and low quality of non-structural components are considered as the main reasons for these damages. Regarding the role of government in the developing countries, construction policies should be modified and new policies should be implemented to enhance the structural and non-structural resilience in the buildings.

To obtain rich information about the cognitive diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD), this study attempted to retrofit a traditional borderline personality questionnaire so that the improved assessment (called CDA-BPD) could provide more diagnostic information. The retrofitting processes included the following steps: (1) applied an cognitive diagnosis model to analyze the psychometric characteristics of the traditional questionnaire; (2) under the guidance of cognitive diagnosis assessment (CDA), high-quality items were chosen to develop the CDA-BPD and tested on 1,097 subjects; (3) the quality of the CDA-BPD was evaluated; (4) the structure of the CDA-BPD was analyzed. Results indicated that: (1) the CDA-BPD had acceptable reliability and validity; (2) the CDA-BPD had sensitivity of 0.985 and specificity of 0.853 with area under curve (AUC) = 0.956; (3) the two structural factors of the traditional questionnaire were confirmed in the CDA-BPD; χ2 was 83.01 with df = 26, p < .0001, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.97, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.045. It was concluded that the practice of retrofitting a traditional borderline personality assessment for cognitive diagnostic purpose was feasible. Most importantly, under the cognitive diagnosis model framework, CDA-BPD could simultaneously provide general-level information and the detailed symptom criteria-level information about the posterior probability of satisfying each symptom criterion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) for each individual, which gave further insight into tailoring individual-specific treatments for borderline personality disorder.