The European Union has extensive competences to engage with the world beyond its borders. Therefore, the UK's own relationships with non-EU countries are deeply embedded in the EU institutional framework, and the process of Brexit will require substantial legal reform in the UK. The term 'external relations' in fact covers an extremely wide set of policies which rely on a diverse set of legal competences. For this reason, we tend not to use the term 'foreign policy' unless this refers to the 'political' as opposed to 'economic' aspects, though even these are not always easily separated. 'External relations' is taken to cover the Common Commercial Policy, the powers of the EU to make agreements with 'third' – i.e. non-EU – countries, neighbourhood policy, development policy, relations with international institutions and what is known as the 'external dimension of internal policies'. The latter refers to a long-standing legal principle set out by the Court of Justice in Case 22-70 AETR, under which the EU has implied external competence where it enjoys internal competence. In addition to the wide variety of external competences which are scattered throughout the treaties, the legal instruments and institutional arrangements which apply across these areas are not the same throughout. This makes external relations a particularly complex area which the UK will need to extract itself from. We will address two of the main focal points of EU external relations: the CCP and the CFS.
Grid computing enables the selection and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources as a single unified computing resource, for solving large scale compute and data intensive computing applications. As with any computer system an important task within a grid is monitoring. The ability to monitor distributed resources is crucial to high performance computation. Amongst other things, it allows one to evaluate behaviour, optimize behaviour, discover and diagnose problems or faults. The objective of this research was to design a framework that would provide a generic template to allow for ad-hoc monitoring experiments with external instruments in a grid environment. The template allows for the information captured by external instruments, either hardware or software, to be accessed through a grid information system. Monitoring instruments, in general, create a huge amount of monitoring data that is often stored in raw log files. The sheer size of the data generated makes it unsuitable for direct insertion into an information system. The idea of the framework is to make this data accessible through an information system, whilst allowing the data to remain in-situ. A demonstrator of the framework was also to be implemented as part of this research. To accomplish this, first the central component of the framework, the interface to the grid information system, in this case R-GMA, which is a relational implementation of the Global Grid Forum?s Grid Monitoring Architecture, developed within the EU DataGrid project, had xvi to be designed and implemented. This resulted in the development of a new type of R-GMA producer, the Canonical Producer. The proposed framework demonstrator was a network tracer, NetTracer, that would allow access to monitoring data obtained from a set of example network monitoring instruments through R-GMA. The instruments chosen support the tracing of two network interconnect technologies, Ethernet using Tcpdump, a software network packet capture application, and SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface), using a (hardware) SCI trace instrument. An additional, and valuable, contribution was the initial design and implementation of a Grid-wide Intrusion Detection System, the design of which evolved from the extension of NetTracer to support a third network monitoring tool, Snort, a network-based intrusion detection system. The research was successful in its objectives. The framework, SANTA-G, was designed, and NetTracer, the framework demonstrator, shows that is a viable concept. The research has contributed to three major grid projects. The Canonical Producer, the enabling technology for the framework, is now part of the R-GMA system. The initial implementation of NetTracer was developed within the EU CrossGrid project, and forms part of its grid monitoring system. NetTracer, and a prototype of the Grid-wide Intrusion Detection System, are also being used by Grid-Ireland, the national computational grid of Ireland, in order to monitor network activity on, and the state of security of, its sites. ; TARA (Trinity's Access to Research Archive) has a robust takedown policy. Please contact us if you have any concerns: rssadmin@tcd.ie
Nonprofits are guided by internal efforts and external mandates to build capacity. However, scholars and grant makers are hampered by varied definitions of the concept, competing but untested models, and the lack of a reliable and valid measure. This research defines nonprofit capacity as the processes, practices, and people that the organization has at its disposal that enable it to produce, perform, or deploy resources to achieve its mission. An inductive‐confirmatory two‐study approach introduces and validates the Nonprofit Capacities Instrument, a 45‐item measure of eight nonprofit capacities derived from existing instruments. The capacities are (1) financial management, (2) adaptive capacity, (3) strategic planning, (4) external communication, (5) board leadership, (6) operational capacity, (7) mission orientation, and (8) staff management. Intriguingly, this research demonstrates that nonprofit capacity is not a singular or second‐order concept, but better described in its plural form, nonprofit capacities.
