The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess current developments in scholarly publishing in Europe. Current models for disseminating content have limitations and Open Access models of publishing have been endorsed by the European Universities Association. The Harvard mandate for the deposit of materials in Open Access repositories is a bold new development, and the community is watching it with interest. It is possible that e-books may be the next large form of content to be made available to the user. Users certainly express interest in using this form of material. However, current library systems need to be developed in order to cope with this mass of new content. E-theses, available in Open Access from institutional repositories, are a form of content that is made much more visible than the paper equivalents. The DART-Europe portal, supported by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) currently provides access to 100,000 research theses in 150 European Universities. At an institutional and academic level, however, much remains to be done to embed Open Access into the landscape: the current situation is described in a new report for UCL (University College London), produced by RAND Europe.

This article considers the modern-day relevance of C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’ while the author, Walter Massey, reflects upon his own personal journey through these two worlds, from his early life as a student of physics, to his current role as Chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The divisions between the sciences and the arts have been improved over time, thanks to the evolution of both disciplines, the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a more collaborative mindset among scholars of both worlds. Certain shared challenges remain, such as the decline in the perceived value of intellectualism and scholarship among certain segments of society. The keys to overcoming these new two cultures are open communication and transparency.

The term globalization has been accepted very quickly. Until the 1990’s virtually unknown, the word is now on everybody’s lips. The phenomenon of globalization however is much older than the concept. It started at the end of the 15th century with the beginnings of European expansion and was dramatically increased by the industrialization of the world since the late 18th century. Over the last 30 years or so it has accelerated so much that one can speak of a new stage of globalization.

The extra-terrestrial scenario of the origin of life suggested by Svante Arrhenius (1908) as the ‘panspermia’ hypothesis was revived by the discovery of a low-temperature quantum limit of a chemical reaction rate in 1973. Entropy factors play no role near absolute zero, and slow molecular tunnelling can lead to the exothermic formation of quite complex molecules. Interstellar grains or particles of cometary tails could serve as possible cold seeds of life, with acetic acid, urea and products of their polycondensation as quasi-equilibrium intermediates. Scenarios of the origin of life should consider the appearance of a typical feature of living species—chiral purity of their aminoacids and sugars. Very cold solid environment hinders tunnelling racemization under conditions typical for outer space. However, the decisive problem of the origin of chiral purity of the Earth's biosphere is the mechanism of the spontaneous breaking of mirror symmetry rather than the search for some ‘advantage factors’ which can promote gradual accumulation of enantiomeric excess. Extra-terrestrial (cold, solid phase) scenarios of the origin of life seem to be more promising from that point of view than terrestrial (warm) scenarios. In a scheme of five main stages of prebiological evolution some problems important for further investigation are briefly discussed.

The Academia Europaea had its origin in a proposal that came in 1984 from the UK Department of Education and Science. This led to a Foundation Meeting in Cambridge in September 1988 attended by 54 of the Founding Members. They set up the formal framework and this provided the basis of the first Plenary Meeting held in London in June 1989.

There is very much more to Daniel Defoe's inspired piece of ‘faction’ about Robinson Crusoe than seeing it just as a boy's adventure story. Its influence was widespread, judging by the great scale of new editions and reprintings, both internationally and through many translations. It can be read as a sophisticated myth of the ascent of man, of economic growth by dint of the work ethic, of the imperative of ‘improvement’ and the determination to master nature. It has implications for natural rights theory, the Lockeian justification of private property and the role of the ‘civilised’ European facing a hostile, alien habitat.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been dominated by multifarious crises that have given way to individual and collective wounds resulting from environmental disasters, exile and migratory movements, war, terrorism, radicalism and other disturbing historical episodes. Our main contention is that trauma and/or excessive exposure to vulnerable situations can be relieved thanks to diverse narrative practices. Accordingly, we explore the field of Trauma Studies since its emergence to its current evolution towards the vulnerability paradigm, examining the different meanings of vulnerability not only from the perspective of the life sciences but also from the social sciences and its application to the humanities. Then, we move on to the notion of resilience and how it can help us articulate and/or move beyond trauma and vulnerability. In keeping with this, considering the ethical and political relationality between the self and other, we highlight one’s tendency to be affected by the other’s wounds and vulnerability as well as the inevitability of interdependency and interconnectedness between people and non-human entities. Thus, we explore the role of literature in giving voice to the voiceless and to unheard experiences of suffering as well as in representing the demise of the sovereign self and the rise of human and non-human interconnectedness after being exposed to traumatic or disastrous events, as represented in contemporary literatures in English.

In the Lisbon Agenda, the European Union’s member States have committed themselves to invest in becoming the most competitive economy in the world. In this paper we review the evidence on whether investment in health should be part of this process. Concentrating on microeconomic studies, we show how better health can increase productivity and labour supply. In addition, there is an indirect positive effect through the investment that healthy people make their own education. Governments pursuing sustainable economic growth – broadly defined – should include the health of their population along with education and physical infrastructure in a balanced investment strategy.

One way that the American government has changed in the past 50 years is through the establishment and expansion of organizations providing technical expertise for decisionmaking. This essay reviews the performance of current structures from the diverse vantage points of elites, bureaucracies, the general public and activist minorities, drawing on studies of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government, and the cultural theory of Mary Douglas et al. The apparently mature institutional landscape may well be ripe for change.

The main purpose of this article is to present the activities of local DMOs (destination management organizations) in the context of the development of the tourist education sector in Poland. The article provides the results of the authors’ research on the collaboration between DMOs and the representatives of the educational sector in Poland, especially in the area of the training of professionally prepared personnel for the operation of the market of tourist services.

Ten non-violent revolutions are considered, characteristic for the second half of the 20th century, that profoundly changed our world and our perception of it. Perhaps the most important of those, the demographic revolution, resulted in unprecedented changes both in population size and structure. An attempt is made to analyse the ‘big perhaps’, some of the incompletely comprehended economical, medical, social, ethical and political consequences of present and projected demographic changes.

The idea of Europe has changed with time. The notion was originally identified with three concepts: that of freedom, of Christianity, and with civilization. Later it was associated with diversity, democracy and then with nationalism. Only very slowly has the idea of a common identity leading to integration come to the fore.

Today Western European welfare states find themselves in a paradoxical situation: parts of working life are in need of labour that is difficult to find nationally – and internationally. While this is partly due to inflexible policies, it is also due to competition for labour among Western countries. At the same time, asylum seekers are constantly arriving, often to be joined by family members. The authorities are confronted with a mismatch between the supply of, and demand for, immigrants. The receiving countries do not get the labour they want, while many of those who actually come cannot be incorporated productively for various reasons. This situation illustrates the squeeze facing today’s welfare states – in this article exemplified with the Norwegian case – between the logic of humanitarian responsibilities and the concerns of the national economy.

This article discusses the gaps in the cognitive demands of education as higher levels of education became socially and culturally necessary. These gaps are related to major transitions between education levels, such as the transition from preschool to primary school, from primary to secondary, or from secondary to tertiary education. Gaps reflect deviations between the concepts and skills prescribed for learning by a specific population and the readiness of this population to cope with the demands of the task within the time frame prescribed. The history and the cognitive developmental profile of the gaps is outlined. This article focuses on the gap between secondary and tertiary education. It is explained that a major reason for the gap is the vast expansion in the population of youth attending university studies. We outline a programme for bridging this gap, which extends from primary to university education. We emphasize changes in principle-based and critical thought that are needed by many students if they are be able to grasp science as intended by universities.

The development, refinement and increasingly widespread use of DNA microarrays have been important responses to the explosion of sequence information produced by genome science. The high sample densities possible with DNA microarrays, coupled with the complete or nearly complete genome sequences available for humans and model organisms, provide a powerful analytical method to measure both qualitative and quantitative variations in RNA and DNA. Principal among the applications of microarrays is the large-scale analysis of RNA expression, often referred to as expression profiling. The power of this application lies in its ability to determine the expression patterns of tens of thousands of genes in a single experiment. Additionally, the ability to detect DNA polymorphisms makes microarrays useful in studies designed to correlate DNA sequence variations with variations in phenotype. The unprecedented scale on which microarrays allow both experimentation and generation of results should make possible a more complete and comprehensive understanding of cells and cellular processes.

This study investigates the impact of financial depth and capital market development on the growth of European nations. Financial depth is important if the benefits of financial integration are to be realized. In fact, financial depth is a channel that promotes growth and risk sharing and curbs macroeconomic volatility. Panel data of 17 European nations from 1970 to 2013 were taken and results were obtained through the Pool Mean Group Estimation technique. Our results show that, for European nations, financial depth and stock market development contributed to long-term growth. However, the contribution of financial depth outweighs that of stock market development. Moreover, it was observed that in the case of Hungary and Ireland, capital market development and financial depth contributed to short-term growth. Trade openness was found to be significant for growth in the cases of Austria and Finland while financial depth and trade openness were found to be significant for Germany and Switzerland. In conclusion, in the short-run, financial depth contributed more to growth than stock market development. Therefore, the role of financial depth in enhancing growth can be said to be more persistent than that of stock market development.

Fusion, which powers the sun and stars, is potentially an environmentally responsible and intrinsically safe source of essentially limitless energy on earth. The potential of fusion has been recognized for over 65 years, but mastering fusion on earth has proved to be an enormous scientific and technical challenge. It involves heating a large volume of dilute gas, containing equal parts of deuterium and tritium, to over 100M°C (M°C=one million degrees celsius) while preventing it from being cooled by touching the walls, from which it must be isolated using a ‘magnetic bottle’. This has now been done, and the Joint European Torus (JET) – which is the world's leading fusion research facility – has produced 16 MW of fusion power. The next step, which is to build a power station sized device called ITER, will be taken by a global collaboration. ITER will be twice as big as JET in linear dimensions, and will integrate all the technologies needed in a fusion power station. ITER should produce at least 500 MW of fusion power, ten times more than needed to heat the gas, and confirm that it is possible to build a fusion power station. Time is, however, needed to further develop the technology in order to ensure that it would be reliable and economical, and to test in power station conditions the materials that will be used in its construction, which will have to stand up to intense bombardment by the neutrons that carry the energy out of the magnetic bottle. Up to now, fusion has not been developed with any sense of urgency: since devices called tokamaks emerged in 1969 as the best candidates for bottling hot gases, at least 15 years have been lost due to delays in decision making and inadequate funding. In view of the urgent need for new, large-scale, emission-free sources of energy, and given the fact that – assuming it can be made to work reliably – the economics of fusion power look reasonable, the time has come to develop fusion on the so-called Fast Track. This involves: building ITER and the essential International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility in parallel, which will take ten years; using the results to finalize the design of a prototype fusion power station (generally called DEMO for Demonstrator); and then constructing DEMO, which will take another ten years. Assuming adequate funding, and that there are no major surprises, DEMO could be putting electricity into the grid within 30 years.

The ability of political parties in advanced industrial democracies to maintain the traditional linkage between voters and their governments by making and attempting to fulfill policy promises is potentially being challenged by emerging social, political, and economic forces of the 21st century. Parties may become less meaningful to the electorate as they deal with the cross-pressures created by the forces of Europeanization, globalization, localism, and the increasing independence of central banks. These factors have the potential to make parties in government, at the national-level, marginally less able to fulfill the promises they make to voters. The review of literature presented here regarding these challenges indicates that although the risks to parties are very real, the effects of these emerging forces have yet to substantially diminish the primary roles and functioning of national parties in government. Those most at risk of being affected in the future are parties who rely strongly on economic appeals and promises.

Roman Jakobson famously defined poetry as pivoting on the metaphorical axis with parallelism as a major feature, and James Kugel argues that parallelism is the defining feature of biblical poetry. The parallel structure – including its variations of symmetry and antithesis – is crucial for classical Chinese poetry. In drawing on both Chinese and Western critical views on the symmetrical structure of parallelism and antithesis, this paper will explore the relationship between the cognitive and linguistic correlation in the formation of parallel structure in literary language, particularly poetry, and argue for the basis of parallelism as deeply embedded in the mind and manifested in literary expressions.

In the last few decades, the subject of trust has become one of the central research topics in sociology and political science. Various theoretical approaches have crystallized, and an immense amount of empirical data has been collected. The focus on trust is for two kinds of reasons. One has to do with immanent developments in the social sciences. We have witnessed a turn from almost exclusive preoccupation with the macro-social level, that is the organizational, systemic or structuralist images of society, toward the micro-foundations of social life; that is, everyday actions and interactions, including their ‘soft’ dimensions, mental and cultural intangibles and imponderables. Another set of reasons has to do with the changing quality of social structures and social processes in the late-modern period. The ascendance of democracy means that the role of human agency is growing, and more depends on what common people think and do, how they feel toward others and toward their rulers and how they choose to participate and cooperate. The process of globalization means that more and more of the factors impinging on everyday life of people are non-transparent, unfamiliar and distant, demanding new type of attitudes. The expansion of risk means that people have to act more often than before in conditions of uncertainty. The traumas of rapid, comprehensive and often unexpected social change produce disorientation and a loss of existential security. If the ambition of sociology to become the reflexive awareness of society is to be realized, then the current interest in trust seems to be wholly warranted.