Dante’s attitude towards Jews and Muslims in the Divine Comedy has been a controversial issue in literary studies of the medieval period. This article outlines the most central questions in this regard and argues that the treatment of the issue has often been misleading due to exaggeration and overstatement. Dante has been seen, respectively, as a summarizer of medieval culture and mentalities, as a medieval intellectual who was more open for non-Christian influences than his fellow Christians, and as a highly prejudiced conservative. In considering the constituents of Dante’s worldview, the article that follows argues that Dante should rather be seen as a medieval Christian whose cultural horizon was limited, whose political theory of world government was narrowly focused on a specific problem within European Christendom, and whose vision of redemption, although complex and original in various respects, could not but embrace all human beings as either righteous or corrupted Christians.

This study aims to analyse the policies with respect to, and structuring of, science and technology in Turkey from a historical perspective, and to evaluate the restructuring currently going on, from the viewpoint of institutions on science and technology. Such restructuring has undergone many transformations throughout Turkish history, and has been influenced directly by both internal and external dynamics. From the examples of other countries, we learn that success in high technology production results from well-established and sound industrial and scientific infrastructures. It would be useful to set forth such a vision for Turkey as well.

This article discusses the validity for historians of the concept of a pax britannica (a reminiscence, of course, of the pax romana), which Britain would have imposed during the 19th century, when she was the only superpower. Admittedly, from 1815 to 1914, there was no general war, even though ‘small’ wars broke out in Europe and overseas. The superior economic and naval power of Britain obliged France to avoid open conflict; Russia was also constrained, but not without the Crimean war. On the other hand, the influence of Britain in Europe had its limits, and eventually the British panicked before the rise of a strong German navy and this was a significant factor in the origins of World War I. Thanks to peace in Europe, Britain could devote her energies to overseas expansion. Besides her Empire stricto sensu, which grew relentlessly, she had a vast ‘informal Empire’ where the ‘imperialism of free trade’ prevailed. Altogether, the notion of pax britannica is most legitimate within the ‘formal’ empire. To her subject peoples Britain brought law and order, honest and efficient government, some economic development and a fast demographic growth. Pax britannica was both myth and reality, but it evaporated as Britain lost her economic and naval ascendancy.

This article investigates the trend of smartphone-enabled screen tourism based on the findings from practice-based research carried out during the development and testing of the locative screen tourism experience ‘DETECt Aarhus’. This work shows how smart screen tourism can facilitate multilayered cultural encounters because it can provide a multifaceted perspective on locations and can motivate people to explore local culture. App-guided tours enable the embodied and emotional experiences of traditional screen tourism, but in a more flexible way that eases the crossing of thresholds between the material space and fictional places of crime stories. The testing of the DETECt Aarhus app’s pilot version further highlighted that popular crime narratives and smart tourism technology can address a broader group beyond fans of specific crime media. In addition, visitors with no previous connection to (local) crime stories can use apps to encounter the destination as a material space, fictional place and site of cultural production.

This article confronts two films about the request for a European passport by a Latin American citizen: Um Passaporte Húngaro (A Hungarian Passport, 2001) and El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace, 2003). Both films deal with memory of the Jewish-Latin American migration that took place within the context of the Holocaust, and both gear this problematic towards other, more contemporary, stories of displacement. It is argued that this multidirectional quality operates in two ways in relation to the concept of nationality: whereas one film puts it to work in order to critique and deconstruct the nation (centrifugal logic), the other uses it to opposite effect: to reaffirm and rebuild it (centripetal logic).

The number, scale and variety of threats to the safety of the contemporary world are forcing multilateral cooperation to tighten. The United Nations is the main forum of such cooperation and has a vast spectrum of powers. In addition the European Union tries to act in a similar way, although on a much smaller scale. Both organizations, then, seem to have much in common and appear to be mutual partners. Is this cooperation really going as well as one would expect? Do they treat each other as equal partners? This article tries to answer these questions and more.

This article presents a personal perspective on why it is interesting and important to test all kinds of fundamental laws and search for as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions using laboratory-based non-accelerator techniques. Such room-scale experiments are already spearheading discovery, and can be expected to become even more important as accelerators reach seemingly inevitable limits.

The European Plan S initiative intending to transform the field of academic publishing towards open access has been received with both enthusiasm and criticism. This article reflects on this case as an example of how policymaking in ‘the Europe of Knowledge’ – characterized by increasing complexity caused by problems of multi-level coordination, combined with multi-actor divergence of norms, ideas, and interests − affects and triggers university responses. The analysis of response to this initiative for reform of scientific publishing takes the concept of normative match and mismatch as its theoretical point of departure, and the article provides an overview of how Plan S has been implemented in Norwegian higher education, where the challenge for universities has been to find a balance between responding to political expectations and expectations from societal and academic stakeholders. Our findings suggest a normative mismatch related to the Plan S initiative. The article argues that the university level was left with the task of defending the academic freedom of the individual scholar, while also being delegated the responsibility of controlling the rising costs of publishing services. As a result, issues relating to academic publishing are currently of strategic interest to universities.

This article discusses the chryselephantine statue known as the Palaikastro Kouros, which was recovered in the excavations at Palaikastro in eastern Crete in the 1980s. The statue and the sanctuary building in which it had stood had been deliberately destroyed c. 1450 bc. It is probable that the motivation for the destruction was iconoclastic. This situates the fate of the Palaikastro Kouros within a broader context of iconoclasm in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean area.

Through comparative study, case and data analysis, this article summarizes the key points of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law, and analyses the expected practical significance. Meanwhile, this article also discusses the shortcomings of the new patent law after the fourth amendment, and puts forward some suggestions for further improvement and refinement. The purpose of the fourth amendment of Chinese Patent Law is mainly to make the Chinese patent system more in line with the current technological and economic development in China as well as international cooperative innovation. The core points of the fourth amendment include: (1) strengthening patent enforcement by adopting punitive damages to intentional patent infringement, and increasing the patent protection duration extension for new pharmaceuticals, etc. (2) Promoting patent implementation by adding ‘Open Licence’ rules and improving employees’ invention regulations; (3) Improving design patent protection by expending protection duration and adopting protection for partial designs. (4) Increasing the provisions about the grace period for patent filings of inventions related to public interests. The new Patent Law 2020 will gradually show its significant practical effects. At the same time, however, there are still some regulations that need to be further clarified and refined for ensuring better implementation of the new law.

What are the reasons for the rapid economic growth of regions and their later decline? Why does the development of a certain region create under-development in another region within a national or global sphere? A central paradigm for explaining such phenomena is core–periphery relations, and the case study presented in this paper is the port city of Thessaloniki and its regressive and peripheral status within the regional (Macedonia and the Southern Balkans), national (State of Greece), and international (the capitalist world- system) spheres during two main political periods: (i) the final decades of the Ottoman regime in Macedonia (1870–1912); (ii) the first quarter of a century in which Thessaloniki integrated with Greece (1912–1936).

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

Is a common approach to knowledge about man and nature possible? With Leonardo da Vinci as our starting point we will explore this question. Leonardo was much more than a painter; he was a sharp observer of man and nature. What he saw (structures) and what he did (using his miraculous left hand as syntax) was translated into insights and methods of constructions as recorded in his notebooks. His view was holistic, as witnessed by his study of the eye; from the anatomy of the eye he proceeded outwards to a theory of perspective, and inwards to an understanding how perception and the mind are grounded in the brain. In this we see similarities to current studies of language, mind and brain. It is possible to see a kind of proto-version of the art and science of mathematical modelling in Leonardo. This is a methodology of wide scope, extending far beyond physics and engineering. With a sufficiently broad understanding of the key concepts of structure, syntax and algorithms we have a method strong enough to allow for a common approach to knowledge of man and nature, to what there is and how we know.

As a theatrical phenomenon, cross-dressing performance has passed down through many centuries and manifested itself in different parts of the world. In the era of film and television, it was adapted to and has appeared on screen, as a popular means of entertaining the audience, and so plays an important role in influencing public opinions on certain social and cultural issues, such as the politics of gender and interculturalism. In light of theories of gender performativity and cultural agency, the intermediality of cross-dressing performance is approached in this article, mainly based on a careful analysis of Li Yugang’s solo shows on TV, the Chinese film Farewell My Concubine, and the American film M. Butterfly. By having the intermedial intersected with gender and interculturalism, this article argues that intermedial cross-dressing performance, on the one hand, has transformative power over gender politics, as it contributes to the gradual acceptance of differences in gender as well as other social categories. On the other hand, in some cross-dressing performances on screen, the subversive and the reiterative are blended together in cross-dressing performance, which undermines the legitimization of sexual orientations outside of the heterosexual norms. In addition, the entanglement of intermediality and interculturalism in cross-dressing performance in such a film as M. Butterfly contributes to critical reflections on cultural and categorical boundaries, which has profound implications for cross-cultural communications.

The amount and quality of clinical research are constantly increasing; however, the translation of results into daily practice is not keeping pace. University curricula provide minimal methodological background for understanding the latest scientific findings. In this project, we aimed to investigate the quality and amount of clinical research compared with basic research by analysing ten doctoral schools in Hungary. We found that 71% of PhD theses were submitted in basic sciences. The majority of physicians (53%) working in clinical institutions did their PhD projects in theoretical departments. Importantly, recent clinical methodologies such as pre-registered randomized clinical trials and meta-analysis are only rarely used (1% and 1%, respectively) compared with retrospective data analysis or cross-sectional studies (30% and 43%, respectively). Quality measures such as international registration, sample size calculation, and multicentricity of clinical sciences are generally absent from articles. Our results suggest that doctoral schools are seriously lagging behind in both teaching and scholarly activity in terms of recent clinical research methodology. Innovation and new educational platforms are essential to improve the proportion of science-oriented physicians.

International boundaries are man-made separation lines. All of today’s boundaries were created in the past, sometimes years, sometimes decades, even in some cases centuries ago. Thus, international boundaries reflect the historical moments in the life of a State, when its limits were made according to its force and ability at a given time. Understanding the process of boundary making and the location of boundaries can become a bridge of research and knowledge between three major scientific areas – history, geography and political science.

In the most recent two decades, the political campaigns conducted by the Social Democratic Party in Romania targeted specific groups of voters, with little intention to attract new voters. The reason behind their strategy is that they could secure a relatively constant support of roughly one third of the electorate and so win the popular vote in every election since 2000. However, the 2016 parliamentary elections marked a turning point in this approach and the party used almost exclusively online marketing to organize, streamline and channel its messages. This article seeks to understand why this change occurred although it did not seem to be necessary. This change is more surprising in a context in which the main political competitors were weak and disorganized. Our qualitative analysis aims to identify and explain the main elements that determined this change. It accounts for three main variables: experiential learning, the role of a new party leader and the use of new opportunities.

On 11 March 2006 the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his prison cell in The Hague, where the case against him at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was nearing its end. Many people voiced their disappointment about the fact that Milosevic would never receive his verdict. Although this disillusionment is understandable, Milosevic's death also saved the prosecutors and the Tribunal from delivering a judgment that would probably have contributed little to reconciliation in former Yugoslavia. This was particularly so in relation to that part of the indictment that concerned Milosevic's alleged responsibility for the massacre by the Bosnian Serb army of 7500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys following the fall of Srebrenica in July 2005.