This paper deals with the residences of public authority across Europe from the emergence of the state system to the present. It is concerned with the addresses, the buildings, their surroundings and the symbolic significance from the point of view of builders and the public. The building styles have been heavily influenced by the examples of imperial and papal Rome, and a dominant model of a European capital city building has evolved. There are also some systematic differences, particularly for those countries with a dramatic history of constitutional change and for those with a decentralized process of state-building in the early stages of the process. In the second half of the 19th century, and probably again currently, the residences of public authority should be read in conjunction with the positioning of a series of civic institutions. The display of state authority has been increasingly accompanied by the representation of national identity. More recently, however, a touch of cosmopolitanism has been added in many capitals. The reading of these capitals is therefore now more ambiguous. This will probably intensify under the impact of the emerging European multilevel governance system. At the same time, this governance system has become increasingly based in Brussels. For this city to symbolically represent Europe is a very difficult ambition in the context of its multiple capital roles. However, Brussels has a long history of dealing successfully with such urban challenges in spite of major conflicts and drawbacks.

We will illustrate the universality of strongly coupled plasmas by discussing two new forms of these plasmas, which have only recently become possible to create and observe in the laboratory. They exhibit a wealth of intriguing complex behavior, which can be studied experimentally, in many cases for the first time. Plasmas, gases of charged particles, are universal in the sense that certain properties of complex behavior only depend on ratios of characteristic parameters of the plasma, not on the parameters themselves. Therefore, it is of fundamental and far-reaching consequence, to be able to create and observe a strongly coupled plasma since its behavior is paradigmatic for an entire class of plasmas.

Urban history, at least in Germany, has mainly concentrated on the Medieval and Reformation cities on the one hand and Industrial and Contemporary cities on the other. However, recent debates among Early Modernists have produced the view that ‘confessionalization’, that is the formation of three or four modern church systems based on specific confessions of faith, was one of the most influential factors in producing the fundamental changes that occurred between 1550 and 1650 in Europe. This had a huge effect on the cities of Europe and their inhabitants. This paper compares Catholic and Protestant cities in Europe around 1600 with regard to their specific architecture and their religious and civic rituals. Rites and other religious functions or institutions have always been an important part of urban life. Lewis Mumford refers to religious funeral rites in his magisterial analysis of urban life in a universal perspective: ‘The city of the dead antedates the city of the living. In one sense, indeed the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city.’ In Europe, the relationship between the Church and the towns or cities was especially close and, in a sense, fundamental because of the medieval history of the European towns and the structure and profile of pre-modern European societies in general. We start with a brief overview of these preconditions for urban life during Europe's confessional period, and then go on to take a closer look at the confessional city itself.

The analysis of the moral questions involved in the exercise of power by Machiavelli never seems to lose its topicality. It remains as immediate and penetrating as when it was first conceived.

Yeltsin’s oligarchy1 was 15, or even 20 or even 50, very rich people who featured all the time in the mass media. They were very ambitious. They were prepared to go openly i1nto the government or Duma, or to finance a political party. They were well known because they were popular. However, it would be difficult to argue that they controlled any part of the real economy.

Cultures may be viewed as systems of elements constituted through the selection, interpretation and internalization of traditions by individuals and groups. Group identities may be viewed as cores of living tradition systems based on a limited number of key symbols and tales of identity. The cultural identities of Finno-Ugrian minorities in present-day Russia are at risk and uncertainty prevails concerning the strategies to be adopted in their defence. What are the cultural resources for ethnic survival and what principles may be discerned in a basic strategy that should be flexible enough to be modified according to thousands of different minority situations?

The purpose of this paper is to revise essentialist conceptions of the European Union citizenship and European identity, and make a case for a ‘politics of affinity’. This politics is founded on flexible notion of Union citizenship that accommodates multiple identities. The ‘politics of affinity’ avoids homogenizing assumptions and unitary conceptions of European, national, regional and other identities. It promotes diversity, otherness and fluid character of the postmodern European citizenship. It also advocates a more fluid idea of boundaries. The politics of affinity grounds European politics and citizenship discourse on affinity (not identity). The following lines will reflect on the institutional mechanisms, reforms and policies needed for the implementation of the politics of affinity. This paper will focus on the Treaty of Lisbon, the 2004/38 Citizenship Directive, the 2003 Directive on Long-term Residence Third Country Nationals and some ECJ's rulings in the new millennium.

Primary education for all seems on the way to being achieved throughout the world within a couple of decades, despite the deep inequalities and lack of resources that remain. Science education at an elementary level, during the first years of school, should now be considered as essential to the cultural, civic, ethical, economic and technical development of humans and societies, in a context of globalization, as the triad ‘reading–writing–arithmetic’ has been during the two last centuries. Yet current education practice – which often characterizes science lessons in developed countries as well as in developing ones, when they exist at all – is quite unsatisfactory, as it is more concerned with transferring knowledge of facts than with scientific literacy, and misses the goal of capacity building. New developments in the last decade, based on inquiry pedagogy and often proposed or led by science Academies, have demonstrated another way to communicate science, and to involve and train teachers. In France, the United States and Sweden, but also in China, Brazil and Egypt, the results of this new approach have led to great hopes for transformation, fully supported by science academies. In Europe, a recently implemented EU programme aims at similar goals, in the spirit of the Lisbon objectives toward a society of knowledge.

From the ninth to the 13th century, numerous works on pharmacology were written in Arabic in Eastern as well as in Western parts of the Islamic world. Starting from Galen and Dioscorides, the Islamic authors greatly improved on the Greek heritage. Among the theories they developed, two major trends stand out. The first trend emphasized medicinal degrees of primary qualities, and thus could lead to the promotion of mathematical rules. The second trend, on the contrary, focused on ‘the whole form’ of the substances, and opened the way to an experimental approach. Both these trends will continue in European pharmacology up to the Modern period.

Web services that are free of charge to users typically offer access to online information based on some form of economic interest of the web service itself. Advertisers who put the information on the web will make a payment to the search services based on the clicks that their advertisements receive. Thus, end users cannot know that the results they obtain from web search engines are exhaustive, or that they actually respond to their needs. To fill the gap between user needs and the information presented to them on the web, Intelligent Search Assistants have been proposed to act at the interface between users and search engines to present data to users in a manner that reflects their actual needs or their observed or stated preferences. This paper presents an Intelligent Internet Search Assistant based on the Random Neural Network that tracks the user’s preferences and makes a selection on the output of one or more search engines using the preferences that it has learned. We also introduce a ‘relevance metric’ to compare the performance of our Intelligent Internet Search Assistant against a few search engines, showing that it provides better performance.

From the Renaissance, dance and sport formed the basis of ‘polite’ and ethical behaviour. Both offered a frame within which social norms could be taught and enacted. Scholarship has often concentrated either on the history and aesthetics of dance or on those of gymnastics but neglected the proximity of both forms to each other. This paper focuses on one particular narrative: the intertwining of dance and gymnastics as utopian projects in the arousal of nationalism and creation of a new ‘German’ body. From Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who sketched the first national and patriotic movement system in Die deutsche Turnkunst 1816, to dance master Franz Anton Roller, gymnastics teacher Adolf Spiess, and dance gurus Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, it will demonstrate how the distinction between dance and gymnastics was constantly re-negotiated; and it argues that twentieth-century Modern Dance developed out of nineteenth-century Turnen and gymnastics. Dance intended to revolutionise German society physically and aesthetically and incorporated spatial concepts and movement sequences that gymnastics systems had already explored. Through their conceptions of motion in time and space, dance and gymnastics created a modern and revolutionary physical practice for the German nation.

Two men, as different in personality as it is possible to be, Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, each played a part in forming Pergamon Press, one of today's leading scientific publishers. This article outlines the tale.

The creation, roles, and experience of meaningful places in contemporary urban environments can be effectively informed through understandings of pertinent aspects of sacred architecture. To do so, this paper will discuss the mediating roles traditionally performed by sacred architecture and, in particular, its traditional role as an in-between place believed by its creators to establish connections to the understandings they sought or the gods they worshipped. Enduring themes of sacred places will be presented in the context of their communicative capacity and ritual uses, as a means to offer interpretations appropriate to today. The case study of the recently completed Oakland (CA) Cathedral will serve to illustrate contemporary positions and iterations. The conclusion suggests that the sacred place was (and still is), an intermediate zone created in the belief that it had the ability to engage, elucidate and transform, and that a re-introduction and repositioning of the mediating roles performed by the built environment can inform the creation of engaging and meaningful places today.

Although inquiry in philosophy and some social sciences has attended closely to the question of how investigators use language to describe and explain phenomena of interest, less attention has been devoted to questions of language use in psychological science. This essay explores language use in a major subfield of psychology, the psychology of personality. We identify three descriptive and explanatory languages in the field and critique them from the perspective of scholarship outside of psychology that has explored language use. We conclude with a call for greater exchange between investigators who embrace discursive accounts of persons and social action, and those who posit social-cognitive accounts of the knowledge that individuals use when they create discourse in their efforts to understand the world and to direct their experiences and actions.

Return migration has been one of the rather neglected aspects of migration until recently, although a considerable number of international migrants as well as inter-regional migrants return to their place of origin. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 1990s, the interest for issues related to return migration has grown considerably. In the context of Turkish return migration there still is a lack of information about the motives for returning, the new social status, the levels of satisfaction and reintegration as well as the employment and income of emigrants who have returned home. This paper aims at shedding light on this neglected aspect of Turkish migration in the context of Europe as well as on the history of Turkey as a country of immigration.

As governments grapple with increased risks associated with more frequent and impactful disasters, climate change, social inequity, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, questions about resilience take on greater urgency. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine strive for science to be beneficial to society. In 2012, the National Academies released a report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, that provided recommendations around critical issues of resilience and strategic steps the United States could take towards building disaster resilience. A new program, the Resilient America Program, was created as an outgrowth of that report. Its core mission is to partner with communities across the nation to help decision-makers identify key priorities for their community; tie those priorities to relevant risks; and identify actions that build resilience to those risks. The Resilient America Program is a novel program of the National Academies; it employs a hands-on approach to bring science into decision-making by working directly with decision-makers to test approaches for communicating and managing risk, measuring resilience, building community partnerships, and sharing relevant resilience information.

The ocean carbon cycle plays a twofold role in the context of climate change: (1) through carbon dioxide gas exchange with the atmosphere and carbon cycle climate feedbacks, the ocean regulates the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and hence has a strong influence on the heat budget of the Earth; (2) the paleo-climatic marine sediment core record is largely based on biogenic matter fluxes from the ocean surface to the sea floor, which are part of the marine carbon cycle. The ocean is important for global carbon cycling, primarily due to three factors: (1) the ocean is a huge carbon reservoir with a relatively short turnover time; (2) carbon dioxide in sea water is effectively dissociated inorganically into other substances; (3) marine plankton is keeping the surface ocean carbon dioxide concentration at a lower level than would a lifeless ocean. On intermediate to long time scales, the ocean provides the most important sink for anthropogenic carbon dioxide. The marine uptake kinetics for carbon dioxide work on a longer time scale than current and projected emissions by humans.

Expected utility theory tells us how we should make decisions under uncertainty: we should choose the option that leads to the greatest expectation of utility. This may, however, not be the option that is likely to produce the best result – that may be the wrong choice if it also creates a small chance of a great disaster. A small chance of disaster may be the most important consideration in decision making. Climate change creates a small chance of disaster, and some authors believe this to be the most important consideration in deciding our response to climate change. To know whether they are right, we need to make a moral judgement about just how bad the disaster would be.