Alcohol is an important part of European culture and Europe currently has the world’s heaviest alcohol consumption. There is some evidence for harmonisation of drinking habits across Europe, particularly in the total per capita consumption, types of beverage and frequency of teenage drunkenness. As part of this pattern, increasing consumption and deleterious health effects have been particularly noticeable in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and deaths from cirrhosis in these countries now exceed EU averages. This is a difficult area for Governments where the tension between regulation and personal choice is conspicuous and widely debated. In the UK, regulation has been weak but there are signs that the appetite for tackling the twin drivers of price and availability may be increasing.

It seems appropriate to distinguish at least two aspects of academic freedom: (a) freedom from external constraints in choosing topics, concepts, methods and sources, which in western democracies generally enjoys a certain level of protection by law; (b) freedom to act in the pursuit of goals and values, with academic staff being in control of the relevant means to do so, which is generally strictly related to the overall organisation of universities and the higher education system at large. Both these aspects have been understood as necessary conditions for producing and disseminating new knowledge, i.e. the two main functions of higher education institutions. It can be added that academic freedom has been considered as one of the elements defining the academic profession, at least after the Second World War. On the one hand, academic freedom is strictly connected with the idea that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake through research represents the main goal of the academic work. On the other hand, academic freedom and peer review are considered as necessary devices to ensure quality, i.e. quality is ensured by the self-steering capacities of academics or their professional autonomy. In the last few decades, several processes have had an impact on academic freedom: (a) the rise of higher education institutions as more autonomous corporate bodies, which has implied the strengthening of the role of administrative staff at the expense of the academic community, a trend that has been named ‘managerialism’; (b) the drive of governments away from more direct forms of control in favour of a system of distant steering, which has implied stronger accountability of higher education institutions and academics and the use of assessment devices; (c) the increasing demands to and pressures on academics and higher education by both the economy and society to support economic development, innovation, and social progress, a trend to which we refer to as growing expectations of relevance. The impact of the first two processes is quite clear and pertains mostly to relationships within higher education institutions and to the relationship between academics and the state. The impact of the last process is less clear and pertains to the relationships between academics and the external world, mostly the economy, but also society. Building on the results of the Changing Academic Profession survey, this article will address the issue of the growing pressures on academics to be ‘relevant’ to both society and the economy, and of the mechanisms through which the notion of relevance intrudes into the academic profession in selected European countries, especially evaluation, funding, and specific kinds of research activities.

For digital interactive distributed systems, the timing of their events and the causality between their events are key issues. In real-time applications of embedded software systems, timing properties are essential, such as the response times of reactions depending on the precise timing of the input events. In a highly abstract view, a digital system can be represented by a set of events annotated by their timing. Sets of timed events labeled by actions represent the observations about systems. An essential property that helps to understand distributed interactive systems and a way to reason about their event flow is causality. Causality addresses the questions under which conditions certain events must, may or must not happen. Causality addresses the logical dependencies between the events in systems. Strictly speaking, causality reflects the logical essence in the event and action flow of systems. Causality is closely related to time. In particular, we study in the following the relationship between causality and the timing of input and output events, as well as its relationship to the granularity of time. We deal, in particular, with the problem of time abstraction and the precise timing of events. We show how causality and time form the basis of inductive reasoning, in particular in the case of dependencies in communication cycles (‘feedback’) and how we can work with time in models of distributed systems with a flexible choice of local clocks and local timing.

The reason why I wavered a bit with this topic is that, after all, it has to do with Darwin, after a great Darwin year, as seen by a German scientist. Not that Darwin was very adept in German: Gregor Mendel’s ‘Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden’ (Experiments on Plant Hybrids) was said to have stayed uncut and probably unread on his shelf, which is why he never got it right with heredity in his life – only Gregory Bateson, Ronald A. Fisher, and JBS Haldane, together with Sewall Wright merged evolution with genetics. But Darwin taught us, nevertheless, in essence why the single human species shows such tremendous ethnic diversity, which impresses us above all through a diversity of languages – up to 7000 altogether – and among them, as a consequence, also German, my mother tongue, and English. It would thus have been a truly Darwinian message, if I had written this article in German. I would have called that the discommunication function of the many different languages in humans, which would have been a most significant message of cultural evolution, indeed. I finally decided to overcome the desire to demonstrate so bluntly what cultural evolution is all about, or rather to show that nowadays, with global cultural progress, ‘the world is flat’ indeed – even linguistically. The real sign of its ‘flatness’ is that English is used everywhere, even if Thomas L. Friedman may not have noticed this sign. But I will also come back to that later, when I hope to show how Darwinian principles connect both natural and cultural evolution, and how they first have been widely misunderstood as to their true meaning, and then have been terribly misused – although more so by culturalists, or some self-proclaimed ‘humanists’, rather than by biologists – or at least most of them. Let me, however, quickly add a remark on human languages. That languages even influence our brains and our thinking, that is: how we see the world, has first been remarked upon by Wilhelm von Humboldt and later, more extensively so, by Benjamin Whorf. It has recently been shown by neural imaging – for instance by Angela Friederici – that one’s native language, first as learned from one’s mother and from those around us when we are babies, later from one’s community of speakers, can deeply impinge on a baby’s brain development and stay imprinted in it throughout life, even if language is, of course, learned and not fully genetically preformed. This shows once more how deep the biological roots are that ground our cultures, according to truly Darwinian principles, even if these cultures are completely learned.

At the turn of the 20th century, intellectuals and artists in Belgium and the Netherlands were keen to define their respective national identities. One of the most striking ways of doing this was based on a paradox: in both Belgium and the Netherlands the idea came into being that their national distinctiveness actually lay in their being international. What set the Belgians, living in the heart of Europe, apart from the French or the Germans, so the thinking went, was precisely the fact that they were able to understand both the French and the Germans. And what made the Dutch different from the inhabitants of the major powers, it was emphasised, was the fact that they were attentive to the general interest, and not just their own national interest. This article focuses on the history of this remarkable ‘international patriotism’.

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more frequent because many contemporary issues can only be successfully addressed by integrating different perspectives. One general feature of the various scientific fields is peer review, i.e. the assessment and improvement of submissions to journals, conferences and workshops. Whilst there exist guidelines for the peer review of mono-disciplinary articles and empirical studies of how interdisciplinary research proposals are assessed, there is still a need for a summary of issues specific to the peer review of interdisciplinary research papers. This article provides an overview of relevant questions such as whether reviewers are competent to assess interdisciplinary papers even if unfamiliar with all the involved fields. We discuss the assessment of the interdisciplinarity, soundness, novelty, influence and general interest of interdisciplinary manuscripts. Further issues include the appropriateness of interdisciplinary submissions for journals, keeping the vocabulary of new interdisciplinary fields understandable to the reader and balancing the references across various fields. Constructive interdisciplinary reviewers are likely to be just as open-minded as interdisciplinary scientists and should be rewarded more than they currently are.

The functions and territories of academies and universities have never been totally independent from the outside world, nor can we revert to earlier stages of the history of these institutions. Therefore, we have to understand and judge them according to their components in order to find the proper responses to various challenges, and we have to make continuous efforts to be as independent and autonomous as possible in the context of cooperation and the building of collective wisdom. The keywords of this article are personal liberty, political freedom, concentration versus separation of powers, efficiency, meritocracy, common good, and political community.

Excessive alcohol consumption is linked to a variety of major health problems, including the severe inflammation of the pancreas, which may lead to premature death of the individual.1 Hospital admissions in the United Kingdom due to acute pancreatitis were recently shown to have doubled over a 30 year period,2 in parallel with an estimated doubling of alcohol consumption in this country, and the incidence of the disease is dramatically increasing. Within the European Union, acute pancreatitis may attain an incidence of up to 1 per 1000 individuals per year. In accord with trends in drinking lifestyle in the UK, admissions of younger people and women have correspondingly escalated over the last few decades, and alcohol-related problems have placed a heavy financial burden on the healthcare system. So-called ‘binge drinking’, a prevalent feature of the current ‘drinking culture’, is commonly linked to patients presenting at clinic with episodes of acute pancreatitis, often manifested initially as excruciating abdominal pain and vomiting. Of these individuals, approximately 20% will develop a more extensive form of the disease with significant pancreatic necrosis triggering a systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) that may cause multiple organ failure; up to a third of these patients will die. The extent of necrotic cell death in these patients is a major determinant of the severity of acute pancreatitis and disease outcome.3 However, the precise way in which alcohol triggers the cellular damage that forms the basis of this severe and debilitating disease has remained elusive.

This article outlines the lecture presented by Robert Zorec at the Academia Europea meeting in Liverpool on 19 September 2008, four decades after the Sherrington Lecture of Bernard Katz who, together with his colleagues, developed a number of paradigms addressing vesicles in chemical synapses. Vesicles are subcellular organelles that evolved in eukaryotic cells 1000 to 2000 million years ago. They store signalling molecules such as chemical messengers, which are essential for the function of neurons and endocrine cells in supporting the communication between tissues and organs in the human body. Upon a stimulus, the vesicle-stored signalling molecules (neurotransmitters or hormones) are released from cells. This event involves exocytosis, a fundamental biological process, consisting of the merger of the vesicle membrane with the plasma membrane. The two fusing membranes lead to the formation of an aqueous channel – the fusion pore – through which signalling molecules exit into the extracellular space or blood stream. The work of Bernard Katz and colleagues considered that vesicle cargo discharge initially requires the delivery of vesicles to the plasma membrane, where vesicles dock and get primed for fusion with the plasma membrane, and that stimulation initiates the formation of the transient fusion pore through which cargo molecules leave the vesicle lumen in an all-or-none-fashion. However, recent studies indicate that this may not be so simple. Here we highlight the novel findings which indicate that fusion pores are subject to regulations, which affect the release competence of a single vesicle. At least in pituitary lactotrophs, which are the subject of research in our laboratories, single vesicle release of peptide signalling molecules involves modulation of fusion pore diameter and fusion pore kinetics.

As part of their conflict handling repertoire, political systems possess a range of mechanisms to suppress or avoid conflicts. A closer look across Europe would yield a broad tapestry of mechanisms for handling the thorny issue of European integration, with most governments and political systems relying on some version of conflict avoidance. In this picture, one should expect that a country such as Norway, which has rejected EU membership twice, has an active and vocal anti-membership organization, and where polls consistently show a ‘no’ majority, would stand out as the exception, in the sense that there would be no need for the Norwegian political system to take any measures to suppress the issue. But reality is more complex. Since the early 1990s, when Norway entered into the EEA agreement with the EU, Norway’s relationship to the EU has changed dramatically. Norway’s current arrangement with the EU is perhaps best labelled as ‘tight incorporation without formal membership’. This situation is managed through arrangements not to raise the EU membership issue. In this article, I rely on Stephen Holmes’s notion of ‘gag rules’, as a particular means of issue avoidance. This mechanism speaks of how actors seek to remove debate on a controversial issue that does not go away: it is a matter of stymieing debate on the issue but not stopping to deal with it. If anything, the lid on debate on EU membership helps the political system to keep alive an active process of Norwegian adaptation to the EU, with serious implications for Norwegian democracy.

May 9, 2010, marks the 60th anniversary of what is arguably the boldest and ostensibly the most successful experiment in the history of international politics. On that date, in 1950, the Schuman Declaration1 was issued, seeking to release Europe from its centuries of fratricidal war, those conflagrations having just previously reached near suicidal proportions. The process of European integration – culminating in today’s European Union – was launched by six states at the heart of the continent, for the purposes of making war ‘not only unthinkable, but materially impossible.’ There is today little empirical question of Europe’s success. War between former bitter enemies has never been even remotely near the horizon during the period that has now become known as ‘The Long Peace,’ and, looking forward, such militarized conflict remains all but inconceivable. But was it the process of European integration that produced this achievement? And if so, is the model exportable to other regions? This essay catalogues the factors that account for Europe’s success in ending the scourge of war on a continent where it had been a commonly employed extension of politics for centuries. I conclude that the integration process represents an important contribution, but is only one of a plethora of causal factors that massively over-determined Europe’s long peace of our time, and that the European experiment is mostly non-exportable to other parts of the world.

Strong evidence in the field of neuroscience now makes it possible to claim, with minimal reservation, that E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary imagination was enriched by synaesthesia. E. T. A. Hoffmann is recognised as a remarkable polymath. A writer of fiction, bibliophile, composer and music critic, he not only understood Romantic sensibility but also involved himself in contemporary scientific debates on the nature of sound and perception, and was familiar with the acoustic theories of Ritter and Schubert’s work on magnetism and electrical energy. Hoffmann’s distinctive creativity was formed and informed by his diverse abilities and interests, and by his auditory sensibility and kinaesthetic appreciation of music. We postulate that the multi-sensory nature of Hoffmann’s work is evidence of creative synaesthesia, a phenomenon that occurs when a neurophysiological sensation perceived in the brain stimulates a different sense or senses and, as a result, produces a creative outcome. Taking as our example his intensely musical story Ritter Gluck, published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of February 1809, we examine Hoffmann’s complex and idiosyncratic use of metaphor and structure in the scientific context of his own time and continent, and in the context of 21st century scientific understandings of brain science.

We are a sensorium commune, sensuous beings who perceive through many diverse senses at once.1

The study deals with the academic profession in China. Its characteristics and relationship with changing social institutions are explored by a historical approach and from an institutional perspective, which includes two elements of government and organization. The major findings of this study are summarized below. First, in accordance with China’s legal framework, public and private higher education institutions are categorized as different legal entities, a difference that leads to favourable conditions for the academic profession in the public sector and to less favourable conditions in the private sector, and which also obstructs personnel flow and competition between the two sectors. Second, the personnel system has changed significantly since 1978, when it was reformed and the policies became more open. This change is largely led by the central government. As regards faculty hiring and promotion, qualification and performance are emphasized over seniority. As regards remuneration and benefits, the egalitarian approach has gradually been replaced by income gains based on performance. Finally, evidence shows that China’s higher education institutions has evolved from so-called danwei governed under a planned system to organizations ruled by the market system, which has caused the academic profession to evolve from a danwei profession into a more organizational one.

Traditionally, academics like to think that they further society by furthering their academic disciplines. The managerial university focuses on rationalization and efficiency, and believes in market mechanisms. These different viewpoints lie at the root of many conflicts. Moreover, one cannot see these issues in isolation. The logic of the managerial university reflects a shift from knowledge communities to knowledge enterprises. This conflicts with the logic of the academic profession, valuing academic autonomy and academic freedom. In the 2007 Changing Academic Profession survey, Japanese academics regarded the threats of the looming bureaucracy as almost as dangerous as did the academics surveyed in 1992 in the context of the Carnegie international comparative study on the academic profession, which was carried out in Europe and the US. This report intends to analyse the results of the CAP survey in order to compare the similarities and differences of academic staff’s reactions to the managerial university from an international perspective. More specifically, the focus will be on the following topics: (1) the role of knowledge and academic vision; (2) decision making; (3) the role of institutional missions and profiles; (4) the impact of incentives and sanctions; (5) supervisory mechanisms; and (6) cooperation.

We compare G7 life expectancies with the existential conditions from 1870 to date, using the real annual outputs of goods and services per capita as a measure of existential conditions. Wars destroy analytic relations, but life insurers eliminate catastrophic losses, and the outputs have an envelope representing the undisturbed existential condition. Both evolutions are S-functions with the same growth parameter of 62 years. Its length bridging three generations and its constancy over two orders of magnitude in output implies biologic pace control. For the first time it is seen that the mean life expectancy precedes the existential condition by a constant 59 years and approaches asymptotically an age of 118. This precedence and the ratio of 2 follow quantitatively from life’s integration over the existential condition. On the conditions of stable environment and openness to new knowledge, the industrial evolution will continue as a stable predictable process, immune to world wars and financial breakdowns.

This article addresses the critical issue of how constitutional designing of the EU is related to the expression of collective identities. A European collective identity is perceived in terms of the discursive representation of the underlying demos of a European democracy. Against the common view that holds the self-identified political community as prior and independent of constitutional designing, it is claimed that democracy rather operates through the identification of popular subjectness. The demos is signified and recognised as distinct and internally coherent through democratic practice. In the empirical part, it is tested out to what extent public debates on EU-constitution-making were linked to the identification of the popular subject of democracy. By drawing on a comparative media survey of constitutional debates from 2002–2007, the article distinguishes different markers of collective identities (national, European or multiple) that were used for representing and signifying democratic subjects in the EU.

What happened 20 years ago in the region formerly ruled by a communist regime was a velvet revolution. And even if it was a revolution without bloodshed, it is a legitimate question to ask what was realized of the revolutionary motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité? Liberty is a bundle of rights, composed of at least three sets: (1) political rights; (2) rights of free entrepreneurship, free entry to the market; and (3) freedom of choice between alternative goods and services. There is great progress in achieving all three categories of liberty. As for egalitarian values, inequality rapidly increased, causing aversion against the new order in a large fraction of society. Fraternité, in other words solidarity, is a widely accepted value, but there are great difficulties in its implementation. Post-socialist countries inherited a premature welfare state. The majority of people would prefer universal social entitlements, while the necessary material resources are not sufficient for these ambitious goals. This paper concludes with a discussion of various policy options for easing the contradictions between conflicting and inconsistent objectives.