This article explains the causes of the Russia–Ukraine war starting in 2014 from the energy and energy markets perspective, based on resource dependency theory and the conceptual framework outlined by Jeffrey D. Colgan (2013). Our findings reveal that Russia is critically dependent on revenue from gas exports to Ukraine and the European Union, but also that Ukraine’s energy deposits and pipeline system have the potential to be a direct competitive threat to Russia’s energy exports. This paper argues that this was the underlying reason and main causal pathway leading to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine.

Erasmus was the first European intellectual to become famous, in the majority of European countries in his own lifetime. He thus illustrates the increasing importance of the international scholarly community or ‘republic of letters’ (respublica litteraria), a phrase which he helped to launch and which was common currency until the age of Voltaire. This article examines the ideal embodied in the phrase and suggests seven ways of testing the extent to which it was translated into practice (invitations to foreign scholars; the internationalization of libraries; correspondence; visits to famous scholars as part of the practice of travel; the album amicorum; the learned society; and the learned journal). A final section discusses the extent to which the republic may be said to have survived until our own day.

In recent decades, psychologists have become increasingly interested in our ability to speak. This paper sketches the present theoretical perspective on this most complex skill of homo sapiens. The generation of fluent speech is based on the interaction of various processing components. These mechanisms are highly specialized, dedicated to performing specific subroutines, such as retrieving appropriate words, generating morpho-syntactic structure, computing the phonological target shape of syllables, words, phrases and whole utterances, and creating and executing articulatory programmes. As in any complex skill, there is a self-monitoring mechanism that checks the output. These component processes are targets of increasingly sophisticated experimental research, of which this paper presents a few salient examples.

Robots are no longer confined to factories; they are progressively spreading to urban, social and assistive domains. In order to become handy co-workers and helpful assistants, they must be endowed with quite different abilities from their industrial ancestors. Research on service robots aims to make them intrinsically safe to people, easy to teach by non-experts, able to manipulate not only rigid but also deformable objects, and highly adaptable to non-predefined and dynamic environments. Robots worldwide will share object and environmental models, their acquired knowledge and experiences through global databases and, together with the internet of things, will strongly change the citizens’ way of life in so-called smart cities. This raises a number of social and ethical issues that are now being debated not only within the Robotics community but by society at large.

Sociology is currently undergoing an interesting theoretical and methodological turn. A number of recent and influential works of sociology deal with the seemingly trivial phenomena of everyday life. The standard mass surveys are being replaced by in-depth, interpretative, and qualitative procedures that focus on the visual surface of society. They do so by means of observation and its extension – photography. The author believes that this is not a new fashion but rather signals a true paradigmatic shift. For the author, it heralds the emergence of a ‘third’ sociology, after the ‘first sociology’ of social organisms and systems, and the ‘second sociology’ of behaviour and action. The new focus is on social existence manifested by social events of various scales. This sociology of social existence provides a new angle of vision, which promises to advance considerably our understanding of several perennial riddles of human society.

The world within which the EU and China have to deal with each other is changing. The unipolar moment is definitely fading and slowly giving way to an international system characterized by multilayered and culturally diversified polarity. This development has far-reaching consequences for the EU–China relationship; the more so since the EU and China have distinctive identities and define their value preferences differently. China is no longer the developing country it once was and is becoming more assertive by the day. Beijing is at the head of the world’s most successful economy and will weigh more and more heavily on global governance.1 Three decades of impressive economic growth have boosted the self-confidence of the Chinese leaders significantly. In Beijing, the notion that China should start taking on an attitude befitting a great power is gaining ground. China is taking up ever more space within various multilateral organizations and is setting up diplomatic activities throughout the globe. Moreover, Beijing has become more active in setting up its own multilateral channels to further its national interests and own norms. China no longer considers itself an outsider that should crawl back into its shell and steer clear of a global political system dominated by the West. All this puts into question the EU’s conditional policy towards China, which is based on the assumption that China can be socialized and persuaded to incorporate Europe’s post-modern values. The way ahead seems to be for Europe to opt for a more pragmatic approach, which takes stock of the changes in the underlying power and identity relations between the EU and China. The analysis of this paper will be developed at three levels. First, it examines the changes in the structure of international politics. To what kind of structure are we evolving and where do China and the EU fit in? Second, it takes a closer look at the respective identities of China and the EU and explicates the major differences between them. Finally, this study appraises the implications of the emerging multilayered and culturally diversified polarity for the further development of the EU–China relationship.

A trend of increasing victimization of women and children in situations of war and community violence has emerged in the 20th century. Children are also exposed to violence in their own families, as witnesses of parental violence, targets of physical abuse, and recipients of TV violence. As regards the direct physical effects of violence, children's injuries are no different from those of adults, while indirect effects comprise increases in, for instance, malnutrition. Psychological effects of danger include post-traumatic stress disorder and maladaptations, such as aggression, cognitive impairment, and truncated moral development. Different scenes of violence are interrelated. The cycle of violence lives its own life, but breaking up the cycle is not a hopeless task.

The dark matter problem is almost a century old. Since the 1930s evidence has been growing that our cosmos is dominated by a new form of non-baryonic matter that holds galaxies and clusters together and influences cosmic structures up to the largest observed scales. At the microscopic level, we still do not know the composition of this dark, or invisible, matter, which does not interact directly with light. The simplest assumption is that it is made of new particles that interact with gravity and, at most, weakly with known elementary particles. I will discuss searches for such new particles, both space- and Earth-bound, including those experiments placed in deep underground laboratories. While a dark matter particle has not yet been identified, even after decades of concerted efforts, new technological developments and experiments have reached sensitivities where a discovery might be imminent, albeit certainly not guaranteed.

Scientific literacy should not be taken to mean the knowledge of a lot of science, but rather the understanding of how science really works.

This paper addresses the general question of the role of emotions in risk management, with an application to the siting of a repository for spent nuclear fuel. Although it is true that such siting has been very difficult to carry out without meeting with strong local opposition, there are some exceptions in recent Swedish experience. This recent experience constitutes an occasion for reconsidering the received message from risk perception research since the 1970s. This research has purportedly demonstrated a very strong impact of emotional processes on risk attitudes, which in turn is supposed to imply that these attitudes are rigid and unchangeable. However, when this assertion is looked at more closely, it is found that a number of questionable assumptions and overly strong generalizations have been made. The central role played by the concept of ‘dread’ is particularly important. Dread, or a ‘gut reaction’, is by no means demonstrated in the traditional selection of hazard attributes, which contain such dimensions as concern for future generations or voluntariness. Such dimensions may have a relationship to emotional processes but they are not emotional per se and their emotional significance remains to be documented. The items that do measure emotional reactions directly, by asking about fear and anxiety, are found in data on nuclear waste repository siting to have only a weak influence on policy attitudes. The most important weight is instead carried by items measuring the ‘expected severity of consequences’. The argument is, in a concluding section, carried to the level of attitudes to technologies, which may or may not be related to perceived risk. It is found that an important role is played by substitutability of a technology. If people see no good substitute for a technology that has important benefits, they are ready to accept the risks. The current situation in Sweden with regard to nuclear power can be understood in this light, since no realistic alternatives are available.

Along with the rapid development and proliferation of autonomous robotic weapons, machines are beginning to replace people on battlefields. The use by the USA of Predators or Reapers and other unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places in the world clearly signals a distancing of soldiers from their targets. In this article I concentrate on fully autonomous weapons. The theses of the article are as follows: the use of autonomous weapons would be contrary to the basic and fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, such as the principles of distinction and proportionality, and thus illegal. As such, their use would threaten the wellbeing, life and health of civilians and civilian populations. Their use would undermine the whole concept of the rules of war. Still, there are scholars who are of the opinion that prohibiting the use of autonomous weapons would make no sense at all and that the development of such weapons is inevitable and will take place gradually. Their use would be an expression of the technological dimension of international security. As this article will attempt to demonstrate, the drawbacks of the use of autonomous weapons are of such magnitude that they exclude the legality of such devices.

The individual characteristics of leaders and voters have assumed great importance in modern political discourse. Pervasive media influence points to leaders' personality as an anchor around which political information is organized in drawing in and/or deterring the electorate's preferences. Voters' traits, values and perceptions of politicians are no less important than traditional socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age, educational level, occupation and income in explaining political preferences. Recent findings suggest that politics is becoming personalized, as political choices increasingly depend on voters' personality. More specifically, voters' distinctive pattern of habits, attitudes and values, serve as a compass that grants coherence to their own preferences and that helps them make sense of politicians' behaviour.

Addressing the ‘topographical turn’ in cultural theory which emphasizes spatial constellations and sites, the article discusses concepts of space both in Anglo-American Cultural Theory and in European Culture Studies in order to develop their differences. Within Cultural Studies the program to ‘spatialize’ historical narratives has created a whole language of symbolic topographical figures which function as a counter-discourse for minorities. To argue against the tendency of translating theories in order to transform them into ‘neutral tools’, independent of their historical origin, the article discusses various space-discourses in European cultural theories; it refers to studies from the current cultural reorientation of the humanities but also to those from the early 20th century to illuminate different relationships between philosophy, historiography and cultural techniques.

‘How did life start on Earth?’ and ‘Why were left-handed amino acids selected for the architecture of proteins?’ A new attempt to answer these questions of high public and interdisciplinary scientific interest will be provided by this review. It will describe most recent experimental data on how the basic and molecular building blocks of life, amino acids, formed in a prebiotic setting. Most amino acids are chiral, that is that they cannot be superimposed with their mirror image molecules (enantiomers). In processes triggering the origin of life on Earth, the equal occurrence, i.e. the parity between left-handed amino acids and their right-handed mirror images, was violated. In the case of amino acids, the balance was tipped to the left – as a result of which life's proteins today exclusively implement the left-handed form of amino acids, called l-amino acid enantiomers. Neither plants, nor animals, including humans, make use of d-amino acids for the molecular architecture of their proteins (enzymes). This review addresses the molecular asymmetry of amino acids in living organisms, namely the preference for left-handedness. What was the cause for the violation of molecular parity of amino acids in the emergence of life on Earth? All the fascinating models proposed by physicists, chemists, and biologists will be vividly presented including the scientific conflicts. Special emphasis will be given to amino acid enantiomers that were subjected to chiral photons. The interaction between racemic molecules and chiral photons was shown to produce an enantiomeric enrichment that will be discussed in the context of absolute asymmetric synthesis. The concluding paragraphs will describe the attempt to verify any of those models with the chirality-module of the Rosetta mission. This European space mission contains probe Philae that was launched on board the Rosetta spacecraft with the aim of landing on the icy surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and analysing whether chiral organic compounds are present that could have been brought to the Earth by comet impacts.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami had one of the highest magnitudes in the history of Europe. The source mechanism requires generation at a subduction zone. Intensity distribution and tsunami modelling excludes the Gorringe Bank as a source area and suggests generation by the incipient convergence of the Atlantic with the Southwest Iberia and Morocco margin rather than at the less active Gulf of Cadiz Accretionary Prism. The comparison with the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami supports this interpretation. A tsunami warning alert system is urgent for the Atlantic.

The history of Europe cannot be written without taking into account both the Islamic presence on the soil of Europe from the Arab invasion of Spain in 711 onwards, and the impact of that contact with Islam on the attitudes of the inhabitants of those countries not invaded by the Muslims. This paper seeks to challenge the view that the history of medieval Europe (and by extension more recent history, in areas under or close to Ottoman rule) can be written solely as the rise of the Christian west: the intermingling of Jews, Christians and Muslims on European soil proved very fertile. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Television claims to report reality but largely creates its own reality. There is very little autonomy, largely because the competition for ‘market share’ is so intense. The pressure to fill the space is strong; hence, it must be something for everyone. Everyone is looking over their shoulder to see what their rivals are saying; to know what to say, you need to know what everyone else is saying. This leads to homogenization and political conformity. Politics and economics lead to an internal censorship. ‘News’ is selective, favouring the extremes, blood, sex, crime, riots, not what ordinary people experience. Television calls for dramatization and the exaggeration of the importance of events. In debate, the fast, superficial thinker is favoured over the original and profound. Can you refuse to talk on television? There is a desire to be seen that is exploited.

Habitat dioramas are natural history scenarios which typically feature mounted zoological specimens arranged in a foreground that replicates their native surroundings in the wild. Ideally, the three-dimensional foreground merges imperceptibly into a painted background landscape, creating an illusion—if only for a moment—of atmospheric space and distance. More profoundly, some of the major controversies hidden in the diorama concept are: taxonomic versus ecologic understanding; art versus science; popular education versus scientific documentation; culturally biased perception versus ‘objectivity’; and ‘Omni-max’ versus diorama.

This paper aims to examine the critical success and failure factors for the new generation of ethnic (or migrant) entrepreneurs in high-tech and creative industries in Dutch cities. The present study investigates their entrepreneurial behaviour with a particular focus on their personal and business characteristics as well as their motivations and driving forces, which all determine their entrepreneurship and their business performance. An empirical application is presented, in which the results from an in-depth interview study on second-generation Moroccan entrepreneurs are discussed. The findings of our study show that, in general, these entrepreneurs are more open and are looking for new opportunities beyond the traditional markets by using modern break-out strategies. This research helps to map out key factors that influence their entrepreneurial behaviour and activity, business entry decisions, and creative business strategies. It also identifies conditions for success and other factors that impact on the performance of ethnic entrepreneurs in the Netherlands, within the broader context of entrepreneurship. These findings are informative for various stakeholders such as other ethnic entrepreneurs, policy makers and business investors in this dynamic and promising urban business environment.

Science and art have long recognized that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ (PEM) or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this article, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.