Mental Illness and Intellectual Disability

[Excerpt] Both, people with intellectual disability and people with mental illness, suffer from prejudices, negative attitudes, degrading treatment, abuse and discrimination in society. They are often discriminated against by employers, social and health services, or housing societies and in the access to goods or to financial services. They experience painful emotions, being out of control, or loosing all they have

The European Union Against Social Exclusion

[Excerpt] Social inclusion means that people who are poor or have other problems take part in the life of society. Social inclusion is the opposite of social exclusion

Discrimination Hurts Deep Down Inside! : Fighting Discrimination in Europe

[Excerpt] Everybody has the right to be protected from discriminatio

Achieving Quality: Consumer Involvement in Quality Evaluation of Services

[Excerpt] The aim of this paper is to raise awareness of the fact that changes in the approach towards the “clients” or “consumers” of services for people with intellectual disability do have an important impact on the way the quality evaluation systems of these services should be designed and organised

The need for ‘Diamond Engagement’ around open access to high quality research output

This paper advocates for a co-ordinated cultural shift in their engagement with access to resources in order to make peer-reviewed articles available to a wider audience. This Paper addresses two audiences: scientists, especially those who have been traditionally more resistant to the OA approach, and policy makers. The Scientific Committee is well aware of the difficulties that some research communities face in engaging with the OA approach and would like to offer a way forward to address the current status quo. Social scientists in particular have been struggling with the discussion on OA, given the length of time that the current quality standards and good practice for publication took to set up. The community of researchers perceives that these standards are now guarded by the peer-reviewed ranked journals which do not offer OA for either articles or books, a situation that is certain to persist for some time.   The other important aspect is that payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) to journals for OA publication is often unaffordable given the limited resources available to the social sciences disciplines. In this context, this paper illustrates how the deposition of articles in public repositories can be beneficial to the research community. At the same time, this Paper encourages policy makers to better invest in the harmonisation of research information metadata standards across Europe using existing public infrastructures, and to ensure good quality of records, interoperability and discoverability. It also links the discussion of OA with an issue that is crucial in both research and policy agendas: demonstration of the impact of publicly-funded research

Mott physics and spin fluctuations: a unified framework

We present a formalism for strongly correlated electrons systems which consists in a local approximation of the dynamical three-leg interaction vertex. This vertex is self-consistently computed with a quantum impurity model with dynamical interactions in the charge and spin channels, similar to dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) approaches. The electronic self-energy and the polarization are both frequency and momentum dependent. The method interpolates between the spin-fluctuation or GW approximations at weak coupling and the atomic limit at strong coupling. We apply the formalism to the Hubbard model on a two-dimensional square lattice and show that as interactions are increased towards the Mott insulating state, the local vertex acquires a strong frequency dependence, driving the system to a Mott transition, while at low enough temperatures the momentum-dependence of the self-energy is enhanced due to large spin fluctuations. Upon doping, we find a Fermi arc in the one-particle spectral function, which is one signature of the pseudo-gap state.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Europe

Since the be ginning of the 1990s, organic farm ing has rapidly developed in almost all European countries. Growth has, however, slowed down recently. According to the Swiss Research Institute of Or ganic Agriculture FiBL, by the 31.12.2002 in the 15 countries of the European Union (EU), around 4.8 million hectares were man aged organically by al most 140,000 farms. This constituted 3.5 percent of the agricultural area and 2 percent of the farms in the EU. According to the SOEL-statistics in the whole of Europe cur rently 5.6 mil lion hect ares are managed or gani cally by ap prox imately 175,000 farmers. Compared to the previous year, this is an increase of 9 percent in the organic land area in the EU, mainly due to a strong growth in France, Spain and the UK. The number of farms went down, however, mainly due to a decrease in organic farms in Italy. There are also sub stantial differ ences between indi vid ual countries re gard ing the importance of organic farm ing. More than 11 percent of ag ricultural land is organic in Austria, and 10 percent in Switzerland. Some countries have yet to reach one percent. The coun try with the highest number of farms and the greatest number of hectares is Italy. One quarter of the European Union’s organic land and more than one third of its organic farms are located here. A complete overview of the statistical development of the organic sec tor since the 1990s is available at the homepage of the Or ganic Cen tre Wales at www.organic.aber.ac.uk/stats.shtml

Exact overlaps in the Kondo problem

It is well known that the ground states of a Fermi liquid with and without a single Kondo impurity have an overlap which decays as a power law of the system size, expressing the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe. Ground states with two different values of the Kondo couplings have, however, a finite overlap in the thermodynamic limit. This overlap, which plays an important role in quantum quenches for impurity systems, is a universal function of the ratio of the corresponding Kondo temperatures, which is not accessible using perturbation theory nor the Bethe ansatz. Using a strategy based on the integrable structure of the corresponding quantum field theory, we propose an exact formula for this overlap, which we check against extensive density matrix renormalization group calculations.Comment: 4.5+7 pages. 3 figure

Welcome to Europe

Bruegel Fellow Jakob von Weizsäcker argues that Europe needs more high-skilled migration and the debate on low-skilled migration should not be an excuse to slow this process down. Rather, the EU should use a couple of tools to encourage high-skilled migration: a skill-based points system with a â??Blue Card" granting access to its entire labour market and a â??Blue Diploma" for students graduating with a Masters degree (or equivalent) from selected universities to allow them access to the entire EU labour market. In order to manage migration from the new member states he recommends an â??External Minimum Wage".

Whither growth in central and eastern Europe? Policy lessons for an integrated Europe

In this Blueprint, Bruegel Resident Fellows Zsolt Darvas, Jean Pisani-Ferry, André Sapir and their co-authors Torbjörn Becker, Daniel Daianu, Vladimir Gligorov, Michael A Landesmann, Pavle Petrovic, Dariusz K. Rosati and Beatrice Weder di Mauro argue that in view of the depth of integration in Europe, the development model of the central, eastern and south-eastern Europe (CESEE) region, despite its shortcomings, should be preserved. But it should be reformed, with major implications for policymaking both at national and EU levels. If so, what are the required changes? Bruegel and The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) cooperated to form this expert group of economists from various European countries to research these issues.