Brussels blog round up for 17– 23 November: Budget troubles, France is downgraded, and are European young farmers facing extinction?

Chris Gilson and Stuart A Brown take a look at the week in Brussels blogging

Parma Eldalamberon XXII (2015), by J.R.R. Tolkien

Book review, by Andrew Higgins, of Parma Eldalamberon XXII (2015), by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smit

Book review: enterprising care? Unpaid voluntary action in the 21st century by Irene Hardhill and Susan Baines Posted on April 22, 2012 by Blog Admin

Many voluntary organisations now face having to take up the provision of some public services as government funding shrinks, and are also under considerable pressure to become more enterprising. Chris Gilson reviews Enterprising Care? which includes case study descriptions, discussions of academic debates about volunteering, work and care as well as research practice

Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson: “Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now”

Following this week’s the launch of EUROPP – an academic blog investigating matters of European Politics and Policy –Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson (also the creators of this blog!) discuss social scientists’ obligation to spread their research to the wider world and how blogging can help academics break out of restrictive publishing loops

Foreword: Revisiting Gilson and Kraakman’s Efficiency Story

Gilson and Kraakman\u27s ‘Mechanisms of Market Efficiency’ is part of the canon of modem corporate law scholarship, one of a handful of articles that has profoundly influenced the way we think about the field. It is also enigmatic, warranting a fresh look by those who think they know what it says from some long-ago reading or second-hand references by other authors

5 minutes with Salam Kawakibi on the Syrian crisis: “while we can see many political declarations, we cannot see any real action”

The crisis in Syria continues despite the efforts of Europe and the wider international community. In an interview with EUROPP editors Chris Gilson and Julian Kirchherr, as part of our coverage of the European neighbourhood, Salam Kawakibi of the Arab Reform Initiative discusses the roots of the conflict in Syria, its regional implications and the role that Europe might now be able to play

Five minutes with Noam Chomsky – “Europe is pretty much following behind US policy, no matter what that policy is”

Last week the General Assembly of the United Nations voted in favour of recognising Palestine as a non-member observer state. The EU was unable to reach a common position on the issue, with some states voting in favour and others, including Germany and the United Kingdom, abstaining. EUROPP editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson asked Noam Chomsky for his views on the vote and Europe’s wider response to the Israel-Palestine crisis

What about the Lib Dems?

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg claims that there have been “no deals and understandings” with either Labour or the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament, despite the media’s obsession with his (potential) role of kingmaker

Tunable critical current for a vortex pinned by a magnetic dipole

\\A simple model for a superconductor with tunable critical current is studied theoretically. The model consists of a thin superconducting film with one vortex interacting with one magnetic dipole, whose magnetic moment is free to rotate, in the presence of a magnetic field applied parallel to the film surfaces. The pinning potential for the vortex is calculated exactly in the London limit. It is found that, due to the dipole freedom to rotate, the dependence of the pinning potential on the applied field is non-trivial, and allows both the spatial dependence and strength of the pinning potential to be changed by the field. As a consequence, the critical current can be tuned by the applied field. The critical current is obtained numerically as a function of the applied field. Order of magnitude changes in the critical current resulting from changes in the direction and magnitude of the applied field are reported, with discontinuous changes taking place in some cases. Possible application to vortices in low-$T_c$ superconducting films pinned by arrays of magnetic dots are briefly considered. \\Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. To be published in Europhysics Letter