The public presence of religion in Western Europe : its social significance among religious constituencies lying between the secular and churchgoing Christians?

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A European federation of states is the only form of integration which has the chance to preserve freedom and survive shifting power relations between sovereign nations

Over 200 years ago, the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, predicted the rise of a great political body in Europe, akin to the present European Union. Using Kant’s ‘philosophical triangle’ Simon Glendinning argues that Europe’s present position as a region of connected, but sovereign states does not go far enough, but that a single unified Europe would be a ‘graveyard of freedom’. Instead, a federation of states provides the best future for Europe

Police reform in Thailand post-2006

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Dependence, independence or inter-dependence? Revisiting the concepts of 'care' and 'dependency'

Research and theory on 'dependency' and 'care-giving' have to date proceeded along largely separate lines, with little sense that they are exploring and explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon. Research on 'care', initially linked to feminism during the early 1980s, has revealed and exposed to public gaze what was hitherto assumed to be a 'natural' female activity. Conversely, disability activists and writers who have promoted a social model of disability have seen the language of and the policy focus upon 'care' as oppressive and objectifying. 'Dependency' is an equally contested concept: sociologists have scrutinised the social construction of dependency, politicians have ascribed negative connotations of passivity, while medical and social policy discourse employs the term in a positivist sense as a measure of physical need for professional intervention. Autonomy and independence, in contrast, are promoted as universal and largely unproblematic goals. These contrasting perspectives have led social theory, research and policies to separate and segregate the worlds of 'carers' from those for whom they 'care'. Drawing on the work of Kittay and others, this paper explores the ways in which sociological perspectives can develop new understanding of the social contexts of 'care' and 'dependence'

Hierarchy and Polysynchrony in an adaptive network

We describe a simple adaptive network of coupled chaotic maps. The network reaches a stationary state (frozen topology) for all values of the coupling parameter, although the dynamics of the maps at the nodes of the network can be non-trivial. The structure of the network shows interesting hierarchical properties and in certain parameter regions the dynamics is polysynchronous: nodes can be divided in differently synchronized classes but contrary to cluster synchronization, nodes in the same class need not be connected to each other. These complicated synchrony patterns have been conjectured to play roles in systems biology and circuits. The adaptive system we study describes ways whereby this behaviour can evolve from undifferentiated nodes.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figure