Democracy, communication and language in Europe's transnational political space

"The external communication of the European Union (EU) suffers from the fact that the flow of information from the Europe of institutions to the Europe of citizens has until now had little success in inspiring popular political participation. This problem can be related to the politics of language in the EU. The paper begins with a discussion of two prominent views of the European problematic of language and the public sphere. The essential interconnections between public political communication and the issue of language in the EU are set forth in contrast with these positions. The paper then turns to the main parameters of an EU language policy directed to the external sphere of communication. A possible strategy for shaping the relation between multilingualism and a transnational public sphere in Europe is sketched out in the final sections." (author's abstract)"Die Europäische Union (EU) hat im Bereich der öffentlichen Darstellung ihrer Politik Defizite: Bisher hat der Informationsfluss vom Europa der Institutionen zum Europa der Bürger nicht nennenswert dazu beigetragen, politische Partizipation im transnationalen Maßstab anzuregen. Das Problem verweist auf die Herausforderungen europäischer Sprachpolitik. Der Beitrag beginnt mit einer Diskussion von zwei prominenten Sichtweisen des Verhältnisses von Sprache und Öffentlichkeit in Europa. Wesentliche Verbindungen zwischen Sprachenfrage und den Strukturen öffentlicher Kommunikation in der EU werden im Kontrast zu diesen Positionen herausgearbeitet. Im Anschluss daran werden die Hauptparameter der auf die Sphäre der externen Kommunikation gerichteten Sprachpolitik der EU kritisch betrachtet. Der Schlussteil des Beitrags skizziert eine mögliche Strategie zum Umgang mit der Sprachenvielfalt in einer transnationalen europäischen Öffentlichkeit." (Autorenreferat

Place of death correlated to socio-demographic factors in a South African hospice

Background: The palliative care literature continually supports the view that home remains the preferred place of death of most patients with terminal illness. However, it also reports that in many countries, palliative care patients sometimes change their minds with regard to this preference. A variety of factors appears to intervene preventing patients from dying at home. The socio-demographics of patients presenting to St. Luke's Hospice, and how this relates to place of death, has never been evaluated. It is believed that in this setting, there is ironically more likelihood of many patients from poorer socio-economic circumstances dying at home. This could be as a result of living with larger families, more difficulty in obtaining access to institutional beds and cultural beliefs. Aim: To determine factors which influence the place of death of patients referred to St. Luke's Hospice over a one-year period. Method: This is a prospective, descriptive, quantitative study of the place of death of new patients referred to St Luke's Hospice, a palliative care service with an inpatient unit and home care programme, between 1 May 2001 and 30 April 2002. Only those patients who died within this time frame were analysed. A "teleform" was designed with the assistance of the Alberta Cancer Board Palliative Care Research Initiative. This form allowed the information to be entered directly into a database for analysis. The variables to be analysed with regard to place of death include: - • Age • Gender • Race • Social Structure • Category of Patient i.e. State or Private • Formal Educational Level • Duration of Illness • Palliative Performance Scale Result This study suggests that. almost two-thirds of patients with a terminal illness can be supported in their homes by a home care programme, without referral to an institution. These statistics correlate well with death statistics of other palliative home care services in industrialised countries. Variables such as age, gender, category of patient, palliative performance scale and duration of illness bore no significant relationship to place of death. However, place of death was strongly associated with race, social structure and socio-economic status. Interestingly, black patients were more likely to die in an institution. Conclusion: Studying socio-demographic factors related to place of death is only one aspect of evaluating and determining the needs of the terminally ill and their families in South Africa. Should or can more people die at home? Are home deaths feasible, and if so how? The task that lies ahead of us in South Africa is to decide what kind of palliative care or other service is optimal. cost effective and appropriate to meet the needs of our multi-cultural society

Popular republicanism versus populism: articulating the people

In problematic ways, populism has become a catch-all formula used with discretion to capture all kinds of discontent with democratic politics today. Populism is not only an essentially contested, but also an unavoidably blurred concept. Its recurrent use as a weapon to discredit all kinds of projects that challenge contemporary liberal democracies has led to a situation in which protest movements that aim at democratic renewal end up being conflated with opposite tendencies whose objective is a reactionary scaling down of democracy. Against this background, this article argues that both for political and for analytical purposes, the key point for distinguishing between “progressive” and “regressive” projects that address the crisis of democracy is to determine how such projects conceive of the identity of the people. Invoking the people is not per se an attribute of populism, but ultimately a feature of all kinds of democratic politics. What does make for a critical difference, though, is how peoplehood is articulated in the process of collective mobilization. The distinction becomes particularly relevant with regard to current debates on how to tackle the issue of diversity and democratic integration in Europe and North America. To substantiate this relevance, the article introduces the concept of popular republicanism, which is fleshed out by discussing two recent examples: Catalan sovereignism and the Kurdish-Turkish HDP

Addressing linguistic diversity in the European Union : strategies and dilemmas

Peer reviewe

Optimum Quantum Error Recovery using Semidefinite Programming

Quantum error correction (QEC) is an essential element of physical quantum information processing systems. Most QEC efforts focus on extending classical error correction schemes to the quantum regime. The input to a noisy system is embedded in a coded subspace, and error recovery is performed via an operation designed to perfectly correct for a set of errors, presumably a large subset of the physical noise process. In this paper, we examine the choice of recovery operation. Rather than seeking perfect correction on a subset of errors, we seek a recovery operation to maximize the entanglement fidelity for a given input state and noise model. In this way, the recovery operation is optimum for the given encoding and noise process. This optimization is shown to be calculable via a semidefinite program (SDP), a well-established form of convex optimization with efficient algorithms for its solution. The error recovery operation may also be interpreted as a combining operation following a quantum spreading channel, thus providing a quantum analogy to the classical diversity combining operation.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Entanglement in SO(3)-invariant bipartite quantum systems

The structure of the state spaces of bipartite (N tensor N) quantum systems which are invariant under product representations of the group SO(3) of three-dimensional proper rotations is analyzed. The subsystems represent particles of arbitrary spin j which transform according to an irreducible representation of the rotation group. A positive map theta is introduced which describes the time reversal symmetry of the local states and which is unitarily equivalent to the transposition of matrices. It is shown that the partial time reversal transformation theta_2 = (I tensor theta) acting on the composite system can be expressed in terms of the invariant 6-j symbols introduced by Wigner into the quantum theory of angular momentum. This fact enables a complete geometrical construction of the manifold of states with positive partial transposition and of the sets of separable and entangled states of (4 tensor 4) systems. The separable states are shown to form a three-dimensional prism and a three-dimensional manifold of bound entangled states is identified. A positive maps is obtained which yields, together with the time reversal, a necessary and sufficient condition for the separability of states of (4 tensor 4) systems. The relations to the reduction criterion and to the recently proposed cross norm criterion for separability are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

The genome of Romanomermis culicivorax:revealing fundamental changes in the core developmental genetic toolkit in Nematoda

Background: The genetics of development in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been described in exquisite detail. The phylum Nematoda has two classes: Chromadorea (which includes C. elegans) and the Enoplea. While the development of many chromadorean species resembles closely that of C. elegans, enoplean nematodes show markedly different patterns of early cell division and cell fate assignment. Embryogenesis of the enoplean Romanomermis culicivorax has been studied in detail, but the genetic circuitry underpinning development in this species has not been explored. Results: We generated a draft genome for R. culicivorax and compared its gene content with that of C. elegans, a second enoplean, the vertebrate parasite Trichinella spiralis, and a representative arthropod, Tribolium castaneum. This comparison revealed that R. culicivorax has retained components of the conserved ecdysozoan developmental gene toolkit lost in C. elegans. T. spiralis has independently lost even more of this toolkit than has C. elegans. However, the C. elegans toolkit is not simply depauperate, as many novel genes essential for embryogenesis in C. elegans are not found in, or have only extremely divergent homologues in R. culicivorax and T. spiralis. Our data imply fundamental differences in the genetic programmes not only for early cell specification but also others such as vulva formation and sex determination. Conclusions: Despite the apparent morphological conservatism, major differences in the molecular logic of development have evolved within the phylum Nematoda. R. culicivorax serves as a tractable system to contrast C. elegans and understand how divergent genomic and thus regulatory backgrounds nevertheless generate a conserved phenotype. The R. culicivorax draft genome will promote use of this species as a research model