Labour-market in a border-area; searching for jobs and the influence of borders

At the moment borders, border-related problems, and the process of tearing down borders are very much in the centre of interest. Especially in Europe a lot of scientific work is done with regard to borders of countries, to determine their role in the ongoing integration process. In this respect border-regions are considered to be able to play a catalytic role. The borderland economies on both sides of a national border in this view have to be changed into one transborder economy. Initiatives to encourage cross-border integration however are not always successful. To our opinion, one of the main reasons lies in the fact that the border has many faces. The effect of a border differs, depending on the type of interaction (e.g. economic, social-cultural or institutional) and the nature of the region it defines. This paper tries to formulate a conceptual framework, within which the different properties of borders and border-regions are taken into account. Next this model is applied to the regional labour-market in the Nijmegen-Arnhem border-area in the eastern part of the Netherlands. The most important questions to be answered are: - Are there effects stemming from the fact the regional labour-market in the Arnhem-Nijmegen is part of a (peripheral) borderland economy? - What are the effects of the border with regard to the interaction of the region Arnhem-Nijmegen with the neighbouring region in Germany? - Is a part of the "natural" labour-market cut off by the national border, or put in other words, what would happen if the Dutch-German border would disappear completely? Keywords: Borders, Regional labour-markets, Transition

Spiritually ours, factually yours: Karelia and Russia in Finnish public consciousness

Diese Veröffentlichung erforscht auf der Grundlage einer Untersuchung der führenden finnischen Tageszeitung Helsingin Sanomat die Einstellungen und das Verständnis der Finnen zu Russland. Sie beschäftigt sich besonders mit der sogenannten Karelien-Frage und die Art und Weise, wie diese die öffentliche Diskussion in Finnland geprägt hat. Der Artikel versucht, meinungsbildende Verhaltensweisen in den spezifischen sozialen und kulturellen Verhältnissen zu untersuchen und erläutert die Meinungsbildung als gesellschaftliches Verhalten. Er bewertet, wie sich die öffentliche Meinung, wie sie sich auf der Leserbriefseite der Zeitung ausdrückt, entwickelt hat und von den größeren Veränderungen beeinflusst worden ist, die an der Grenze stattgefunden haben. Es gibt im Laufe der Zeit eindeutige Veränderungen sowohl in quantitativem als auch qualitativen Sinn. Dies lässt sich als Darstellung eines Trends zum allgemeinen Verschwinden in der Geschichte zusammenfassen, aber auch als periodisch auftretender Effekt und als Zusammenspiel zwischen bilateralen Beziehungen und allgemeineren geopolitischer Veränderungen.Based on an analysis of the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, this paper explores Finnish attitudes towards and understandings of Russia. It pays special attention to the so-called Karelia Question and the way it has shaped public discussion in Finland. The article seeks to investigate human signifying practices in the region’s specific social and cultural circumstances and explains meaning-making as a social practice. It evaluates how public opinion, as expressed in the letters page of the newspaper, has evolved and been affected by the broader changes that have occurred at the border. There are clear changes over time, both in a quantitative and qualitative sense. This may be summarised as representing a trend of general fading into history, but also as a more cyclical effect and as the interplay between bilateral relations and broader geopolitical changes

A Semantic Map for Evaluating Creativity

We present a semantic map of words related with creativity. The aim is to empirically derive terms which can be used to rate processes or products of computational creativity. The words in the map are based on association studies performed by human subjects and augmented with words derived from the literature (based on human raters). The words are used in a card sorting study to investigate the way they are categorized by human subjects. The results are arranged in a heat map of word relations based on a hierarchical cluster analysis. The cluster analysis and a principal component analysis provide a set of five to six clusters of items related to each other, and as clusters related to creativity. These clusters could form a basis for scales used to rate aspects of computational creativity

A man with a remarkable nodular lesion on his penis

A 59-year-old patient presented with an asymptomatic, nodular lesion on his penis. He had a history of hypertension and destructive tophaceous gout. A painless yellow multinodal plaque of 4 by 2 centimeters was observed on the penile shaft. A punch biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of tophaceous gout.</p