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On early Sunday morning, I’ll be heading via train from Berlin to the UACES conference “Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2011” in Cambridge/UK. UACES is the academic organisation that also runs this blog platform, and the conference is a space for the presentation of ongoing academic research on mainly EU-related matters. Among other things, I am […]
Yesterday, the EU Commission published its report on the application of the EU access to documents regulation in 2010 (PDF). The report gives some interesting figures, but one should see them in relation to reality, which shall be done below. A) The report’s figures in a quick and selective summary: In 2010, there were 6127 […]
I just stumbled over a nice academic publication presented quite exactly 30 years ago, in June 1981. This article titled “A practical introduction to sources of information about the European Communities” by Giancarlo Pau (an Italian working at the Commission representation in the UK; Source (pdf)) covers ways to get information about the European Communities, […]
England Expects has written a blog post titled “Citizens versus NGOs“, quoting the summary of reponses of government agencies, NGOs and individual contributions from the recently published “Report on the public consultation on the possible revision of the Tobacco Products Directive (2001/37/EC)“. With the majority of individual contributions (~82,000 in total) being against more restrictive measures against […]
The Guardian just published a nice timeline-map visualisation on “how political shifts have altered the map of Europe” mainly showing the change of political left-right majorities across Europe over the past 40 years. Let’s complement this with an academic perspective: Through the analysis of 264 elections in 30 European countries (EU-27 + Norway, Iceland and […]
[…] Having access to open data makes part of our life much easier, but for now, getting open data that is interesting for our research still seems to be as much activism as it is part of research. Take, for example, the image below. What you see there is an image of a network of 84 EU Commission expert groups and subgroups (a link means a minimum of 3 joint members)*. […]
European Parliament (EP) Library Briefings are short topical summaries mostly on currently relevant matters (e.g. because a committee is dealing with a topic) the EP library staff produces in particular for MEPs and their assistants. Until last year, these documents were not made available to the public – at least that’s what I’ve heard at […]
Yesterday, a double act of extreme violence has hit Norway and speculations on who did this have started as it is usual in the news media cycle. Besides the explosion in the governmental district in central Oslo, for me the more shocking act – if one can say this – is the shooting of young […]
In 1856, the Norwegian ethnologist Eilert Sundt described the rural social structures of Norwegian peasants (and their farms) called “bedelags” (Google translates this as “prayer teams”). These “bedelags” became visible at certain social events (like funerals) when people from different farms came together. Sundt noted that, if visualised, the rural social network would look like a […]
The EU Commission has produced a website on “Myths and facts” about the EU budget. Now while some of the myths and facts corrections are just simple detail provisions, others are misleading, simple spin or, what I think, a misunderstanding of politics. The Commission tries to make this a “myth vs facts” issue, but it […]
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