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"Since 1978"
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Human Rights, Europe and the People's Republic of China
This article seeks to examine certain aspects of the role of human rights in relations between China and Europe. Specifically, the article focuses on the debate whether or not to co-sponsor a resolution critical of China at the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR) or alternatively to base policy around a human rights dialogue with China. This debate has dominated the discussions of member states of the European Union on human rights and China for the past five years at least.
Journal Article
The Zelensky effect
\"With Russian shells raining on Kyiv and tanks closing in, American forces prepared to evacuate Ukraine's leader. Just three years earlier, his apparent main qualification had been playing a president on TV. But Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly retorted, 'I need ammunition, not a ride.' Ukrainian forces won the battle for Kyiv, ensuring their country's independence even as a longer war began for the southeast. You cannot understand the historic events of 2022 without understanding Zelensky. But the Zelensky effect is less about the man himself than about the civic nation he embodies: what makes Zelensky most extraordinary in war is his very ordinariness as a Ukrainian. The Zelensky Effect explains this paradox, exploring Ukraine's national history to show how its now-iconic president reflects the hopes and frustrations of the country's first 'independence generation'. Interweaving social and political background with compelling episodes from Zelensky's life and career, this is the story of Ukraine told through the journey of one man who has come to symbolize his country.\" -- Publisher's description.
Book
Diplomatic Relations and Mutual Strategic Perceptions: China and the European Union
During the last quarter of the 21st century, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the European Community/European Union (EC/EU) have been similar and different, compatible and incompatible players at the same time. Both remain “unfinished” international actors, China because of a lack of functioning state institutions, and the EU because its component members survived as nation states. And whereas the partial opening-up of the vast Chinese market under Deng Xiaoping very much corresponded to structural changes in Western Europe and two European recessions, their respective approaches to world order issues were mutually contradictory in fundamental respects. On the European side, stable democracies had subscribed, as a matter of principle, to the liberal paradigm of non-violent conflict solution and to the universal applicability of human rights. At the same time, the PRC had judged it necessary to strengthen its sovereignty in the interest of a national agenda that bordered on the nationalistic and irredentist, thus keeping its option open, as a matter of principle, to resolve conflicts through force. During the 1980s, Sino-American irritations followed by the gradual demise of the Soviet bloc slowly invalidated the basic strategic framework for EU-China relations. Subsequent attempts at building a new framework have thus far remained unconvincing.
Journal Article
The showman : inside the invasion that shook the world and made a leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
\"Acclaimed journalist Simon Shuster gives us the first inside account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the perspective of President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team, who granted him unprecedented access\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Lauren Groff’s Unlettered Zed
In 2020, as she worked on her novel The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff was reading through all of Shakespeare’s plays. The Vaster Wilds is set in the late winter of 1610, during the “starving time” of the Jamestown colony, and her reading project was helping her to catch an ear for the language of the time––as an exercise, Groff reportedly wrote a version of the novel in blank verse. While The Vaster Wilds taps into the textures and rhythms of Shakespearean language, it tends to avoid citation or quotation, except in one part of the text: the names given to the servant girl whose escape from the Jamestown colony into the wilderness makes up the action of the novel. Through these appropriations of Shakespeare, the novel plays out an ambivalence about the relationship between words, writing, and power, working through multiple possibilities for how to evade or overcome the dominating force of names.
Journal Article
Socioeconomic Status and Macroeconomic Expectations
We show that individuals’ macroeconomic expectations are influenced by their socioeconomic status (SES). People with higher income or higher education are more optimistic about future macroeconomic developments, including business conditions, the national unemployment rate, and stock market returns. The spread in beliefs between highand low-SES individuals diminishes significantly during recessions. A comparison with professional forecasters and historical data reveals that the beliefs wedge reflects excessive pessimism on the part of low-SES individuals. SES-driven expectations help explain why higher-SES individuals are more inclined to invest in the stock market and more likely to consider purchasing homes, durable goods, or cars.
Journal Article
EU Economic Relations with China: An Institutionalist Perspective
Looking at the history of European-Chinese relations, there have been times of rapprochement and co-operation but also of tension and conflict. Both China and the European Union (EU) have gained specific profile as international actors over the last two decades, be it in economic or political terms. Amongst Asian states, China has reached a dominant position on the EU's external relations agenda. Economic relations between the two sides have reached significant importance and in 2000 China was, for exports as well as imports, the EU's third largest non-European trading partner, behind the United States and Japan. This has not happened by accident, but is part of a process in which EU-China relations were progressively deepened. As early as in 1973 the Chinese
government had invited the then European Commissioner Christopher
Soames to visit China. In November 1974 the European Commission
forwarded a memorandum to China, including a draft for a possible trade
agreement. After diplomatic relations had been established between the
EC and China in 1975, recognizing the People's Republic as the only
government of China, the Trade Agreement between the EC and China
followed in 1978. In 1985 this agreement was replaced by the Agreement
on Trade and Economic Co-operation between the EC and China.
The European Commission opened its representation in Beijing in 1988,
and ever since there has been a continuous deepening of economic and
trade relations.
Journal Article
Deep laser microscopy using optical clearing by ultrasound-induced gas bubbles
Although laser scanning microscopy is a pivotal imaging tool in biomedical research, optical scattering from tissue limits the depth of the imaging. To overcome this limitation, we propose a scheme called ultrasound-induced optical clearing microscopy, which makes use of temporary, localized optical clearing based on ultrasound-induced gas bubbles. In this method, bubbles are generated by high-intensity pulsed ultrasound at a desired depth and subsequently maintained by low-intensity continuous ultrasound during imaging. As a result, optical scattering and unwanted changes in the propagation direction of the incident photons are minimized in the bubble cloud, and thus the laser can be tightly focused at a deeper imaging plane. Through phantom and ex vivo experiments, we demonstrate that ultrasound-induced optical clearing microscopy is capable of increasing the imaging depth by a factor of six or more, while the resolution is similar to that of conventional laser scanning microscopy.Optical clearing based on ultrasound-induced gas bubbles offers new opportunities for deeper laser scanning microscopy of biological tissue.
Journal Article
Digitally synthesized beat frequency multiplexing for sub-millisecond fluorescence microscopy
Fluorescence imaging is the most widely used method for unveiling the molecular composition of biological specimens. However, the weak optical emission of fluorescent probes and the trade-off between imaging speed and sensitivity
1
are problematic for acquiring blur-free images of fast phenomena, such as sub-millisecond biochemical dynamics in live cells and tissues
2
, and cells flowing at high speed
3
. Here, we report a technique that achieves real-time pixel readout rates that are one order of magnitude faster than a modern electron multiplier charge-coupled device—the gold standard in high-speed fluorescence imaging technology
4
. Termed fluorescence imaging using radiofrequency-tagged emission (FIRE), this approach maps the image into the radiofrequency spectrum using the beating of digitally synthesized optical fields. We demonstrate diffraction-limited confocal fluorescence imaging of stationary cells at a frame rate of 4.4 kHz, and fluorescence microscopy in flow at a velocity of 1 m s
−1
, corresponding to a throughput of approximately 50,000 cells per second.
A confocal fluorescence microscopy scheme that maps the image to the radiofrequency spectrum by beating together two optical fields offers enhanced read-out speeds at kilohertz frame rates. It provides a new way for observing dynamic phenomena in cells.
Journal Article