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AbstractIn their 2012 publication A Tale of Two Cultures, Gary Goertz and James Mahoney argue that empirical research in the social sciences aiming at causal inference can be differentiated into a qualitative and a quantitative methodological culture. The two cultures differ fundamentally in how researchers approach and implement empirical studies. The argument is well laid out and comprehensively illustrated, but the empirical validity of the two cultures hypothesis has not yet been evaluated systematically. This note introduces a research project that aims to test the two cultures hypothesis via an empirical analysis of how qualitative and quantitative methods are applied. To determine whether there is a qualitative and quantitative method culture, the researchers initially sampled 30 articles from three journals (Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, World Politics) in the 2008–2012 period. Based on this dataset, no evidence was found for the existence of coherent systems of methods practices in political science.

Access to public information in Poland is most typically discussed in the legal and political contexts. However, it is not consciously discussed as a possibility for political scholars to exercise their right of access to public information. This paper, which is of postulatory nature, identifies the benefits for those political scholars who decide to use, in the process of data collection, their right of access to public information as a data collection technique. The proposed technic of data collection may be used by scholars – political scientists around the world.

The development of new approaches in recent times has brought about major changes in the study of social and political life. They reject almost everything that has been traditionally accepted, for which they have been severely criticized. But focusing on academic issues alone won't help much. We can understand the new approaches, their concerns, their rejection of science as model, their disdain for objectivity, universality, truth, relevance and so on, more adequately by relating them to the social conditions that obtain in the West. There are, however, major differences between these conditions and those that obtain in countries like India. And the kind of problems facing these countries can be addressed meaningfully by the more traditional approach than by the approaches developed recently. This is why, while it does not seem to have much future in the West, where it originated and continued for long, it may survive, even flourish, in countries like India.

How can archivists analyse science archives? Science archives are like DNA for the human body: unique and essential. The analysis of DNA and science archives is a very difficult process. Archivists in a scientific environment need to develop new techniques complementary to the traditional methodologies. In this paper an overview of these old and new techniques will be given. It will also show how these techniques can be worked out in practice.

In Greg Bear's critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin's Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a "noncoding region" of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way and, moreover, that it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear's literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari's important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear's novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis's theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species' DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear's informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin's Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience.

The Javanese - one of the largest ethnic groups in the Islamic world - were once mostly 'nominal Muslims' with pious believers a minority and the majority seemingly resistant to Islam's call for greater piety. Over the tumultuous period analyzed here - from the 1930s to the 2000s - that society has changed profoundly to become an extraordinary example of the rising religiosity that marks the modern age. Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java draws on a formidable body of sources, including interviews, archival documents and a vast range of published material, to situate the Javanese religious experience. Winner of the Kahin Prize from the Association of Asia Studies, the study has considerable relevance for much wider contexts. The final section of the book, which considers the significance of Java's religious history in global contexts, shows how it exemplifies a profound contest of values in the universal human search for a better life.

This conceptual paper traces the origins and progress of Open Science and proposes its generative coupling to Open Innovation in the contemporary socio-political context; where universities are re-imaging their civic missions in the face of anti-establishment populist politics. This setting is one of changing knowledge production regimes and institutional pressures that create contradictions identifiable through the prism of the series of scientific norms conceptualised by Robert K. Merton. This paper privileges a sociological perspective to proffer scientific knowledge production as a societally embedded process, which is well illustrated by scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Science in Society fields. In doing so, it identifies the co-evolution, co-existence and co-production of Open Science with Open Innovation; and notes how it shares the attributes of other recent diagnoses of changing knowledge production regimes; in particular Mode 2, post-normal science and the Quadruple Helix. It also argues that Open Science can be coupled with Open Innovation to catalyse positive societal change, but that the rise of a populist post-truth era opposed to objectivity, expertise and technocratic political solutions gives the demand for openness and participation a different complexion. Merton's norms provide a useful lens to observe recent shifts in the delivery of science, knowledge and innovation in society towards more inclusive, ethical and sustainable outcomes; and expose the limited reflection on how the appropriation and exploitation of open scientific knowledge encounters industrial R&D and Open Innovation.

Cryptography is the science of transforming data using a key such that the data is unintelligible to those who do not have the key. The primitive operation at the disposal of cryptography is encryption. Encryption is used to provide message privacy and integrity. It has helped in the past to ensure secrecy in important communication especially in military and diplomatic sectors. The different algorithm used in cryptography techniques will be highlighted and one of the applications would be presented using a Object Oriented programming language (OOP) to implement.

(First published in French as "La Geopolitique dans l'histoire," in Espaces temps 68-69-70, pp 187-201.) Geopolitical representations are not only located but also dated. As a geohistoric rationale for a political plan, geopolitics is as old as the political "discourse" on territory & power. But while geopolitics has been discernible since ancient times, this mode of action only became incontestable with the Westphalian state that, on its creation, bore the mark of three principles: the primacy of politics, unity of identity, & territory. During the following centuries, three different stances can be noted: the imperial model, the state model, & the universal model. In each case a historical situation (imperial competition, war, redistribution) leads to the setting up of an explanatory model of itself, & this dynamic is the basis for a representation that becomes the starting point for assessments of competition that will themselves be translated in a new way. A fourth family of models, "neo-geopolitics" has recently emerged. Supplemented with ethnopolitics, neo-geopolitics is making way for dubious entrepreneurs who have reinvested anti-imperialist & anticapitalist phraseology in a process of justifying "rebirths" & other fundamentalisms. Adapted from the source document.

Originally published in 1959, and using material collected from eight languages, much of which was previously unpublished, this is a genuine comparative study, not merely describing each country separately, but an analysis of the most important questions facing 20th century public administration. A substantial historical introduction traces from Roman to modern times the concept and practice of public service and brings out the underlying unity of European experience.

Originally published in 1968, this book provides surveys of the Australian, French, German, Swedish and American systems of public administration. Previously unpublished material on the professional classes in Britain was made available which filled a gap in the (then) available textbooks on British government. A concluding chapter deals with the wider aspects of the generalist versus specialist problem, an original contribution to administrative theory. The book will be of interest to students of politics and government and the student of comparative administration, as well as to those concerned with civil service reform

Die nicht-hegemonial verankerte EU-Interventionsstaatlichkeit im Herrschaftsmodus der (Selbst-)Disziplinierung stellt die Akteur*innen in der Europäischen Union vor große Herausforderungen. Johannes Gerken widmet sich, aufbauend auf den Traditionslinien kritischer Europaforschung, dem durch die Euro-Krise induzierten EU-Staatlichkeitsausbau und entwickelt ein eigenes begriffliches Verständnis der EU-Staatlichkeit. Auf Grundlage einer historisch-materialistischen Staatlichkeitsanalyse präsentiert er eine Einordnung der Politik zur Bewältigung der Euro-Krise in den Gesamtzusammenhang der EU-Staatlichkeitsgenese.

A review essay on a book by Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, Vol. 1: From Early Ancient Greece to Early Christianity; Vol. 2: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).