Rezension zu: Irini Katsirea, Public Broadcasting and European Law

Public broadcasting has always been a regulatory field somewhat zealously guarded within the nation states' sphere and kept willingly untouched by regional or international rules. Values inherent to the role of public broadcasting, such as cultural and national identity, social cohesion, pluralism and a sustained public sphere, were thought too critical and too historically connected with the particular society to allow any "outside" influence. Different regulatory models have emerged to reflect these specificities within the national boundaries of European countries. Yet, as media evolved technologically and economically, the constraints of state borders were rendered obsolete and the inner tension between culture and commerce of the television medium became more pronounced. This tension was only intensified with the formulation of a European Community (EC) layer of regulation, which had as its primary objective the creation of a single market for audiovisual services (or as the EC Directive beautifully put it, a "Television without Frontiers"), while also including some provisions catering for cultural concerns, such as the infamous quota system for European and independent productions. Against this backdrop, public broadcasting makes a particularly intriguing subject for a study of regulatory dilemmas of national versus supranational, integration versus intergovernmentalism, culture versus commerce, intervention versus liberalisation, and all this in the dynamic setting of contemporary media. The present paper reviews Irini Katsirea's book PUBLIC BROADCASTING AND EUROPEAN LAW and seeks to identify whether all elements of the complex governance puzzle of European public service broadcasting rules are analytically well fitted together.

European Public Sphere

Political communication scholars have investigated whether a public sphere emerges that adapts to the new supra- and intergovernmental European reality in the course of European Union integration. Such European public sphere(s) might link EU politics to citizens. The entry discusses not only how such Europeanized public sphere might affect the quality of democracy as well as the political process but also what a European public sphere could look like and how we might measure it. Our empirical knowledge on the existence or nonexistence of a European Public Sphere is summarized in five theses. The article concludes with future paths for research.

Self-adjoint extensions for confined electrons: From a particle in a spherical cavity to the hydrogen atom in a sphere and on a cone

In a recent study of the self-adjoint extensions of the Hamiltonian of a particle confined to a finite region of space, in which we generalized the Heisenberg uncertainty relation to a finite volume, we encountered bound states localized at the wall of the cavity. In this paper, we study this situation in detail both for a free particle and for a hydrogen atom centered in a spherical cavity. For appropriate values of the self-adjoint extension parameter, the bound states localized at the wall resonate with the standard hydrogen bound states. We also examine the accidental symmetry generated by the Runge–Lenz vector, which is explicitly broken in a spherical cavity with general Robin boundary conditions. However, for specific radii of the confining sphere, a remnant of the accidental symmetry persists. The same is true for an electron moving on the surface of a finite circular cone, bound to its tip by a 1/r1/r potential.

Public-health and individual approaches to antiretroviral therapy: township South Africa and Switzerland compared

BACKGROUND: The provision of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in resource-limited settings follows a public health approach, which is characterised by a limited number of regimens and the standardisation of clinical and laboratory monitoring. In industrialized countries doctors prescribe from the full range of available antiretroviral drugs, supported by resistance testing and frequent laboratory monitoring. We compared virologic response, changes to first-line regimens, and mortality in HIV-infected patients starting HAART in South Africa and Switzerland. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We analysed data from the Swiss HIV Cohort Study and two HAART programmes in townships of Cape Town, South Africa. We included treatment-naïve patients aged 16 y or older who had started treatment with at least three drugs since 2001, and excluded intravenous drug users. Data from a total of 2,348 patients from South Africa and 1,016 patients from the Swiss HIV Cohort Study were analysed. Median baseline CD4+ T cell counts were 80 cells/mul in South Africa and 204 cells/mul in Switzerland. In South Africa, patients started with one of four first-line regimens, which was subsequently changed in 514 patients (22%). In Switzerland, 36 first-line regimens were used initially, and these were changed in 539 patients (53%). In most patients HIV-1 RNA was suppressed to 500 copies/ml or less within one year: 96% (95% confidence interval [CI] 95%-97%) in South Africa and 96% (94%-97%) in Switzerland, and 26% (22%-29%) and 27% (24%-31%), respectively, developed viral rebound within two years. Mortality was higher in South Africa than in Switzerland during the first months of HAART: adjusted hazard ratios were 5.90 (95% CI 1.81-19.2) during months 1-3 and 1.77 (0.90-3.50) during months 4-24. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to the highly individualised approach in Switzerland, programmatic HAART in South Africa resulted in similar virologic outcomes, with relatively few changes to initial regimens. Further innovation and resources are required in South Africa to both achieve more timely access to HAART and improve the prognosis of patients who start HAART with advanced disease.