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International audience; Orientation and mobility are amongst the most important challenges for visually impaired people. Tactile maps can provide them with spatial knowledge of their environment, thereby reducing fear related to travelling in space. To date, raised-line paper maps have been used to make geographic information accessible, but these paper maps have significant limitations with regards to content and the presentation of information. Recent advances in technology may help to design usable interactive maps that overcome such limitations. In this paper, we first review different accessible map concepts. We then present our design of an interactive map prototype, and provide evidence of this interactive map’s high user satisfaction and efficiency as compared to a regular raised-line paper map. To conclude, we suggest that advances in interactive technologies (e.g., haptic touch surfaces) provide a unique opportunity to design usable maps in the near future.

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to parallels and intersections between the Irish and Jewish populations in Britain despite similarities in their historical periods of settlement, geographical locations and social positionings. Most of what is known is buried in a variety of printed contemporary observations and scattered comments in secondary historical narratives. This paper explores some of these sources and raises questions about what shape a linked and comparative analysis might take.

Many kinds of data in the social sciences have a hierarchical, multilevel or clustered structure. For example, municipalities are grouped into regions; regions are formed within countries; and quite often, countries belong to supra-national organizations. Once groupings are established, they will tend to become differentiated, and this differentiation implies that the group and its members both influence and are influenced by group membership. To ignore this relationship is to risk overlooking the importance of group effects and it may also render invalid many of the traditional statistical analysis techniques used for studying data relationships. In this paper, we specify a basic two-level model for a conditional beta-convergence model of a sample of European NUTS-2 regions. Specifically, we test for the role of regional decentralization (country-level variable) on regional income growth, since it has been suggested that countries with a governmental form of regional decentralization foster innovation and economic growth., This work has been carried out with the financial support of the Instituto L.R. Klein-CentroGauss (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) and the Project CCG08- UAM/HUM-4173 (Consejería de Educación, Comunidad de Madrid). Coro Chasco also acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science SEJ2006- 02328/ECON.

La liberté constitue toujours le principe à partir duquel toutes les interférences des Etats en termes de sécurité doivent être limitées, justifiées et transparentes dans les traités de l’Union européenne. La perspective qui s’esquisse ici, avec les projets de recherches plus spécifiques qui en font partie, suggère que la résistance face à la marginalisation des revendications de liberté doit être plus forte dès lors que l’on invoque le besoin d’une sécurité accrue. En d’autres termes, là où les possibilités de liberté politique sont désormais retenues par des formes de fragmentation structurelle et institutionnelle, elles devraient se nourrir des formes imaginaires de coopération entre les juridictions existantes ; et là où les possibilités de coopération et d’unification sont pensées pour contrôler les populations dans une plus grande ampleur, elles devraient faire l’objet d’un contrôle démocratique plus important, qu’il soit parlementaire ou qu’il vienne de communautés et d’institutions démocratiques responsables et transparentes. Les implications en termes de politiques, que nous mettons en avant dans ce texte, suivent les principes que nous venons d’exposer. In EU Treaties «liberty» is always the principle against which any state interference on the basis of security must be limited, justified and open to judicial scrutiny. The perspective sketched here, along with the more specific research projects that inform it, suggest an urgent need for much more robust resistance to the marginalization of claims about liberty whenever the necessities of security are invoked. In general terms it might be said that where the possibilities of political liberty are currently being constrained by forms of structural and institutional fragmentation, they ought to be nurtured by imaginative forms of cooperation across existing jurisdictions; and where the possibilities of cooperation and unification are being sought in order to control human populations on a wider scale, they ought to be subject to greater scrutiny and control by many different democratically accountable communities and institutions. The policy implications advanced in this paper follow these principles.