The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is greatly honoured by receiving the Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea. On this occasion, it might be appropriate to talk about the role of academies in science-based policy advice. The authors would like to address the question: what general aims should the academies achieve – particularly in respect to biomedicine and the life sciences?

Die ontologische Frage nach der Organisation zielt auf das Verhältnis zwischen der Einheit eines Ganzen und der Vielheit seiner Teile ab. Wie kann etwas Seiendes mit anderem Seienden welcher Art auch immer in einem Zusammenhang stehen, der auf eine bestimmte Weise geordnet ist? Wie kann etwas Seiendes Komponente einer Organisation sein?

The call to act more entrepreneurially is often heard when policy-makers and scientists are discussing shortcomings in the management of scientific institutions. Reforming a university so that it better ignites the spirit of entrepreneurship in the minds of its faculty, students, and administrative officers, needs more than just inspiring character sketches of resilient go-getters with a high readiness to assume risk, infectious enthusiasm and, at best, a common-good orientation. Any pragmatically relevant idea of good entrepreneurship must specify the conditions necessary to encourage entrepreneurial action: What incentive scheme should be implemented? What indicators should help evaluate its outcomes? What should the mechanism of accountability be? The debate on the role of entrepreneurship in scientific institutions could profit from a rigorous analysis of what has been going on in the management of economic organizations since the rise to dominion, in the 1980s, of what mostly its adversaries call ‘neoliberal’ thought. ‘The financialization of the firm’—this is how Alexander Styhre, chair in organization theory and management at the University of Gothenburg, identifies the most powerful management trend of the last 40 years in the title of his new book. Embedding that tendency in economic, social, and cultural contexts, Styhre has no qualms about conferring upon his central concept the function of an umbrella term: anything that contributes to, or is a consequence of, understanding economic organizations as ‘bundles of financial resources’ (p. 58) forms part of financialization. Styhre’s main perspective is provided by economic sociology, which explains how economic organizations result from the practices of social actors. In Styre’s first two chapters the reader encounters snapshots of economic history from the birth of chartered banking in Renaissance Genoa to today’s investor capitalism, sociological approaches to the institutional structure of capital accumulation, policy analyses of the deregulation of financial markets, epistemological criticism of neoclassical economics, as well as pointed animadversions on neoliberalism.

Complex systems in nature and society make use of information for the development of their internal organization and the control of their functional mechanisms. Alongside technical aspects of storing, transmitting and processing information, the various semantic aspects of information, such as meaning, sense, reference and function, play a decisive part in the analysis of such systems. With the aim of fostering a better understanding of semantic systems from an evolutionary and multidisciplinary perspective, this volume collects contributions by philosophers and natural scientists, linguists, information and computer scientists. They do not follow a single research paradigm; rather they shed, in a complementary way, new light upon some of the most important aspects of the evolution of semantic systems. Evolution of Semantic Systems is intended for researchers in philosophy, computer science, and the natural sciences who work on the analysis or development of semantic systems, ontologies, or similar complex information structures. In the eleven chapters, they will find a broad discussion of topics ranging from underlying universal principles to representation and processing aspects to paradigmatic examples.

Together with formal ontologies, ontology alignments are utilized to interconnect distributed information systems. Despite their widespread use, it is not trivial to specify a formal semantics for ontology alignments—due to the disparity of the respective domains of the involved ontologies. There are already approaches to tackle this problem, but each is relying on different presumptions. In this paper we propose an interpretation of alignments in terms of theories as they are understood in the philosophy of science following the structuralistic notion of ontological reduction. We use this framework to identify an account of the necessary presumptions of every alignment semantics. These assumptions are then used as a basis for the comparison of existing alignment semantics.

The government officials whom Max Weber described as dependable agents of modern bureaucracy do not have much in common with the entrepreneurs characterized as risk-embracing innovators by Joseph A. Schumpeter. From the public-choice perspective, William A. Niskanen, Jr.—though regarding bureaucrats as just another species of utility optimizers—brought their budget-maximizing behavior into stark contrast with the efficient allocation of resources resulting from the decisions of the market players. Nevertheless, almost any skeptic of government, except the unwavering anarchist, would agree that there is a legitimate domain for the use of government power, which has usually been delimited in terms of market failure concerning the supply of public goods. An important example for this is expenditure on R&D. Thus, the burden of proof lies with the government: are its officials really capable of removing the institutional and political obstacles which block the way to the optimal production of public goods? ‘Governpreneurship’ sounds like a magic word that might dissolve the problem of government failure. If public servants were thinking and acting increasingly like entrepreneurs, they would increasingly be satisfying the demands of their customers. This is the central message of Governpreneurship: Establishing a Thriving Entrepreneurial Spirit in Government by Robert Hisrich, the director of the Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship at Thunderbird School of Global Management (Glendale, AZ) and founder of more than a dozen marketing and management consulting firms, and Amr Al-Dabbagh, the former governor of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) and current chief executive officer (CEO) of Al-Dabbagh Group (Saudi Arabia).

Journal Article Advising government how to address market failure in innovation—and what about government failure?Science and Innovation Policy for the New Knowledge Economy edited by Massimo G. Colombo, Luca Grilli, Lucia Piscitello and Cristina Rossi-Lamastra Get access Advising government how to address market failure in innovation—and what about government failure?Science and Innovation Policy for the New Knowledge Economy edited by Massimo G. Colombo, Luca Grilli, Lucia Piscitello and Cristina Rossi-Lamastra Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2011, 208 pages, £69.95 (hardcover), ISBN 9781848448407 Stefan Artmann Stefan Artmann Department of Science–Policy–Society, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, PO Box 110543, D-06019 Halle (Saale), Germany Email: stefan.artmann@leopoldina.org Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Science and Public Policy, Volume 39, Issue 5, October 2012, Pages 690–691, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scs035 Published: 02 May 2012

The definition of a formalism for ontology alignments is straightforward. Problems start when one attempts to define what they mean. The existing semantics [3] all depend on certain preconditions for the alignments to make sense — e.g., that the ontology domains are empirically given, that the involved ontologies are compatible, and that either the domains are identical or, there is a practicable way for specifying a domain relation. Those preconditions, of course, are not always empirically justifiable. With scientific structuralism [1] another approach for interpreting inter-theoretical relations has been put forward. With the help of this framework it is possible to give an exact description of the formal context in which the distributed alignment semantics works.

Background: We consider cells as biological systems that process information by means of molecular codes. Many studies analyze cellular information processing exclusively in syntactic terms (e.g., by measuring Shannon entropy of sets of macromolecules), and abstract completely from semantic aspects that are related to the meaning of molecular information.Methods: This mini-review focusses on semantic aspects of molecular information, particularly on codes that organize the semantic dimension of molecular information. First, a general conceptual framework for describing molecular information is proposed. Second, some examples of molecular codes are presented. Third, a mathematical approach that makes the identification of molecular codes in reaction networks possible, is developed.Results: By combining a systematic conceptual framework for describing molecular information and a mathematical approach to identify molecular codes, it is possible to give a formally consistent and empirically adequate model of the code-based semantics of molecular information in cells.General significance: Research on the semantics of molecular information is of great importance particularly to systems biology since molecular codes embedded in systems of interrelated codes govern main traits of cells. Describing cells as semantic systems may thus trigger new experiments and generate new insights into the fundamental processes of cellular information processing. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled Systems Biology of Microorganisms. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Journal Article Making innovation more probable through innovative governance Get access Governance of Innovation: Firms, Clusters and Institutions in a Changing Setting edited by Arentsen Maarten J van Rossum Wouter and Steenge Albert E in association with the Belgian-Dutch Association for Institutional and Political Economy, 2010 Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 165, £65.00, 9781847207388 Stefan Artmann Stefan Artmann scientific officer at the Department of Science-Policy-Society, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, PO Box 110543, D-06019 Halle (Saale), Germany; Email: stefan.artmann@leopoldina.org Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Science and Public Policy, Volume 38, Issue 10, December 2011, Pages 818–820, https://doi.org/10.1093/spp/38.10.818 Published: 01 December 2011

The paper discusses, from a philosophical perspective, the use of Pervasive Computing for supporting the well-being of humans. Philosophy can help computer scientists who are working in this area, to resolve conceptual problems, to take up a considered position concerning ethical issues, and to define clear technological principles. Drawing on the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, questions addressed in the paper are: How is the technological research programme of Pervasive Computing to be defined? How are humans and systems of Pervasive Computing to be modelled as intelligent agents? How do we understand the behaviour of agents as intentional? How is the interaction of humans and systems of Pervasive Computing to be analyzed? How can we define the well-being of intelligent agents? How should systems of Pervasive Computing be designed if they ought to support the well-being of humans?

Strukturwissenschaften werden in der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaftlern eine Rolle spielen, deren ganze philosophische Tragweite sich aktuell abzuzeichnen beginnt. Information und Kommunikation, Komplexität und Rationalität – dies sind nur einige Begriffe, mit denen Strukturwissenschaftler die Welt analysieren, ohne sie vorher entlang traditioneller Kategorien wie Natur und Kultur aufgeteilt zu haben. Philosophen haben auf die vehemente Entwicklung der Strukturwissenschaften bisher nur unzureichend reagiert und weder eine systematisch umfassende noch eine historisch profilierte Wissenschaftsphilosophie dieser Disziplinengruppe in Angriff genommen. Stefan Artmann legt sie in diesem Buch vor.