Janos Toth

This letter contains suggestions for editors and software providers to help avoid affiliation bias in the initial and concluding stages of the peer review process. Submission management systems have a responsibility to ensure protection against affiliation bias. This can be achieved by automatically withholding the author’s identity and affiliation information from all editors, including the Editor-in-Chief, until a decision about publication has been made. Journals relying on email-based submissions are in a more difficult situation. Not having external support in confirming the submitting author’s identity, this dilemma can be resolved through the implementation of strict instructions and guidelines concerning manuscript submission and handling. In this case the “human factor” cannot be fully eliminated, while automated processes can only be changed intentionally and with a certain delay. Therefore, with the suggested steps, submission management systems could become a strong guard against unconscious bias while also making conscious bias more difficult to impact the peer review process.

Modem economics relied on the false presupposition that natural resources are free goods. It gave rise to exaggerated expectations on the side of economists concerning the possibilities of economic growth. I try to interpret the terms of natural resources, sustaining capacity, production from a human-ecological platform. The quantity of natural resources may vary within a large spectrum between absolute abundance and total exhaustion. The support capacity can be raised in different ways. Extensive growth is wrong while technological development is a good way. So, certain technological-market processes aiming at extensive growth must be suppressed, processes that could increase effectivity and technical developments, which would draw new resources into production, should be supported.

Environmental problems cannot be solved solely by achieving technical developments: innovations in the social structure are strongly needed as well. The nature of these social changes required and the integration still present the subject of prolonged debates (Tóth 1998). It is very difficult to decide whether on the long run effects of the globalization are favourable or detrimental for the environmental protection. The majority of environmentalists disagree of globalization and integration. The purpose of my essay would be to present the difference between globalization and integration. Additional I would like to argue in the favour of such an integration, as only this process and the formation of an attached sovereignty can level out the pernicious effects of globalization.

Today, the expression "media" firmly retains a broad language function both in professional and public discourse, the essence of which is a signification of the auditory, visual, audiovisual and digital-electronic "press", including both the tools and agents. The term seems scientific from academic viewpoint and precise in public discourse. However, analogies drawn from some of its connotations, which can serve as a foundation to signify various media organisations, are adequate only for some segments of the semantic field of the term and for the roles of various entities described as “media” in the context of mass communication studies. In this paper we shall make an attempt to clarify whether the general name "media" and the more specific "medium" adequately marks the complex institutional system and its individual members to which it is applied in mass communication studies. To this end, after outlining the semantic scope of the term, we will try to identify differences postulated essential in the structure and operation of the constituents of the institutional structure it marks. These differences, viewed through specific types and cases, can either corroborate its use or can necessitate a refinement or rejection of its application.

Notions of poverty and impoverishment are often filled with value-loaded connotations, and identified with deprivation both as a state and as a process. In this paper, we would like to show that poverty reveals itself not only as lack or scarcity but also as a totality of positive practices, attributes and strategies on individual as well as on group level. The study employs the Christian understanding of poverty to argue that the surpluses are of different nature and are interconnected with various types of deficits, constituting a complex network which equally affects material, moral, social, and spiritual dimensions. Our objective here is to outline certain aspects of a theory that aims at a new concept of “poverty” and “impoverishment”, which will enable us to include both the positive and negative individual and communal states and motions described in Christian tradition and the negative states and motions constituting the object of deficit-centered theories of poverty.

Issues of the truth potential of religions and its alleged incompatibility with scientific objectivity are among the questions that cannot be bypassed in discourses aiming to an integral understanding of society. In this paper, we will examine and compare two specific approaches that share the intention of taking into consideration religious truths when describing and criticising both modern societies and methods permitting their scientific examination within the academic field. As perennialism focuses on common metaphysical truth shared by all religions, and post-secularism deals with a possible form of cooperation between secular and religious morality, it is expected to find that their offered solutions to social crisis phenomena will be essentially different. However, the results show that basically both see the solution as a reorganizational task.