About this blog

Soon after I became a government minister in March 2007 I started a blog in Slovenian language. A very natural decision, because I have been a computer geek since early 1980s. I blog to share my thoughts about politics, science and technology, research and development, sustainable development, day to day life etc. And also to get feedback from the citizens, sometimes even from colleagues-politicians.

In the first half of 2008, Slovenia is taking over the presidency of the EU, more specifically, it will preside over the European Council. Ministers of our government are involved in the preparations and will be involved in the presidency. So there is much to blog about in English as well.

The European Union, as an abstract entity, is aware of the problem of communicating the policies to the citizens. But the EU are also very concrete people with ideas, thoughts and worries. As a minister in a member state government I am one of them. By taking an open, direct, two way approach to communicating I hope to contribute to a better understanding of EU policies.

I am writing this blog myself, in person, without consultation with the PR office, without clearance from offical spokespersons. This blog is not providing an official view of the EU, or of the government of Slovenia. It is personal, but about public issues:

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Updated! Synchronizing Moon+ Books on Android

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I do a lot of reading on my Android devices, phones and tablets. After a long search I selected  Moon+ Reader , the  Pro  version. The killer feature was the way bookmarks and underlining is handled. I mostly read non-fiction and like to mark important passages. And I want to be sure my marks are available forever. After I am done with a book, I create an Evernote clip from my marks and comments. With Moon+ this is done with a single click. I did most of my reading on my Nexus 7 tablet, but when my phone was getting bigger I realized it would be nice to do some reading there as well. And it would be even nicer if I could synchronize the books, notes etc. Synchronizing book files Moon+ provides functionality to sync books (.epub, .pdf ...) to cloud, but they are just pushed to cloud and this is the end of the story. They will not end up on your other device. So you need to do it like this:  Create a backup of the Moon+ main folder. Just in case. Many android file manages let you
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Managing the Eurozone

Reading about Sarkzoy, Merkel to invite Van Rompuy to head Eurozone I must say I liked the idea 18 months ago. From a paper published in European View Volume 9, Number 1, 79-92 , DOI: 10.1007/s12290-010-0117-3. Enhance economic coordination. This is a logical requirement to maintain monetary integration. The crisis has shown its mechanisms should be taken much more seriously. In the enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact the Commission should take advantage of the new provisions in the Lisbon treaty. The pact should be extended with supervision of private debt and the balance of payments. Because economic coordination calls for measures in the member states, the European Council should take the lead in shaping coordinated economic policy and the Commission in overseeing it. The coordination in the Monetary Union should be particularly strong and take place at a prime ministerial level (underlined today). At the time (and now as well) the Monetary Union was handled by an almo
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Council on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Too Little Too Late

I have been involved in publishing on the World-Wide-Web since 1992 and with scholarly publishing since 1995, also as a co-editor of a peer-reviewed journal ITcon and a coordinator of a framework program SciX, that was studying the topic in depth. The bottom line is that in the scientific publishing process there is a decreasing value added by the publishers. The research is funded by the governments or the industry, performed by the researchers, papers are written and reviewed by them for free, only at the very end a publisher comes along that takes over the copyright, publishes the work and sells the journal at great expense to the community that created and edited the content for free. At the Competitiveness (Internal market, Industry and Research) Council meeting in Brussels, on 22 and 23 November 2007 a conclusion has been reached on scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation . It recognizes: the major contribution of universities, internati
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