Twenty-eight national elections for a Parliament in constant evolution. European Policy Brief No. 26, March 2014

In the City, the citizen is king. At least theoretically. In the European City currently being built around twenty-eight national democracies, the citizen will soon be called upon, in May, to democratically elect his or her representative in the European Parliament for the next five years. Since the very first election of Members of the European Parliament by direct universal suffrage in 1979, spectacular progress has been made by the “European Economic Community” that we now all know as the European Union. And the powers vested in citizen representatives are equally impressive. But there is a real possibility that European citizens will turn their backs on the upcoming European elections like never before. Why?

Toward 2000: opportunities in transportation evolution.

Mode of access: Internet.

The ancient classical drama; a study in literary evolution intended for readers in English and in the original,

"Courses of reading": p. [458]-460.

Women and economics; a study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution,

Mode of access: Internet.

Intermediate types among primitive folk; a study in social evolution

Pt. 1 originally published in the American Journal of Religious Psychology, 1911, and in the Revue d'Ethnographie et de Sociologie, 1911

The making of Hawaii; a study in social evolution,

Bibliography: p. 257-262.

The function of socialization in social evolution

Mode of access: Internet.

Henri Bergson; a study in radical evolution,

Mode of access: Internet.

Religion & art; a study in the evolution of sculpture, painting and architecture,

Translation of: Religione e arte figurata.

Functional promoter analysis using an approach based on an in vitro evolution strategy

In vitro evolution imitates the natural evolution of genes and has been very successfully applied to the modification of coding sequences, but it has not yet been applied to promoter sequences. We propose an alternative method for functional promoter analysis by applying an in vitro evolution scheme consisting of rounds of error-prone PCR, followed by DNA shuffling and selection of mutant promoter activities. We modified the activity in embryogenic sugarcane cells of the promoter region of the Goldfinger isolate of banana streak virus and obtained mutant promoter sequences that showed an average mutation rate of 2.5% after applying one round of error-prone PCR and DNA shuffling. Selection and sequencing of promoter sequences with decreased or unaltered activity allowed us to rapidly map the position of one cis-acting element that influenced promoter activity in embryogenic sugarcane cells and to discover neutral mutations that did not affect promoter Junction. The selective-shotgun approach of this promoter analysis method immediately after the promoter boundaries have been defined by 5' deletion analysis dramatically reduces the labor associated with traditional linker-scanning deletion analysis to reveal the position of functional promoter domains. Furthermore, this method allows the entire promoter to be investigated at once, rather than selected domains or nucleotides, increasing the, prospect of identifying interacting promoter regions.

An analysis of relational complexity in an air traffic control conflict detection task

Theoretical analyses of air traffic complexity were carried out using the Method for the Analysis of Relational Complexity. Twenty-two air traffic controllers examined static air traffic displays and were required to detect and resolve conflicts. Objective measures of performance included conflict detection time and accuracy. Subjective perceptions of mental workload were assessed by a complexity-sorting task and subjective ratings of the difficulty of different aspects of the task. A metric quantifying the complexity of pair-wise relations among aircraft was able to account for a substantial portion of the variance in the perceived complexity and difficulty of conflict detection problems, as well as reaction time. Other variables that influenced performance included the mean minimum separation between aircraft pairs and the amount of time that aircraft spent in conflict.

Gender differentials in the evolution of cigarette smoking habits in a general European adult population from 1993-2003

Background: Describe the recent evolution of cigarette smoking habits by gender in Geneva, where incidence rates of lung cancer have been declining in men but increasing in women. Methods: Continuous cross-sectional surveillance of the general adult ( 35 - 74 yrs) population of Geneva, Switzerland for 11 years ( 1993 - 2003) using a locally-validated smoking questionnaire, yielding a representative random sample of 12,271 individuals ( 6,164 men, 6,107 women). Results: In both genders, prevalence of current cigarette smoking was stable over the 11-year period, at about one third of men and one quarter of women, even though smoking began at an earlier age in more recent years. Older men were more likely to be former smokers than older women. Younger men, but not women, tended to quit smoking at an earlier age. Conclusion: This continuous ( 1993 - 2003) risk factor surveillance system, unique in Europe, shows stable prevalence of smoking in both genders. However, sharp contrasts in age-specific prevalence of never and former smoking and of ages at smoking initiation indicate that smoking continues a long-term decline in men but has still not reached its peak in women.