Overtourism and the Policy Agenda: From Destinations to the European Union - Balancing Growth and Sustainability. Bruges Political Research Papers 83/2021.

For twenty years now, sustainable tourism has become a feature of tourism policy in Europe. However, in just a few years, the neologism “overtourism” has become a buzzword in the media, reflecting and encouraging an increasing politicisation of the issue. Some of the measures aimed at tackling the impacts of overtourism call into question the growth paradigm according to which tourism policies have been framed, and sometimes even create tensions with European single market law. This paper hypothesises a difficulty for overtourism to make it on the European policy agenda, given its antagonistic nature towards the growth paradigm on which tourism policy is based. It also hypothesises that the European institutions will nevertheless take up the matter, because of the political context and of pressure of various entrepreneurs. Building on a qualitative research methodology and on the results of semidirective interviews, this paper analyses the extent to which there is an awareness of the impacts of overtourism at the European level, looking through the lens of historical institutionalism, policy-cycle and governance theories. It concludes that despite a strong European dimension, reaching the European policy agenda has not been an easy task for overtourism, especially because of the centrality of the growth paradigm in tourism policy, which resulted in a pathdependency. Nonetheless, the fight against overtourism has both benefited from a relative window of opportunity and from a context favouring incremental change in the mindset of the institutions. The growing importance of the sustainability paradigm seems to have enabled the integration of this fight, through the pre-existing sustainable tourism framework, on the European policy agenda. Some questions remain, however, regarding the compatibility of the fight against overtourism with a still predominantly growth-based approach

Buying or Selling a Horse in France: An Introduction to the Legal Context Proposed to the Attention of U.S. Equine Lawyers

International audienc

Induction and the discovery of the causes of scurvy: a computational reconstruction

AbstractThe work presented here addresses the problem of inductive reasoning in medical discoveries. The discovery of the causes of scurvy is studied and simulated using computational means. An inductive algorithm is successful in simulating some essential steps in the progress of the understanding of the disease and also allows us to simulate the false reasoning of previous centuries through the introduction of some a priori knowledge inherited from pre-clinical medicine. These results confirm the good results obtained by other AI researchers with an inductive approach of discovery, and illustrate the importance of the social and cultural environment on the way the inductive inference is performed and on its outcome

The improved Clinical Global Impression Scale (iCGI): development and validation in depression

BACKGROUND: The Clinical Global Impression scale (CGI) is frequently used in medical care and clinical research because of its face validity and practicability. This study proposes to improve the reliability of the Clinical Global Impression (CGI) scale in depressive disorders by the use of a semi-standardized interview, a new response format, and a Delphi procedure. METHODS: Thirty patients hospitalised for a major depressive episode were filmed at T1 (first week in hospital) and at T2 (2 weeks later) during a 5' specific interview. The Hamilton Depressive Rating Scale and the Symptom Check List were also rated. Eleven psychiatrists rated these videos using either the usual CGI response format or an improved response format, with or without a Delphi procedure. RESULTS: The new response format slightly improved (but not significantly) the interrater agreement, the Delphi procedure did not. The best results were obtained when ratings by 4 independent raters were averaged. In this situation, intraclass correlation coefficients were about 0.9. CONCLUSION: The Clinical Global Impression is a useful approach in psychiatry since it apprehends patients in their entirety. This study shows that it is possible to quantify such impressions with a high level of interrater agreement

Le véritable et unique méthode de naviger par le quartier d'or laquelle est provvée d'une manière si facile et demontrée...

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Cultura. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 200

Adversarial Imitation Learning On Aggregated Data

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns an optimal policy, given some expert demonstrations, thus avoiding the need for the tedious process of specifying a suitable reward function. However, current methods are constrained by at least one of the following requirements. The first one is the need to fully solve a forward Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem in the inner loop of the algorithm, which might be prohibitively expensive in many complex environments. The second one is the need for full trajectories from the experts, which might not be easily available. The third one is the assumption that the expert data is homogeneous rather than a collection from various experts or possibly alternative solutions to the same task. Such constraints make IRL approaches either not scalable or not usable on certain existing systems. In this work we propose an approach which removes these requirements through a dynamic, adaptive method called Adversarial Imitation Learning on Aggregated Data (AILAD). It learns conjointly both a non linear reward function and the associated optimal policy using an adversarial framework. The reward learner only uses aggregated data. Moreover, it generates diverse behaviors producing a distribution over the aggregated data matching that of the experts

A method for biomarker measurements in peripheral blood mononuclear cells isolated from anxious and depressed mice: β-arrestin 1 protein levels in depression and treatment

A limited number of biomarkers in the central and peripheral systems which are known may be useful for diagnosing major depressive disorders and predicting the effectiveness of antidepressant (AD) treatments. Since 60% of depressed patients do not respond adequately to medication or are resistant to ADs, it is imperative to delineate more accurate biomarkers. Recent clinical studies suggest that β-arrestin 1 levels in human mononuclear leukocytes may be an efficient biomarker. If potential biomarkers such as β-arrestin 1 could be assessed from a source such as peripheral blood cells, then they could be easily monitored and used to predict therapeutic responses. However, no previous studies have measured β-arrestin 1 levels in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in anxious/depressive rodents. This study aimed to develop a method to detect β-arrestin protein levels through immunoblot analyses of mouse PBMCs isolated from whole blood. In order to validate the approach, β-arrestin levels were then compared in naïve, anxious/depressed mice, and anxious/depressed mice treated with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (fluoxetine, 18 mg/kg/day in the drinking water). The results demonstrated that mouse whole blood collected by submandibular bleeding permitted isolation of enough PBMCs to assess circulating proteins such as β-arrestin 1. β-Arrestin 1 levels were successfully measured in healthy human subject and naïve mouse PBMCs. Interestingly, PBMCs from anxious/depressed mice showed significantly reduced β-arrestin 1 levels. These decreased β-arrestin 1 expression levels were restored to normal levels with chronic fluoxetine treatment. The results suggest that isolation of PBMCs from mice by submandibular bleeding is a useful technique to screen putative biomarkers of the pathophysiology of mood disorders and the response to ADs. In addition, these results confirm that β-arrestin 1 is a potential biomarker for depression