Escherichia coli as a potential hydrocarbon conversion microorganism. Oxidation of aliphatic and aromatic compounds by recombinant E. coli in two-liquid phase (aqueous-organic) systems

The increased interest in the study of hydrocarbon utilizing microorganisms in recent years has been stimulated by the possibility of using their monooxygenases in the selective oxidation of aliphatic and aromatic compounds. As an example, long chain (>C16) n-alkanes are converted to dicarboxylic acids by yeast. This type of bioconversion is useful because the regioselective and stereospecific introduction of oxygen into unactivated organic substrates by classical synthetic chemistry remains very difficult. Zie: General Conclusion

Digital humanities methods in comparative law. Quantitative analysis of a plain text corpus of books to trace the diffusion of legal concepts in public spheres.

Tracing the diffusion of legal concepts between different countries is at the core of comparative law. However, this diffusion is not limited to statutes and cases, but pervades through public spheres. This is visible in published materials of all sorts. How to trace this diffusion in public sphere? If cases are important to reconstruct the logics of diffusion in legislative and judicial spheres, one cannot rely on a limited number of sources to assess its importance in general public spheres. In contrast with highly abstracted library databases, where searches have to be conducted by title and indexed topics, the Google books corpus gives access to plain-text search for a significant share of all the material ever published since the 17th century. I will present in this paper how to conduct analysis on serialized quantitative time series from the Google Books corpus, using GCorpusAnalytics (http://github.com/Erispoe/GCorpusAnalytics), a tool I developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). I will expose an application of this tool for the exploration of the diffusion of direct democracy instruments from Switzerland to the United States at the end of the 19th century. Specifically, I will show how a quantitative analysis of the Google Books corpus reveals that Switzerland was indeed the reference, and not New England, and how we can trace the influence of key literature in the public debate at the time. Additionally, I will present the possibility of querying the Google Case Law corpus in time series

Metropolitan dynamics and institutional fragmentation in the United States, 1950-2010

Since 1950, the United States have witnessed a change in their urban dynamics: the advent of the metropolis. Before, the border was clear between big industrial cities, and small rural communities. At the end of the 19th century, large urban centers started to suburbanize. A key property of American metropolitan areas is that they are institutionally fragmented. There is no metropolitan government with a policy monopole on the area. This fragmentation is the product on an increase in individual mobility and a multiplication of new local governments. In this paper, I will present an overview of the evolution of American metropolitan areas from 1950 to 2010. I will present the growing gap between the space individuals are experiencing in metropolitan areas—a growing space in which they are very mobile—and the space they are citizens of—a space that tends to decrease. There are geographical patterns of fragmentation. Metropolitan areas in the South or in the Great Lakes region tend to be less fragmented than areas in the Northeast or in the Central Midwest. How does this growing fragmentation affect political and civic engagement? There is a generational shift from political to civic engagement, and I will present here reasons and empirical clues why there might also be a spatial shift. Spatial institutional fragmentation may not simply and generally deter political engagement, but deter it only at certain scales and also foster civic engagement

Spatial Democracy, a Capability Approach towards Commensurability

Metropolitanization, through the upscaling of urban systems and lifestyles, changes the political patterns of urban areas. Many models of governance have been proposed both to improve the quality and optimize efficiency of urban policies. However surveys suggest that for the public, what is highly important is democratic appreciation. Those models cannot be differentiated in regards to user satisfaction with the service. We have numerous theories of democracy that are irreconcilable. The individual "in concreto" evaluations of the democratic character of a governance model and its policies are also heterogeneous. We however need to account for that diversity if we are to understand how a governance model is evaluated as democratic. Amartya Sen has proposed the concept of capability as a mean to move from a formal conception of rights and status towards a pragmatic analysis of what individuals are actually able to do. After the spatial turn, identified by Edward Soja, space has acquired the character of a social dimension on its own. Geographers such as Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault have defined sets of concepts to work with it. Democracy theories involve inexplicit spatial capabilities, actions that individuals with their competences and appropriation strategies are actually able to engage with in a specific spatial context. I will examine in this paper how we can identify these capabilities and investigates how and under which conditions they give us a valid tool to commensurate democracy theories that would otherwise stay incomparable

Le People's Rule en Californie

Ce mémoire de master en SHS décrit les outils de démocratie directe en Californie à l'échelle de l'état, du comté et de la municipalité. Il replace l'initiative populaire, le référendum et le rappel dans le contexte institutionnel de l'état de Californie et en dresse les enjeux juridiques

Direct democracy and metropolitan fragmentation in Switzerland and in California

In the beginning of the 20th century, many states in the USA, and especially California among them, implemented semi-direct democracy instruments that were directly inspired by the 1848 Swiss constitution—referendum, popular initiative, recall–to fight extensive corruption and nepotism. After a first rush, the use of these instruments remained of low intensity, until the last decades. In California, as well as in Switzerland, initiatives and referendums drastically gained in popularity, exactly while both states were experiencing a strong trend of metropolitanization. This trend, through the upscaling of urban systems and lifestyles, changes the political patterns of urban areas. The use of local initiatives is strongly correlated with both density and diversity at municipal level, what Jacques Lévy identifies as the urban gradient. During the last decades, they have shifted towards regulation of growth and land-use. I argue that we also see a correlation with the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. More fragmented areas, like San Francisco in California and Zürich in Switzerland, experience more local direct democracy. This result demonstrates the tendency of local direct democracy to localize policy-making, preventing its upscaling at the metropolitan level. Two hypothesis can be drawn. Initiatives can be viewed as a fix for bad politics in large constituencies where aggregation of voter preferences can not be achieved through representative democracy. But they also can be interpreted as the sign of a vivid democratic public sphere