Satisfaction with Democracy: When Government by the People Brings Electoral Winners and Losers Together

Research on direct democracy is often entirely sub-national research focusing on a single country or cross-national with limited variance in direct democratic institutions. That has consequences for the scope and opportunity to understand and learn about direct democratic institutions, in particular how they interact with representative democracy. In this paper we use a subnational cross-country comparative perspective to delve deeper into the relationship between direct democracy and individual satisfaction with democracy. To that end we propose a measure of direct democratic institutions for 101 sub-national units that allows to measure the extent of these institutions across various contexts. Comparing the subnational units of the United States, Switzerland, Germany and Austria, we do not find a general relationship between direct democratic institutions and democratic satisfaction. However, we find that direct democracy has the potential to decrease the difference between electoral winners and losers, whereby this mechanism can be observed across different representative systems

The impact of joint attention on the sound-induced flash illusions

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration

Une occupation Néolithique final à Saint Maximin (83),<br />le site du Chemin d'Aix.

International audienceThe Chemin d'Aix site (Saint-Maximin, Var, France) established at the foothill of the Mont Aurélien mountain range was excavated in 2003 within the framework of a salvage archaeology project. This venture has delivered remains from several occupations : Middle Neolithic, Late Neolithic, First Iron Age, Late Antiquity and early Middle-Ages. This note brings forward the existence of an occupation restricted to the extreme end of the Neolithic period in Eastern Provence, an area where human settlement remains badly documented for this period. It is characterised by domestic structures (walls and pits) and by a specific ceramic assemblage which comprises assorted elements of the Rhône-Ouvèze group and the first witnesses of a recent and regional Bell-Beaker character of the Rhodano-Provençal type.Le site du Chemin d'Aix (Saint-Maximin, Var) implanté en piémont nord de la chaîne du Mont Aurélien, a été fouillé en 2003 dans le cadre d'une opération d'archéologie préventive. L'exploration a livré les témoins de plusieurs occupations : Néolithique moyen Chasséen, Néolithique final, 1er âge du Fer, Antiquité tardive et Haut Moyen Age. Cette notice met en avant l'existence d'une occupation limitée dans le temps attribuable à l'extrême fin du Néolithique en Provence oriental, secteur où l'implantation humaine demeure peu documentée pour cette période. Elle est caractérisée par des aménagements domestiques (murs et fosses) et par un mobilier céramique singulier dans lequel s'associent éléments du groupe Rhône-Ouvèze et premiers témoins d'une ambiance Campaniforme récente régionale de type Rhodano-Provençal

University of Copenhagen Participation in TREC Health Misinformation Track 2020

In this paper, we describe our participation in the TREC Health Misinformation Track 2020. We submitted $11$ runs to the Total Recall Task and 13 runs to the Ad Hoc task. Our approach consists of 3 steps: (1) we create an initial run with BM25 and RM3; (2) we estimate credibility and misinformation scores for the documents in the initial run; (3) we merge the relevance, credibility and misinformation scores to re-rank documents in the initial run. To estimate credibility scores, we implement a classifier which exploits features based on the content and the popularity of a document. To compute the misinformation score, we apply a stance detection approach with a pretrained Transformer language model. Finally, we use different approaches to merge scores: weighted average, the distance among score vectors and rank fusion

Interpreting phylogenetic placements for taxonomic assignment of environmental DNA

Taxonomic assignment of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) is an important bioinformatics step in analyzing environmental sequencing data. Pairwise alignment and phylogenetic-placement methods represent two alternative approaches to taxonomic assignments, but their results can differ. Here we used available colpodean ciliate OTUs from forest soils to compare the taxonomic assignments of VSEARCH (which performs pairwise alignments) and EPA-ng (which performs phylogenetic placements). We showed that when there are differences in taxonomic assignments between pairwise alignments and phylogenetic placements at the subtaxon level, there is a low pairwise similarity of the OTUs to the reference database. We then showcase how the output of EPA-ng can be further evaluated using GAPPA to assess the taxonomic assignments when there exist multiple equally likely placements of an OTU, by taking into account the sum over the likelihood weights of the OTU placements within a subtaxon, and the branch distances between equally likely placement locations. We also inferred the evolutionary and ecological characteristics of the colpodean OTUs using their placements within subtaxa. This study demonstrates how to fully analyze the output of EPA-ng, by using GAPPA in conjunction with knowledge of the taxonomic diversity of the clade of interest

Different effects of tocolytic medication on blood pressure and blood pressure amplification

Background The importance of tocolysis has been discussed extensively. Beta-2 adrenoceptor agonistic drugs like ritodrine have been the reference tocolytic drugs in most countries. Cardiovascular side-effects are frequent. Atosiban, a newer tocolytic drug, is a competitive antagonist of oxytocin and has fewer cardiovascular side effects. Although large studies exist, there is mainly subjective reporting of adverse reactions with a focus on blood pressure data. Objectives Evaluation of the acute effects of therapeutic doses of ritodrine and atosiban in comparison to placebo on central and peripheral blood pressures, central-to-peripheral blood pressure amplification and the augmentation index (AIx) in healthy non-pregnant female volunteers. Methods A double-blind, randomized, crossover trial was carried out in 20 healthy non-pregnant female volunteers. Hemodynamic measurements were performed under standardized conditions. Results At steady state, central and peripheral pressures did not differ from placebo in the atosiban group. During ritodrine-infusion, central SBP increased by 11% versus placebo (p = 0.012) and peripheral SBP by 10% (p = 0.004). In contrast to atosiban and placebo, blood pressure amplification was absent in the ritodrine group. While the AIx did not change in the atosiban group, with ritodrine, the AIx tended to decrease. Conclusions The present study shows the significant effects of ritodrine on the cardiovascular system. Atosiban has no significant effects and may be an appropriate alternative to tocolyticum, particularly in cardiovascularly complicated pregnancies

Effects of deletion of the prolactin receptor on ovarian gene expression

Prolactin (PRL) exerts pleiotropic physiological effects in various cells and tissues, and is mainly considered as a regulator of reproduction and cell growth. Null mutation of the PRL receptor (R) gene leads to female sterility due to a complete failure of embryo implantation. Pre-implantatory egg development, implantation and decidualization in the mouse appear to be dependent on ovarian rather than uterine PRLR expression, since progesterone replacement permits the rescue of normal implantation and early pregnancy. To better understand PRL receptor deficiency, we analyzed in detail ovarian and corpora lutea development of PRLR-/- females. The present study demonstrates that the ovulation rate is not different between PRLR+/+ and PRLR-/- mice. The corpus luteum is formed but an elevated level of apoptosis and extensive inhibition of angiogenesis occur during the luteal transition in the absence of prolactin signaling. These modifications lead to the decrease of LH receptor expression and consequently to a loss of the enzymatic cascades necessary to produce adequate levels of progesterone which are required for the maintenance of pregnancy

Tunable Single-frequency operation of a diode-pumped Vertical-External Cavity Laser at the Caesium D2 line

International audienceWe report on a diode-pumped vertical external-cavity surface-emitting laser emitting around 852 nm for Cesium atomic clocks experiments. We have designed a 7-quantum-well semiconductor structure optimized for low laser threshold. An output power of 330 mW was achieved for 1.1 W of incident pump power. Furthermore a compact setup was built for low-power single-requency emission. We obtained an output power of 17 mW in a single longitudinal mode, exhibiting both broad (9 nm) and continuous (14 GHz) tunability around the Cesium D2 line. The laser frequency has been stabilized on an atomic transition with residual frequency fluctuations ~ 300 kHz. Through a beatnote experiment the -3 dB laser linewidth has been measured to < 500 kHz over 10 ms