European cities, in particular major cities with strong economies, attract immigrants from all over the world. As a result, urban populations have become increasingly heterogeneous in ethnic, cultural, and religious terms. The housing of migrants is a central issue that affects quality of life in general. Besides finding employment and gaining access to good education it remains a crucial aspec...

This paper describes three object-oriented design patterns local serialization, global serialization and recovery and their integration to support atomic objects. The paper emphasizes the policies each pattern offers and the heterogeneity of policies resulting from their integration. The policies supported by the patterns include: pessimistic and optimistic serialization; static, dynamic and hy...

In a recent editorial in Biostatistics, Peng (2009) introduced a system for making data and computer code from papers in the journal publicly available so that other researchers can reproduce the statistical analyses in the paper. The editors explain in a short accompanying note (Diggle and Zeger, 2009) that ‘we wish to encourage the practice of making research published in the journal reproduc...

The effectiveness of immigrant integration policies has gained considerable attention across Western democracies dealing with ethnically and culturally diverse societies. However, the findings on what type of policy produces more favourable integration outcomes remain inconclusive. The conflation of normative and analytical assumptions on integration is a major challenge for causal analysis of ...

Like Archimedes who demanded a place to stand so that he could move the Earth, scientific journals also need a firm point to stand on. We use this example because it stresses the importance of determining the journal’s specific research field by editorial policies. One of the basic strategies for medical journals is to define their scope, which helps them to target specific readership, attract ...

Statistical significance tests (SSTs) have been the object of much controversy among social scientists. Proponents have hailed SSTs as an objective means for minimizing the likelihood that chance factors have contributed to research results; critics have both questioned the logic underlying SSTs and bemoaned the widespread misapplication and misinterpretation of the results of these tests. The ...

Policy integration is a processes by which a particular policy, and the objectives, principles and values on which it is based, is intentionally integrated into a whole – a broader and more holistic set of policies – where the former did not previously exist. We may call this whole the integer, a term used in mathematics for a whole number. The integer denotes the broader set of policies of a p...