This study investigates the effect of participative political institutions (PPIs) that emerged in many central European cities from the late 13th century. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on newly compiled long-run data for the existence of different types of PPIs in 104 cities in the Holy Roman Empire. The effect of both an overall index of participativeness of political institutio...

DURING World War II, the US Army Quartermaster Corps established a Climatic Research Laboratory on the second floor of an old building of the Pacific Mills in Lawrence, MA, on the banks of the Merrimac River. The mission of this organization was to test equipment, particularly clothing, for the use of troops in the field, and the Pacific Mills had been chosen because it housed climatically cont...

Years ago I used to worry about the degree to which I had specialized. Vision is limited enough, yet I was not really working on vision, for I hardly made contact with visual sensations, except as signals, nor with the nervous pathways, nor the structures of the eye, except the retina. Actually, my studies involved only the rods and cones of the retina, and in them only the visual pigments. A s...

Research on work-family conflict has focused on individuals, and little is known as to how spouses perceive each other’s work-family conflict and how inaccuracies of such perceptions relate to relationship quality. Using a national sample of dual-earner married and cohabiting couples (N = 545), we found that over half of spouses overestimate or underestimate each other’s work-family conflict. H...

Where do intimal smooth muscle cells (SMCs) come from? For many years, the idea that intimal SMCs originated from the underlying media went unchallenged.1 Then, reports2,3 began to appear that up to half of the SMCs in the intima of atherosclerotic plaques and injured arteries arose from circulating progenitor cells of bone marrow origin. This new view of intimal SMC formation was potentially i...

The Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb received 621 reports of possible adverse drugs reactions on Diane-35® . Of all reports, 388 were received after media attention. Of the 309 reports of thromboembolic adverse drugs reactions, 18 cases were fatal. In 31 cases the thromboembolic adverse drugs reaction was initially not recognized as such. The analysis and the turmoil of the 'Diane affair' gave ri...

Mourning is a process of social disengagement. In our modern society, however, the influence of social and religious institutions on the process of mourning has significantly diminished and been partially replaced by mental health clinics. Given the latter's penchant for the intrapsychic view, the perspective on mourning has become reduced to the individual. These trends are clearly reflected i...