When our democracies are broken, we need to ‘fix’ societies. There no quick fixes, but the good news is that society resilient and people will make new connections. We look better for those ‘small democratic wins’ learn from them improve systems. This seems be core message of book ‘Mending Democracies’, sits within a critical pragmatist approach starts analysis deficits offer language insights ...

This paper describes a method to build artificial societies that can dynamically expand themselves from bottom-up, in order to cope with environmental changes. This method is then applied to model the evolutions through the first stages of human societies, inspired by social science theories.

B.M.A. (GLOUCESTERSHIRE BRANCH) Hon. Secretary: Dr. H. G. Scott-Kerr, 29 Leckhampton Road, Cheltenham 13th Oct.: Mr. J. D. J. Freeman. Presidential Address: "A Naval Opthalmolog'3' Ceylon", and a film, colour and sound, "Land of the Buddha" Gloucester. 10th Nov.: Representatives' Report. Financial Statement. Film. Cheltenham. _ ^ 8th Dec.: Guest Speaker: Mr Brian Inglis, Editor of The Spectator...

Life expectancy at birth now stands at 79 years in France, according to vital registration data. Mortality data for the Ancien Régime can be found in the parish registers in which local priests recorded baptisms, marriages and burials. They are found in a few parishes from the end of the 15th century, and were brought into general use by a royal decree of 1667. The demographers who first began ...

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The future of pensions has been a prominent issue in French public debate for at least fifteen years. Two key events were the release of the report entitled “Aging in Solidarity” (Vieillir solidaires) by the State Planning Commission (Commissariat Général du Plan) in 1986 [1, 2] and that of the “White Paper on Pensions” (Livre blanc sur les retraites) in 1991 [3]. Since then, the topic has stay...

The first quarter of 2004 found French public research laboratories in unprecedented turmoil, partly from the budget cuts made since 2002, and partly from 550 permanent civil service jobs being turned into fixed-term contract appointments. It is this latter minimal cost-saving measure around which the debate has crystallized. For the government, it reflected an aim to see greater diversificatio...

A the end of 2003 the human population crossed a historic, but so far little noticed, threshold: more than 50 per cent of the world’s people now live in a country or a region in which fertility is below 2.1 children per woman, the level conventionally regarded as indicating long-run replacement of the population (see boxes 1 and 2) [1]. A convenient way to illustrate this is to plot a curve tha...