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Atherosclerosis is a chronic and often progressive disease of the wall of the arterial vasculature. The term atherosclerosis is derived from the Greek words "athero" meaning gruel or paste and "skleros" meaning stiff or hard. Atherosclerosis is considered a major clinical problem, which underlies most ischemic events of both the heart as well as the brain. It is the result of the Western lifestyle and can start very early in life even in persons without a strong genetic disposition like untreated familial hypercholesteremia. From the second decade onwards, the disease progresses more rapidly. The clinical silence of atherosclerosis is often broken between the 3rd and 5th decade, when patients present with ischemic complaints of e.g. heart and brain. Despite the continuing decrease in cardiovascular disease (CVD) associated death over the last decade, it still is one of the main causes of death in The Netherlands, accounting for 30,7% of total deaths in 2007. As a result, the socio-economic consequences remain huge. It has been estimated that in the European Union annual CVD-associated costs are €169 billion, of which €105 billion are costs directly related to healthcare. Historically, atherosclerosis was simply considered as an accumulation of lipids in the vascular wall. In the l

In domains where users are exposed to large variations in visuo-spatial features among designs, they often spend excess time searching for common elements (features) on an interface. This article contributes individualised predictive models of visual search, and a computational approach to restructure graphical layouts for an individual user such that features on a new, unvisited interface can be found quicker. It explores four technical principles inspired by the human visual system (HVS) to predict expected positions of features and create individualised layout templates: (I) the interface with highest frequency is chosen as the template; (II) the interface with highest predicted recall probability (serial position curve) is chosen as the template; (III) the most probable locations for features across interfaces are chosen (visual statistical learning) to generate the template; (IV) based on a generative cognitive model, the most likely visual search locations for features are chosen (visual sampling modelling) to generate the template. Given a history of previously seen interfaces, we restructure the spatial layout of a new (unseen) interface with the goal of making its features more easily findable. The four HVS principles are implemented in Familiariser, a web browser that automatically restructures webpage layouts based on the visual history of the user. Evaluation of Familiariser (using visual statistical learning) with users provides first evidence that our approach reduces visual search time by over 10%, and number of eye-gaze fixations by over 20%, during web browsing tasks. ; The project has partially received funding from the Academy of Finland project COMPUTED and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 637991).

This paper studies the impact of national fiscal rules on government size as measured by the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product. We develop a model of the budgetary process and show that a common pool problem may arise which can be mitigated through fiscal rules. We test the model's predictions using a novel time-series cross-section dataset of 27 European Union members for the period between 1990 and 2011. Corroborating the model, we find that fiscal rules have a negative impact on government size. Contrasting the model, their impact becomes smaller as the number of ministers increases.

The article presents a feature of the communist movement in Europe following the collapse of the Soviet model of socialism at the end of the 20th century. The primary focus is given to the radical left parties represented in the European Parliament. In this context, the historical genesis of the establishment and functioning of the European parliamentary political group, the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL), is analyzed and characterized. Within the European Parliament, this political group serves as an important unifying element for political parties with socialist and communist orientations. The scope of activity of this political group determines the main values of the European radical left, which can be considered as one of the alternatives to neoliberalism and social democracy.

The conception of local self-government contained in the law of March 8, 1990, refers to the tradition of Polish self-government and yet meets the requirements provided for in the European Local Government Charter. The .atbove makes it possible, on the one hand, to return to the institutions previously known to the Polish law, and, on the other, to compare them with their European counterparts. The re-instatement of self-government has brought back to light the issue of duality of public administration and its division into government and selfgovernment administration. In view of the principle in force in the former political regime namely the principle of "unity of government on the level of a locality, the solution to the problem of duality is far from easy". New legislation creates grounds for a new, structurally diversified model of state administration. At the Województwo level (the highest unit of local organization), there operates a nominated official, Wojewoda, the organ of government administration, whereas at a local level — in gmina — the ,,basic form of organization of public activity" is local self-government. The duality of administration manifests itself in many legislative acts. The most important of them are: the Act on Local Self-Government and the Act on Government Administration; mention should also be made about the Act on division of tasks and powers between various organs representing basically different types of administration, etc. Some issues posed by the model require further amendments. Problems of particular gravity arise in connection with the question of regions as subsidiary units of basic administrative division of the country, created to further the tasks of government administration at a local level, the absence of deep structural reforms at a central government level, the absence of a clear determination of position of government administration vis-a vis self-government, disputable budgetary and financial solutions, etc. All this leads to the conclusion that the legislative conception of duality of state administration is not sufficiently clear. Neverheless, it is beyond doubt that the new structure of administration is presently in its formative period. ; Digitalizacja i deponowanie archiwalnych zeszytów RPEiS sfinansowane przez MNiSW w ramach realizacji umowy nr 541/P-DUN/2016

AbstractThe assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.