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The book is constructed in the form of an interview of the famous Soviet/Russian sociologist and americanist doctor of sciences N.P. Popov with doctor of sciences B.Z. Doktorov, who developed the genre of scientific memoirs and conducted over a hundred interviews with Russian and American sociologists. The paper covers three main topics. Like any biography, this is a personal story of the author — his youth in the post-war years, the path to the profession of a journalist and sociologist, the worldview of the "sixties". Journalism leads the author, as well as many American pollsters, to the study of public opinion, at first American, continued at the Institute of US and Canadian Studies. He like no other is closely acquainted with the work of leading American pollsters: George Gallup, Louis Harris, Warren Mitofsky, Mervin Field and other gurus. The study of American polling technology and public opinion on socio-political problems and electoral orientations of the population were used by the author in further work at Soviet and Russian centers for the study of public opinion, first of all – at the All-Union center for the study of public opinion (VTSIOM), created in 1988, where he was offered a job by Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Boris Grushin. They also recommended him later as head of the sociological department of the presidential administration right before the 1996 election. The book includes a number of articles by the author on Russian and American public opinion in different years.

This article argues that advocates of deliberative democracy, on the one hand, & direct democracy, on the other, ought to engage with each other's perspectives much more than they have done so far. The ideals & practices associated with these two models can be shown to be mutually supportive &, in some cases, even mutually implicative. By deploying Robert A. Dahl's influential criteria for the democratic process as a baseline, we can begin to see how neither deliberative nor direct approaches taken in isolation can offer an adequate account of democracy. At the same time, we can see how each contributes crucial insights into the demands of democracy, extending & deepening dominant representative or polyarchal theories. Concluding comments sketch innovative institutional designs that exploit deliberative, direct, & representative devices, making connections between them with the aim of enriching our visions of democratic practice. 33 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper consists of an experimental and numerical study into transient behaviour in a residential building. The analysed effects occur by centrifugal pumps when they start with a direct supply (fixed-speed pumps are connected to the service pipe without an atmospheric tank). Direct supply increases the transient effect and places higher demands on the water main. The properties of such an installation were analysed using a hydraulic model in order to detect the most unfavourable scenario. The results were compared to experimental data. Basic hydraulics demonstrates that a pressure drop occurs during the startup. The magnitude mainly depends on the pump capacity. But, numerical and field results show that other variables related to service pipe design could also negatively affect the pressure surge. The study provides water utilities with information about the influence of the different variables on pressure surge magnitude and basic design criteria to minimize these effects. ; This work was supported by the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia of the Spanish Government under Grant No CGL2005-03666. ; Soriano Olivares, J.; Arregui De La Cruz, F.; Espert Alemany, VB.; García-Serra García, J. (2014). Hydraulic transient in residential buildings with a direct pump connection. Urban Water Journal. 2014:1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2014.989860 ; S ; 1 ; 13 ; 2014 ; Basupi, I., Kapelan, Z., & Butler, D. (2013). Reducing life-cycle carbon footprint in the (re)design of water distribution systems using water demand management interventions. Urban Water Journal, 11(2), 91-107. doi:10.1080/1573062x.2012.750374 ; Bergant, A., Tijsseling, A. S., Vítkovský, J. P., Covas, D. I. C., Simpson, A. R., & Lambert, M. F. (2008). Parameters affecting water-hammer wave attenuation, shape and timing—Part 1: Mathematical tools. Journal of Hydraulic Research, 46(3), 373-381. doi:10.3826/jhr.2008.2848 ; Cantor, K. P., Lynch, C. F., Hildesheim, M., Dosemeci, M., Lubin, J., Alavanja, M., & Craun, G. (1998). Drinking ...

This article examines the usage of public advocacy techniques by interest groups at the state level. A mail survey of over 400 groups in three states is used to shed light on this phenomenon. Groups across the sample states report a great deal of public lobbying activity. This is true even among groups in South Carolina-a state where such behavior would not be expected. Findings further suggest that the most important indicators of a group's usage of public advocacy techniques are manifest in a group's resources, which include whether the group has a national affiliate, a political action committee, and a large budget. Business-related groups are not frequent users of public advocacy techniques. A group's participation in direct democracy campaigns is shown to be the strongest determinant of its deployment of public advocacy techniques. The presence of direct democracy in a state may therefore provide additional opportunities to engage in public lobbying campaigns. This finding supports Boehmke's (2005) observations detailing the indirect effects of direct democracy.

1 13 2014 ; S ; This paper consists of an experimental and numerical study into transient behaviour in a residential building. The analysed effects occur by centrifugal pumps when they start with a direct supply (fixed-speed pumps are connected to the service pipe without an atmospheric tank). Direct supply increases the transient effect and places higher demands on the water main. The properties of such an installation were analysed using a hydraulic model in order to detect the most unfavourable scenario. The results were compared to experimental data. Basic hydraulics demonstrates that a pressure drop occurs during the startup. The magnitude mainly depends on the pump capacity. But, numerical and field results show that other variables related to service pipe design could also negatively affect the pressure surge. The study provides water utilities with information about the influence of the different variables on pressure surge magnitude and basic design criteria to minimize these effects. This work was supported by the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia of the Spanish Government under Grant No CGL2005-03666. Soriano Olivares, J.; Arregui De La Cruz, F.; Espert Alemany, VB.; García-Serra García, J. (2014). Hydraulic transient in residential buildings with a direct pump connection. Urban Water Journal. 2014:1-13. doi:10.1080/1573062X.2014.989860 Basupi, I., Kapelan, Z., & Butler, D. (2013). Reducing life-cycle carbon footprint in the (re)design of water distribution systems using water demand management interventions. Urban Water Journal, 11(2), 91-107. doi:10.1080/1573062x.2012.750374 Bergant, A., Tijsseling, A. S., Vítkovský, J. P., Covas, D. I. C., Simpson, A. R., & Lambert, M. F. (2008). Parameters affecting water-hammer wave attenuation, shape and timing—Part 1: Mathematical tools. Journal of Hydraulic Research, 46(3), 373-381. doi:10.3826/jhr.2008.2848 Cantor, K. P., Lynch, C. F., Hildesheim, M., Dosemeci, M., Lubin, J., Alavanja, M., & Craun, G. (1998). Drinking Water Source and Chlorination ...

AbstractChange agents play important roles in the diffusion of policy innovation. Scholars argue that the career paths of change agents could facilitate the diffusion of innovation through network‐based mechanisms of portable innovation or policy wormholes, but have not fully distinguished between direct and indirect connections inherently important in a leadership transfer network. This study proposes an indirect portable innovation hypothesis and an indirect policy wormhole hypothesis to highlight the effects of leadership transfer networks through indirect network connections, extending the agent network diffusion (AND) model. We test the hypotheses empirically with the diffusion of local financial subsidy policies for new energy vehicles (NEVs) among cities in China from 2009 to 2016. The results confirm the effects of direct and indirect portable innovation and policy wormholes.

Using a new dataset of Italian publicly traded companies between 1994 and 2008, this paper aims to quantify the value of different types of political connections. Conducting an event study on stock returns, we examine how the stocks of connected companies perform before and after the politicians to whom they are connected are either elected to Parliament, or appointed as government ministers. First, we check whether political connections in general lead to abnormally positive returns. Then, we ask whether political connections have a different effect on stock returns, depending on whether companies have politicians themselves (direct connection) or some of their relatives (indirect connection) among their administrators. Finally, we test the hypothesis that connections are effective only when the politicians are members of the governing coalition. Contrary to most studies, political connections are not always associated with positive stock returns. Taking stock performance as a proxy for the benefits of connections, we conclude that only certain political connections are in fact valuable to companies. Being connected with the (future) governing coalition has the predicted positive effect, whereas gaining or maintaining a connection with the opposition coalition has no effect, or even a negative effect. Also, only indirect connections are found to increase the company's value, while direct connections are not. However, given the size and composition of our sample, we cannot confidently conclude that indirect connections do differ from direct ones.

Tactile sensors are basically arrays of force sensors that are intended to emulate the skin in applications such as assistive robotics. Local electronics are usually implemented to reduce errors and interference caused by long wires. Realizations based on standard microcontrollers, Programmable Systems on Chip (PSoCs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been proposed by the authors for the case of piezoresistive tactile sensors. The solution employing FPGAs is especially relevant since their performance is closer to that of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) than that of the other devices. This paper presents an implementation of such an idea for a specific sensor. For the purpose of comparison, the circuitry based on the other devices is also made for the same sensor. This paper discusses the implementation issues, provides details regarding the design of the hardware based on the three devices and compares them. ; This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government under contracts TEC2006-12376 and TEC2009-14446.

The author argues that direct election intensified existing electoral incentives in the early-twentieth-century Senate, shifting the audience for senators' reelection efforts with measurable behavioral consequences. The author examines patterns of bill sponsorship, roll-call participation, and party voting in the decades surrounding the Seventeenth Amendment's ratification, a time when originally elected and originally selected senators served side by side. The author finds evidence of increased sponsorship and participation among originally elected senators. Comparing behavioral patterns before and after the constitutional amendment also reveals other important behavioral shifts toward a mass audience in the post-amendment period, including a tendency to increase constituency bill sponsorship immediately before reelection and a strengthening of the link between state partisanship and senators' party support voting.