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Aims: Prolonged screen time (ST) is a potential concern for poor wellbeing. This study aimed to examine the associations of different types of ST with life satisfaction among adolescents. Methods: Data were from 380,446 adolescents (aged 11–15 years, 51% girls) across 37 European and North American countries who completed the 2010 and 2014 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children surveys. Participants reported h/day during free time spent on television, electronic games, and computer/other devices. Life satisfaction was assessed using a 10-point scale (low life satisfaction ⩽5). Results: Generalized additive modelling showed non-linear associations for each ST type, with low life satisfaction increasing monotonically for >1 h/day of electronic gaming or computer/other device and >2 h/day of watching television. Multilevel multivariable modelling showed that >4 h/day of watching television was associated with 26% higher odds for boys (OR 1.26; 95% CI:1.21–1.32) and 52% higher odds for girls (1.52; 1.46–1.59) of low life satisfaction than for ⩽1 h/day of television. Electronic gaming >4 h/day was associated with low life satisfaction with odds 42% higher in boys (1.42, 1.36–1.48) and 69% higher in girls (1.69, 1.61–1.76). A similar association was found for >4 h/day of computer/other device for boys (1.43, 1.37–1.49) and girls (1.71, 1.65–1.77). Conclusions: Low levels of ST may be beneficial; however, prolonged periods are associated with low life satisfaction among adolescents, in particular among girls. Results support ⩽2 h/day restriction of ST and highlight research is needed to understand underlying mechanisms of ST and wellbeing, which may not reflect active versus passive content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents information on the audit of submitted unsolicited manuscripts for July 2006 to June 2007. He notes the proportion of submission from Great Britain which comprised 48% along with 15% from Europe, and 23% from North America. He mentions their endeavour to maintain standards with the help of several people who assisted them to review papers including Stephen Abbott, Hannah Babad, Doug Altman.

A growing number of bioethicists, policy-makers, legal scholars, patient groups, and other critically involved parties in North America and Europe recently have started calling for a new ethical principle to gather participants into clinical and genetics research. While long-prevailing regimes of consent have held that people participate in the research process out of `altruism' (and hence do not merit more than nominal payment for their participation), the increasingly visible profits accruing to bioscience researchers, companies, and universities suggest that this research contract is producing a stark asymmetry. A move is afoot, therefore, to develop a principle of benefit-sharing through which to guarantee some form of returns to research subjects. This paper tracks some of the implications of the rise of this new ethic, tracing its travels from the world of bioprospecting to clinical and genetics research, and exploring how and why benefit-sharing matters to Latourian notions of science as politics. What might it mean, both for bioscience and for our ideas about politics and publics more generally, to think of research not just as a mode of ‘speaking for’, in Latourian terms, but as a mode of giving back? I argue that in shifting the problem from one of dialogue to one of distribution, benefit-sharing proposals are also implicated in the constitution of the biosciences' publics in new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a report from the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development on the promotion of social and economic equalities. It presents several regional perspectives including the recognition of social development activity in Africa, the formal regulation of social work in Asia Pacific countries including Australia, Japan and South Korea, and the apparent decline the quality of service under social work and welfare across Europe following the financial crisis in 2008-2009.

We examine the conceptions of science communication, especially in relation to “public engagement with science” (PES), evident in the literature and websites of science research funding bodies in Europe, North America, South America, Asia and Oceania, and Africa. The analysis uses a fourfold classification of science communication to situate these conceptions: professional, deficit, consultative and deliberative. We find that all bodies engage in professional communication (within the research community); however, engagement with the broader community is variable. Deficit (information dissemination) models still prevail but there is evidence of movement towards more deliberative, participatory models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1892, ten years into the fifth international cholera epidemic that lasted from 1881 to 1896, fear of cholera in North America, particularly in Toronto, was full blown. Cholera had been raging in the Middle East, India, and Europe, and in Russia alone there were an estimated 300,000 deaths, but the disease had yet to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Maritime traffic of immigrants from Europe was continuous, and each migrant ship potentially carried the disease. Doctors, government officials, and politicians were not asking ‘would cholera come?’ but rather, when. In the city of Toronto, no one actually got sick or died from cholera in 1892. However, the crisis and fears of imminent cholera were real. This article documents how future threats became immediate and dire concerns. My task here becomes how to write a history of an event that was shaped by urgency, immediacy, and speculation on the future. My argument will show how the geography of an epidemic is not limited to the presence of disease. How do you theorize a crisis in the absence of an actual disease outbreak? How do you theorize an event that didn’t happen? This article will answer these questions and contribute to recent literature in geography that engages with life, security, and the future. Predictions about both the present and the future were speculative statements, and these statements had effects on cities and nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the flows of physicians and nurses from African countries to Europe and North America using available data sets. It offers a geographic perspective of the magnitude and flow of these skilled health care professionals and highlights positive and negative impacts of the flows on Africa’s development. The article further discusses the coercive and ‘carrot and stick’ strategies that African governments have employed during the past two decades in attempts to stem the tide of the flows of its health care professionals. It concludes by noting that while Africa can do nothing about the pull factors, it can mitigate the push factors by creating conducive working environments to help retain its health care professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlights difficulties and problems in library automation systems migration faced by libraries in the Middle East due to the lack of direct support from their ILS's parent companies. Local vendors lack the required expertise and resources to provide the level of support enjoyed by North American and European user libraries of such systems. In this context, the article presents the experiences of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) Library in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in system migration from the SirsiDynix integrated library system, Horizon, to the same company's newer system, Symphony, which readers may find somewhat different from those of western libraries in terms of planning, execution and time span of the project. A brief 30-year history of library automation at KFUPM is also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades we have witnessed the development of a new type of migration regulation and border control in Europe, North America and Australia. In this new system of controls, the focus is less on the physical crossing of territorial borders and more on the process as a whole; from airline reservations, ticketing and visa applications to monitoring individuals after arriving in the country of destination. The developing mode of border control encompasses a multiplication of borders, a multiplication of actors and a multiplication of data and technology. The question arises: Does the new form of border management in Western countries bring forward the aims of border control more effectively and does it entail new risks (for visitors/migrants)? In this article I will first outline a normative framework for evaluating current developments in border control, building on studies in political theory and the philosophy of law. I then substantiate my claim that a new type of border control is developing and present an overview of three interconnected multiplications. Next, using findings from empirical and legal studies, (likely) consequences of the multiplications will be presented. Linking these consequences to the normative framework allows us, finally, to point out risks of the currently developing system of border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we consider the forms of democratic participation that revolve around issues of religious faith and Islam. The context of such work is one in which a concern with the levels of participation in the political institutions of Western Europe and North America feature prominently in both journalistic and academic debate. The article speaks to debates that are concerned with the efficacy of specific forms of participation. In doing so we argue that we need to think carefully about the forms of social action that constitute participation in the democratic process. We also need to think precisely about definitions of the political with which people engage. If we take the political as a domain in which the ethical settlement of society is contestable, the sorts of mobilization around faith communities that this article describes are clearly a form of political participation. Yet the article argues that the reasons many become involved in these forms of social organization in contemporary East London is precisely because they are seen as less complicit with mainstream political institutions of the British state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in Europe and North America has been central to the development of security as a collective good. Not only has it institutionalized the state as the prime national and international security provider, it has helped to reduce the threat from other actors by either prohibiting or limiting their use of violence. The recent growth of the private security industry appears to undermine this view. Not only are private security firms proliferating at the national level; private military companies are also taking over an increasing range of military functions in both national defence and international interventions. This article seeks to provide an examination of the theoretical and practical implications of the shift from states to markets in the provision of security. Specifically, it discusses how the conceptualization of security as a commodity rather than a collective good affects the meaning and implementation of security in Western democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Global Pollen Database is an example of a successful data synthesis effort that has uses for biogeographical and climate change studies. Results are of interest in many fields of physical geography. Continental-scale maps of past conditions have been used in data-model comparison studies. Time series, developed by averaging quantitative reconstructions from many sites, have indicated that millennial-scale climate variability has affected the vegetation of Europe and North America during the Holocene. Major transitions in the vegetation of Europe and North America occurred at the same time, suggesting the overriding climate effect on the vegetation of both continents. The database can also be used to test biogeographical hypotheses, as several examples illustrate, without the need for collecting new data. Hundreds of studies over the past 50 years show that pollen analysis is more precise than frequently acknowledged: vegetation responds rapidly to climate variations, changes in vegetation are spatially coherent and the taxonomic resolution available in the database is greater than frequently acknowledged. The availability of a public, freely available database enables different analyses to be performed on the same data, thereby ensuring that results are not dependent on methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Europe and North America, policing services, government agencies and private-sector interests have turned increasingly to open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance to address crime, fear of crime and perceptions of social disorder. Although recent scholarly contributions have displaced the traditional explanatory reliance on the panopticon with mechanisms of consumer seduction, ‘post-panoptic’ insights into the establishment of open-street monitoring programmes have not advanced completely beyond the determinism reminiscent of the exercise of panoptical power. With the intention of supplementing the displacement of the panoptic paradigm with a less deterministic and more flexible framework, we conceptualize the establishment of public monitoring programmes in terms of the central role of communications and media in surveillance policy development and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, there has been a steady increase in the use of closed circuit television cameras to monitor public space(s) across Europe and North America. The existing theoretical literature has tended to explain the resort to CCTV in the context of disciplinary subjection. Whereas one set of studies explains CCTV surveillance using the metaphor of panopticon, more recent argumentation has identified CCTV as a ‘social ordering strategy’ which serves the interests of elite/business partnerships through risk-based modes of neoliberal regulation. This article provides insight into the hitherto neglected emotional and affective dimensions of the adoption of CCTV monitoring programs, privileging the role of social antagonism in the consolidation of public surveillance schemes. Developing one explanation for the ascension of open-street monitoring which advances the literature beyond the dominant material-ideological perspective(s), the article engages insights from Foucauldian and psychoanalytic theory to explicate the reciprocal functioning of grievance and risk-based modes of problematization, set in a wider imaginary web of relations, in the symbolic constitution of social disorder as a mechanism of affective governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states is being challenged as national administrations lose their 'gate-keeper-role' between domestic and international politics. But what kind of political system is emerging 'after Westphalia'? The article attempts to answer this question by looking at processes of political institution-building in cross-border regions in Europe and North America. A classification of political institutions is developed which, in a first dimension, distinguishes between instrumental and identity-providing institutions. Second, formal, encompassing and territorially based political institutions are contrasted with informal, specific and non-territorial institutions. Based on this classification, the forms of cross-border collaboration in four border regions in Europe and North America are compared. In Europe, cross-border collaboration is producing another soft, but formalized, comprehensive and territorially defined layer in the European 'multi-level-system'. In North America, by contrast, only informal, specific and non-territorial institutions are evolving across the national borders. Here, the territorially based nation-state is not complemented by similar kinds of polities, but is instead being challenged more fundamentally by new kinds of polities -- transnational socio-economic exchange networks and transnational ideological coalitions which embody enormous transformational potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tree-ring records, six from eastern North America and four from northwestern Europe, are used to develop the first reconstruction of the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The reconstructed series spans the interval AD 1701-1980 and explains 41% of the variance in the NAO over the AD 1874-1980 calibration period. The reconstruction also captures the spectral properties of this index, suggeting that the oscillatory character of the NAO is a long-term feature of the North Atlantic climate system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]