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Even though the average age at first childbirth has been increasing and education and employment options for women have improved immensely in recent decades, in France, unlike in other European countries, these developments have not led to a major increase in childlessness. Birth rates remain high and the share of the population who are childless is among the lowest in western Europe. This article discusses the historical roots as well as the societal conditions, institutional regulations, and political decisions that may explain the low levels of childlessness in France. We also discuss differences in rates of childlessness by education and occupation. Using a large representative survey on family life that was conducted parallel to the French census in 2011, we study the fertility histories of men and women born between the 1920s and late 1970s. We find that while the differences in fertility by level of education seem to have declined, having a higher education is still an obstacle to parenthood for women. For men, having a low educational and occupational status is associated with a greater likelihood of being childless. A large part of the differences in rates of childlessness between social groups can be traced back to the men and women who have never lived in a couple relationship; thus, partnership status can be regarded as a decisive parameter of the extent of childlessness.

Within the ROLE European research project, an interoperability framework has been developed to support self-regulated learning and to enable learners and teachers to create personal learning environments (PLEs). This framework enables learners to assemble tools, services and resources together to create their own custom learning environment. This chapter discusses the overall architecture, the specific components of this architecture and the platforms in which we have integrated the ROLE framework. Additionally, we share the lessons learned from the design and development. Furthermore, we discuss our experience with the ROLE development infrastructure and our collaboration within the ROLE development team and with several open-source projects.

The Internet today consist of many heterogeneous infrastructures, owned and maintained by separate and potentially competing administrative authorities. On top of this a wide variety of applications has different requirements with regard to quality, reliability and security from the underlying networks. The number of stakeholders who participate in provisioning of network and services is growing. More demanding applications (like eGovernment, eHealth, critical and emergency infrastructures) are on the rise. Therefore we assume that these two basic characteristics, a) multiple authorities and b) applications with very diverse demands, are likely to stay or even increase in the Internet of the future. In such an environment federation and virtualization of resources are key features that should be supported in a future Internet. The ability to form slices across domains that meet application specific requirements enables many of the desired features in future networks. In this paper, we present a Multipath Routing Slice experiment that we performed over multiple federated testbeds. We combined capabilities from different experimental facilities, since one single testbed did not offer all the required capabilities. This paper summarizes the conducted experiment, our experience with the usability of federated testbeds and our experience with the use of advanced measurement technologies within experimental facilities. We believe that this experiment provides a good example use case for the future Internet itself because we assume that the Internet will consist of multiple different infrastructures that have to be combined in application specific overlays or routing slices, very much like the experimental facilities we used in this experiment. We also assume that the growing demands will push towards a much better measurement instrumentation of the future Internet. The tools used in our experiment can provide a starting point for this.