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Distribution by Scientific Domains
Law and Criminology27%
Humanities and Social Sciences27%

Selected Abstracts

At the birth of molecular radiation biology ,

ENVIRONMENTAL AND MOLECULAR MUTAGENESIS, Issue 2-3 2001
Raymond Devoret
Abstract Rational thinking builds on feelings, too. This article starts with a tribute to Richard Setlow, an eminent scientist; it retraces as well some studies in molecular genetics that helped to understand basic questions of radiation biology. In the mid-1950s, the induction of a dormant virus (prophage) by irradiation of its host was an intriguing phenomenon. Soon, it was found that prophage induction results from the inactivation of the prophage repressor. Similarly, a score of induced cellular SOS functions were found to be induced when the LexA repressor is inactivated. Repressor inactivation involves the formation of a newly formed distinctive structure: a RecA-polymer wrapped around single-stranded DNA left by the arrest of replication at damaged sites. By touching this RecA nucleofilament, the LexA repressor is inactivated, triggering the sequential expression of SOS functions. The RecA nucleofilament acts as a chaperone, allowing recombinational repair to occur after nucleotide excision repair is over. The UmuD,C complex, synthesized slowly and parsimoniously, peaks at the end of recombinational repair, ready to be positioned at the tip of a RecA nucleofilament, placing the UmuD,C complex right at a lesion. At this location, UmuD,C prevents recombinational repair, and now acts as an error-prone paucimerase that fills the discontinuity opposite the damaged DNA. Finally, the elimination of lesions from the path of DNA polymerase, allows the resumption of DNA replication, and the SOS repair cycle switches to a normal cell cycle. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 38:135,143, 2001. © 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

Trajectories of Multiculturalism in Germany, the Netherlands and Canada: In Search of Common Patterns

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2010
Elke Winter
In the mid-1990s, Canadian scholarship introduced an important distinction between historically incorporated national minorities and ethnic groups emerging from recent immigration. While the former may be accommodated through federal or multinational arrangements, multiculturalism has come to describe a normative framework of immigrant integration. The distinction between these analytically different types of movements is crucial for Taylor's and Kymlicka's influential theories, but the relations between different types of national and ethnic struggles for rights and recognition have remained unexplored in much of the subsequent scholarly literature. This article starts from a theoretical position where different types of diversity are viewed as highly interdependent in practice. Tracing the trajectories of multiculturalism in three different countries, the article aims to identify common patterns of how changing relations between traditionally incorporated groups affect public perceptions of and state responses to more recent immigration-induced diversity. More specifically, it asks the following question: to what extent does the absence (in Germany), discontinuation (in the Netherlands) and exacerbation (in Canada) of claims on ethnocultural grounds by traditionally incorporated groups influence the willingness of the national majority/ies to grant multicultural rights to immigrants? [source]

Growth and Location of Economic Activity: The Spatial Dynamics of Industries in Canada 1971,2001

GROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2006
MARIO POLÈSE
ABSTRACT A growing literature has accumulated that points to the stability of industrial location patterns. Can this be reconciled with spatial dynamics? This article starts with the premise that demonstrable regularities exist in the manner in which individual industries locate (and relocate) over space. For Canada, spatial distributions of employment are examined for seventy-one industries over a thirty-year period (1971,2001). Industry data is organized by "synthetic regions" based on urban size and distance criteria. "Typical" location patterns are identified for industry groupings. Industrial spatial concentrations are then compared over time using correlation analysis, showing a high degree of stability. Stable industrial location patterns are not, the article finds, incompatible with differential regional growth. Five spatial processes are identified, driving change. The chief driving force is the propensity of dynamic industries to start up in large metro areas, setting off a process of diffusion (for services) and crowding out (for manufacturing), offset by the centralizing impact of greater consumer mobility and falling transport costs. These changes do not, however, significantly alter the relative spatial distribution of most industries over time. [source]

Environmentally-friendly Aspects and Innovative Lightweight Traction System Technologies of the Shinkansen High-speed EMUs

IEEJ TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING, Issue 2 2008
Yoshiyasu Hagiwara Member
Abstract In 1964, the Tokaido Shinkansen marked the start of the world's first commercial service high-speed railway that operates at over 200 km/h. Since then, the Tokaido Shinkansen has demonstrated successful business and technological advancement. With the speeding-up of the Shinkansen, environmental matters such as noise and vibration have become critical issues. Measures taken to counter noise and vibration,such as weight reduction and aerodynamics,also effect global environmental measures to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emission. With the introduction of the Series 300, there was a system change of applying an AC drive system, and the lightweight body realized performance improvement over the earlier Series 0. The high-speed EMUs have readily taken advantage of technological innovation such as those achieved in electronics technology. In particular, an innovative AC drive system comprising a power converter with a GTO thyristor and asynchronous motors realized a high-performance and lightweight traction system for high-speed EMUs in the 1990s. Furthermore, recent innovations in electronics technology, such as low switching loss power devices and high-power permanent magnets, have improved the AC drive systems of the high-speed EMUs of the 21st century. This article starts out by introducing environmentally friendliness of the Shinkansen trains in terms of low energy consumption by means of traction system change, and then proceeds to describe the recent technological innovations that have given birth to lightweight traction systems, such as the Permanent Magnet Synchronous traction Motor (PMSM) and power converters with train-draft-cooling systems. The article concludes by summing up the environmentally friendly aspects of the Tokaido Shinkansen. Copyright © 2008 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [source]

,A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil': Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2003
Stephen Skinner
The study of law in literature stimulates critical reflection about law and the limits of its institutions by expanding contextual analysis to include the emotive discourses of fiction. This article starts from the premisses that the orthodox separation of literary expression from social scientific writing is not immutable and that different temporal settings are not barriers to exploring themes that traverse them. It uses Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a story of policing and anarchism in late nineteenth-century London, in order to discuss the limits of policing today. This novel is read in parallel with two modern police studies to show how it prefigures current concerns, portraying policing as an imperfect totem of security, immaterial to the individual's emotional crises, which, by extension, can be seen to illustrate the limits of law itself. This article thus raises methodological and theoretical issues of general interest to the study of law in society and suggests how reading literature can thicken' legal analysis by offering experience of the emotional beyond that law ignores. [source]

The Feminine (Ob)scene of Cruelty

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 6 2008
Margins, On the Fantastic, its Genealogy
This article starts out with a panoramic exposition of Latin American fantastic literature, arguing that the fantastic mode has become mainstream rather than a marginalized exception. However, something important is missing from the canonized program for the fantastic, namely a sensation of the fantastic object as well as of the desire that accompanies the dreams or fantasies that give reality its coherence. This article argues that authors like Alejandra Pizarnik and Silvina Ocampo represent a "real" response to the canon of artful metaphysical fictionalizations: an excessive enjoyment that cannot be accounted for in terms of the symbolic but approaches the Lacanian realm of the Real. It is often maintained that the subversive potential of fantastic literature resides in its interrogation of the (unconscious) limits between the real and the unreal that define the social, symbolic order. Yet the fascination of the "feminine (ob)scene of cruelty" resides in what exceeds symbolization, what is left after the categorical operations of culture have been performed, and never ceases to exert a horrifying fascination from beyond the frontiers of socially accepted values. [source]

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Flexibilities on Intellectual Property Enforcement: The World Trade Organization Panel Interpretation of China-Intellectual Property Enforcement of Criminal Measures and Its Implications

THE JOURNAL OF WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Issue 5 2010
Xuan Li
Criminal procedure is one of the three major points in the China-Intellectual Property (IP) case brought about by the United States. A number of experts believed that United States failed on this point because of lack of sufficient evidence. However, the author is of the view that the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) text-based interpretation of IP enforcement flexibility served as the core of the panel decision. This article starts with the criminal thresholds of China's criminal laws, and focuses on analysing the interpretation by the panel on the scope of responsibility and its limitations as enshrined in article 61, which led to the conclusion that the essence of the dispute is how to interpret and determine "IP enforcement flexibility". On this basis, the article expounds the concept and content of the "IP enforcement flexibility" and highlights the implications of this concept on current international TRIPS-plus initiatives. Some implications are given on how the World Trade Organization members can take advantage of the enforcement flexibility to serve the needs of innovation and development in their own countries. [source]

Reforms Towards Intellectual Property-Based Economic Development in Malaysia

THE JOURNAL OF WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Issue 4 2009
Lim Heng Gee
It has been constantly asserted that the intellectual property (IP) system is an effective way to enhance creativity, technological innovations, trade and competitiveness. Others, however, maintain that the IP system may not necessarily be the most effective and appropriate way to fuel the economy. This article investigates the role that IP plays in the economic development of Malaysia from 1986 to 2006. In particular, the article examines the impact of IP-based reforms, which includes not only the IP laws but other IP-related policies with a view to determine how these policies contribute to economic development in Malaysia. For this purpose, the article starts with a brief summary of important IP-related policies. Then the article proceeds with an analysis of trends in IP applications such as patent, trademark and industrial design application. Using data such as numbers of IP filing and grant, this article suggests ways in which the reforms in IP-related policies could have supported growth or could have directly influenced trends in IP application in Malaysia. The article further examines the growth of IP applications in four industrial sectors in Malaysia, i.e. automobiles, information technology, pharmaceuticals, and information and communications technology. [source]

Training and patient safety

BRITISH JOURNAL OF SURGERY (NOW INCLUDES EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SURGERY), Issue 4 2004
P. Thorpe
Patient Safety Leading Article Series, 2004 Over the rest of 2004 BJS will publish a series of leading articles dealing with issues of patient safety. A personal view of the matter was sought from the perspective of a trainee, Paul Thorpe, British trained but currently working in Australia. The trainee's view, sadly but typically, tends to come last,but not this time. Paul's article starts off the series. He notes that hospitals lag behind the airline industry and it is fitting, therefore, that the second paper is by Manfred Müller of Lufthansa. Copyright © 2004 British Journal of Surgery Society Ltd. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Why is Knowledge Management So Difficult?

BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW, Issue 1 2001
Julian Birkinshaw
Knowledge management promises much, but often delivers very little. There are no simple solutions to this challenge. This article starts by trying to define what knowledge management is. It then identifies where the problems lie and suggests five steps to resolve those problems. The article is based on research in a dozen leading companies, including HP, Ericsson, ABB, Skandia and Xerox. [source]

Risk and Return in the 20th and 21st Centuries

BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW, Issue 2 2000
Elroy Dimson
The single most important contemporary issue in finance is the equity risk premium. This drives future equity returns, and is the key determinant of the cost of capital. The risk premium , the expected reward for bearing the risk of investing in equities, rather than in low-risk investments such as bills or bonds , is usually estimated from historical data. This article starts by summarising new evidence on historical returns in twelve major world markets from the authors' recent book, ,The Millennium Book: A Century of Investment Returns'. The authors show that the historical equity risk premium has been lower than previously believed, and argue that the future risk premium is likely to be lower still. They discuss what this implies for the cost of capital, stock market values, and companies' target rates of return. They suggest that many companies are seeking too high a rate of return and thus run the risk of under-investing. [source]