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Selected AbstractsWhat's in a Standard Form Contract?JOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2007An Empirical Analysis of Software License Agreements The vast majority of commercial transactions are governed by standard form contracts, but little is known about their actual content and the determinants of that content. This article provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of an important class of modern standard form contracts,software license agreements. In a sample of 647 licenses for software from various markets, I document the prevalence of terms relating to license acceptance, license scope, limitations on transfer, warranties, limitations on liability, maintenance and support, and conflict resolution. I find that almost all licenses display a net bias, relative to relevant default rules, in favor of the software company (the contract writer). I also investigate firm- and buyer-type determinants of the net bias. Larger and (controlling for size) younger firms offer more one-sided terms. Firms offer similar terms to both business buyers and members of the general public. In addition to providing new insight about the nature of standard form contracts, the results may inform efforts to draft new default rules to govern software transactions. [source] Too much of a good thing: the ,problem' of political communications in a mass media democracyJOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3 2007Ivor Gaber Francis Fukuyama asks: ,,,is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?' This paper argues that one of these ,internal contradictions' is the political communications process and it can be sufficiently serious to undermine the democratic system,but such an undermining is not inevitable. The problem can be described as follows: Democratic systems require that citizens are kept fully informed by governments (and others) in the interests of transparency and ultimately accountability. Hence, all political communications have, as their final objective, the accountability of politicians at the ballot box. Thus all political communications have what can be described as ,above' and ,below' the line content. The above-the-line is the actual content of the message, the below-the-line is the implicit one of ,think better of me and my colleagues think worse of my opponents'. Consequently, no matter how personally honest and open an individual politician might be, the democratic system requires her or him to be always thinking about securing a successful result at the ballot box. Thus we have the ,political communications paradox'. Voters want politicians to be honest and accountable but this very demand means that politicians, implicitly, always have to have another agenda in operation when they are communicating with the public, i.e. securing their approval and then their support. As a result the trust which is a fundamental to the workings of a democratic system is constantly being undermined. This has two effects. First, that governments are obliged to make communications, rather than delivery, their real priority and second trust, not just in politicians but in the political system as a whole, tends to wane over time, which in turn endangers the very system it was designed to underpin. But this decline is not inevitable because the system has some in-built self-correcting mechanisms These include: the rise of new parties and/or leaders who portray themselves as ,new' and ,untainted',New Labour, New Conservatives, etc., an almost regular ,re-balancing' of the power relationship that exists between politicians and the civil service, particularly in the communications field, the rise of new forms of communication that seek to by-pass the institutional roadblocks that are perceived as being the cause of the problems and finally increased attention by journalists and academics to the process of political communications makes it more difficult for politicians to continue with ,business as usual' as far as their communication activities are concerned. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] METHODS FOR JOINT INFERENCE FROM MULTIPLE DATA SOURCES FOR IMPROVED ESTIMATES OF POPULATION SIZE AND SURVIVAL RATESMARINE MAMMAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2004Daniel Goodman Abstract Critical conservation decisions often hinge on estimates of population size, population growth rate, and survival rates, but as a practical matter it is difficult to obtain enough data to provide precise estimates. Here we discuss Bayesian methods for simultaneously drawing on the information content from multiple sorts of data to get as much precision as possible for the estimates. The basic idea is that an underlying population model can connect the various sorts of observations, so this can be elaborated into a joint likelihood function for joint estimation of the respective parameters. The potential for improved estimates derives from the potentially greater effective sample size of the aggregate of data, even though some of the data types may only bear directly on a subset of the parameters. The achieved improvement depends on specifics of the interactions among parameters in the underlying model, and on the actual content of the data. Assuming the respective data sets are unbiased, notwithstanding the fact that they may be noisy, we may gauge the average improvement in the estimates of the parameters of interest from the reduction, if any, in the standard deviations of their posterior marginal distributions. Prospective designs may be evaluated from analysis of simulated data. Here this approach is illustrated with an assessment of the potential value in various ways of merging mark-resight and carcass-survey data for the Florida manatee, as could be made possible by various modifications in the data collection protocols in both programs. [source] Emphatic inaccuracy in husband to wife aggression: The overattribution biasPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, Issue 2 2002William E. Schweinle Is husbands' wife-directed aggression related to unusual accuracy (hypersensitivity) or to bias (being likely to inappropriately infer criticism or rejection) when they infer women's critical/rejecting thoughts and feelings? Results of a study using the empathic accuracy paradigm and signal detection analyses revealed that the greater the husbands' bias to overattribute criticism and rejection to the thoughts and feelings of women they had never met, the more the husbands reported behaving in a verbally aggressive way toward their own wives. This finding discourages the conclusion that maritally aggressive men are uniquely provoked by their own female partners, and instead suggests that they are biased to overattribute criticism and rejection to women in general. The strength of this overattribution bias correlated negatively with the men's accuracy in inferring the actual content of the women's thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, the husbands' thematic accuracy (their ability to accurately specify which of the stimulus women's thoughts and feelings really were critical or rejecting) was associated with their self-reported marital satisfaction. [source] Zoospores of Three Arctic Laminariales Under Different UV Radiation and Temperature Conditions: Exceptional Spectral Absorbance Properties and Lack of Phlorotannin InductionPHOTOCHEMISTRY & PHOTOBIOLOGY, Issue 4 2009Ruth Müller Phlorotannins have often been considered to act as UV-protective compounds in zoospores of brown algae. However, only the absorption characteristics of zoospores under UV exposure have been determined and no data are available on the actual content of phlorotannins or on temperature,UV interactions. Therefore, we determined the absorbance spectra and the phlorotannin contents in zoospore suspensions of three Arctic species (Saccharina latissima, Laminaria digitata, Alaria esculenta), and in the media surrounding zoospores after exposure to different radiation (400,700, 320,700, 295,700 nm) and temperature (2,18°C) conditions for 8 h. Absorption typical of phlorotannins with a maximum at 276 nm was monitored in zoospore suspensions as well as in the media surrounding zoospores, but the results depended strongly on radiation treatments and on zoospore densities. Surprisingly, the content of UV-absorbing phlorotannins subsequent to different exposures did not change in any of the three species. The observed exceptional absorption properties could, therefore, not be related to phlorotannin contents. These findings are discussed in light of a strong phlorotannin investment from sporophytes during spore release and a minor UV-protective role of phlorotannins for zoospores of Arctic kelp species. [source] Condensed tannins in the diets of primates: a matter of methods?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PRIMATOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Jessica M. Rothman Abstract To understand the ways in which condensed tannins (CT) affect primate diet selection and nutritional status, correct measurements are essential. In the majority of studies of the CT contents of primate foods, a tannin source such as "quebracho" is used to standardize CT assays, but the CT in quebracho tannin may not be similar to those in the plants of interest. We investigated how the choice of standard to calibrate CT assays affects the estimation of CT in the diets of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei). We purified the CT from gorilla foods and compared the actual amounts of CT in the foods with estimates produced by using the quebracho tannin. When quebracho was used, the estimates of CT contents of gorilla foods were, on average, 3.6 times the actual content of CT so that the amounts in frequently eaten gorilla foods were substantially overestimated. The overestimation for a given plant could not be predicted reliably and the ranking of plants by tannin content differed according to the standard used. Our results demonstrate that accurate measurements of CT necessitate the use of tannins purified from the plant species of interest. A reevaluation of primatology studies using interspecific comparisons of tannin content will provide new insights into primate food selection and nutritional ecology. Am. J. Primatol. 71:70,76, 2009. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Do temperature and social environment interact to affect call rate in frogs (Crinia signifera)?AUSTRAL ECOLOGY, Issue 2 2004Bob B. M. Wong Abstract Acoustic displays are pervasive and conspicuous forms of sexual advertisement used by animals to attract mates. Evidence suggests that individuals may use environmental cues and/or the presence of other displaying animals to select the best times for display to optimize the chances of mating. Less well-known is how the physical and social environment might interact to affect the actual content of the display itself. We examined the effects of social environment and temperature on calling rate in a frog Crinia signifera. We found that both variables interacted to affect call rate but only among continuous callers. Call rate increased with temperature in individuals calling continuously on their own but no relationship was found in frogs calling continuously in the presence of others, either in a duet or in a group calling situation. We suggest that the temperature sensitivity of calling rate in frogs could depend on the social environment of the caller. As such, we suggest caution in generalizing about the way temperature affects calling rates in frogs and encourage greater consideration of how physical and social environments might interact to influence the signal content of acoustic displays. [source] Contents of hypericin and pseudohypericin in five commercial products of St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum)JOURNAL OF THE SCIENCE OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE, Issue 5 2004Zhao-Jun Wang Abstract Hypericin and pseudohypericin are the two major dianthrones of St John's wort (SJW, Hypericum perforatum) that are reported to have antidepressant and antiviral effects. In this study we used methanol extracts of five commercial SJW products to determine the two congeners using a modified reverse phase HPLC method with gradient elution. One SJW product is specified by the manufacturer to contain 340 µg hypericin per tablet (170 mg extract), while the other four products are specified to contain 900 µg hypericin per tablet (300 mg); none of the products is claimed to contain pseudohypericin. Our results showed that the actual contents of hypericin in these products ranged from 1.7 to 38.5% of the claimed amounts. However, the amounts of pseudohypericin were in general much higher than those of hypericin. When hypericin and pseudohypericin were combined as total hypericin, the four products that supposedly contain 900 µg per tablet were found to contain 26, 484, 587 and 615 µg total hypericin per tablet, or 2.9, 53.8, 65.2 and 68.3% of the claimed hypericin contents respectively. The product which supposedly contains 340 µg hypericin per tablet was found to contain 388 µg total hypericin per tablet, or 114% of the claimed hypericin content. The relatively low hypericin contents measured in these products are not a result of losses during extraction, because the two congeners had high recoveries (93.7 and 94.3% for hypericin and pseudohypericin respectively) when added before methanolic extraction to an SJW product with known amounts of the two congeners. Thus our results show that the commercial SJW products vary greatly in their amounts of total hypericin and that pseudohypericin, rather than hypericin, is the major hypericin in these products. Copyright © 2004 Society of Chemical Industry [source] | ||||||||||