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Principal Aim (principal + aim)
Selected AbstractsGOLD infrastructure for virtual organizationsCONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE, Issue 11 2008P. Periorellis Abstract The paper discusses the GOLD project (Grid-based Information Models to Support the Rapid Innovation of New High Value-Added Chemicals) whose principal aim is to carry out research and development into enabling technologies to support the formation, operation and termination of virtual organizations. The paper discusses the outcome of this research, which is the GOLD Middleware infrastructure. The infrastructure has been implemented in the form of a set of Middleware components, which address issues such as trust, security, contract monitoring and enforcement, information management and coordination. We discuss all these issues in turn and more importantly we demonstrate how current WS standards can be used to implement these issues. In addition, the paper follows a top down approach starting with a brief outline on the architectural elements derived during the requirements engineering phase and demonstrates how these elements were mapped onto actual services that were implemented according to service-oriented architecture principles and related technologies. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Evolutionarily stable investment in secondary defencesFUNCTIONAL ECOLOGY, Issue 5 2005M. BROOM Summary 1Previous workers have suggested that the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) for investment in antipredator defences, such as toxins, will critically depend on the nature of expression of the defence. Specifically, it has been suggested that if the different levels of a defence are best described as a continuous variable, then this will lead to pure ESSs with all individuals in a population adopting similar defence levels; whereas defences that can only take on discrete levels will lead to mixed ESSs (featuring variation in defence within the population). 2Our principal aim is to determine the validity of these viewpoints, and examine how the pure and mixed strategies predicted by the two types of defences can be reconciled with practical and philosophical difficulties in defining any given defence unambiguously as continuous or discrete. 3We present the first model of a continuously varying defence that is solved explicitly for evolutionarily stable strategies. 4We are able to demonstrate analytically, that the model always has a unique ESS, which is always pure. This strategy may involve all members of the population adopting no defence, or all members of the population making the same non-zero investment in defence. 5We then modify our model to restrict the defence to a number of discrete levels and demonstrate that the unique ESS in this case can be either pure or mixed. We further argue that the mixed ESS can be a combination of no more than two defence levels, and the two levels in a mixed ESS must be nearest neighbour levels in an ordered list of the levels that the defence can take. 6This, in turn, means that the mixed ESS will be practically identical to a pure ESS if the discrete defence is fine-grained. [source] The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military interventionINTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2008ALEX J. BELLAMY The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has come a long way in a relatively short space of time. From inauspicious beginnings, the principle was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005 and unanimously reaffirmed by the Security Council in 2006 (Resolution 1674). However, the principle remains hotly contested primarily because of its association with humanitarian intervention and the pervasive belief that its principal aim is to create a pathway for the legitimization of unilateral military intervention. This article sets forth the argument that a deepening consensus on R2P is dependent on its dissociation from the politics of humanitarian intervention and suggests that one way of doing this is by abandoning the search for criteria for decision-making about the use of force, one of the centre pieces of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001 report that coined the phrase R2P. Criteria were never likely to win international support, the article maintains, and were less likely to improve decision-making on how best to respond to major humanitarian crises. Nevertheless, R2P can make an important contribution to thinking about the problem of military intervention by mitigating potential ,moral hazards', overcoming the tendency of international actors to focus exclusively on military methods and giving impetus to efforts to operationalize protection in the field. [source] Socio-economic Development and International Migration: A Turkish StudyINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 4 2001Ahmet Icduygu The root causes of international migration have been the subject of many studies, a vast majority of which are based on development theories dominated by economy-oriented perspectives. An underlying assumption is that poverty breeds migration. The results, and the conclusions drawn from these studies, differ widely. For instance, whether emigration increases when poverty becomes more extreme, or less extreme, or why it reaches certain levels, are issues on which research still offers a mixed answer. This article investigates the relationship between economic development and migration by taking into consideration the degrees of economic development that form thresholds for migration. It focuses on recent evidence on the development-emigration relationship in Turkey which reflects a dimension of the dynamics and mechanisms facilitating or restricting migratory flows from the country. Using data from the 1995 District-level Socio-economic Development Index of Turkey (DSDI) and the 1990 Census, the principal aim of the article is to provide an analytical base which identifies degrees of local level of development in Turkey, relate these to international migration flows, and examine patterns of the development-migration relationship. [source] Autonomy, Interdependence, and Assisted Suicide: Respecting Boundaries/Crossing LinesBIOETHICS, Issue 3 2000Anne Donchin Western philosophy has been powerfully influenced by a paradigm of personal agency that is linked to an individualistic conception of autonomy. This essay contrasts this conception with an alternative understanding that recognizes a social component built into the very meaning of autonomy. After reviewing feminist critiques of the dominant conception of autonomy, I develop the broad outlines of a relational view and apply this reconceptualization to a concrete situation in order to show how this altered view reconfigures understanding of the participants' relationships and each of their personal perspectives. The situation chosen, physician-assisted suicide, is intended principally to illustrate one respect in which a relational conception of autonomy reframes a controversial moral issue and reveals perspectives toward it that are likely to be obscured when autonomy is viewed through the lens of the dominant individualistic conception. My principal aim is to show that when autonomy is understood relationally, respecting others' autonomy is likely to be a far more complex issue than is apparent within the standard conception, both for those with professional responsibilities and often for personal intimates as well. [source] Esophageal cancer in Central and Eastern Europe: Tobacco and alcoholINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CANCER, Issue 7 2007Mia Hashibe Abstract Esophageal cancer mortality rates in Central and Eastern Europe have been increasing steadily and are expected to increase further in the future. To evaluate the role of risk factors for esophageal cancer in this population, a multicenter study was conducted, with investigation of tobacco and alcohol as one of the principal aims. We have included 192 squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and 35 adenocarcinoma cases of the esophagus diagnosed at designated hospitals in 5 centers from Romania, Russia, the Czech Republic and Poland. Controls were frequency matched from patients in the same hospital as the cases (n = 1,114). Our results showed that the risk of esophageal SCC may be increased by approximately 7-fold for current smokers (OR = 7.41, 95% CI 3.98,13.79) and by 3-fold for ever alcohol drinkers (OR = 2.86, 95% CI 1.06,7.74). Dose-response relations were evident for both the frequency and duration of tobacco and of alcohol on the risk of esophageal SCC. Risk estimates for tobacco smoking were highest for lower esophageal SCCs, while risk estimates for alcohol drinking were highest for upper esophageal SCCs; though differences were not statistically significant. For adenocarcinoma of the esophagus, our results suggested a more modest increase in risk because of tobacco smoking than that for SCC of the esophagus and no association with alcohol consumption, although our sample size was small. A synergistic interaction between tobacco and alcohol was observed for the risk of esophageal SCC, highlighting the importance of both factors for esophageal cancers in Central and Eastern Europe. © 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Export market participation, spillovers, and foreign direct investment in Australian food manufacturingAGRIBUSINESS : AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Issue 3 2010Shauna Phillips Generating a more outward looking sector has been one of the principal aims of agrifood policy in Australia for the past two decades. Australia's proximity to fast-growing economies of East Asia has been seen as a major source for export growth. Over the same time span, there has been an increase in foreign ownership in the food sector. Using a firm-level data set for 2005, we characterize the probability that a firm participates in exporting by a set of firm characteristics, including foreign ownership and spillovers from foreign-owned firms, and find that foreign ownership neither increases nor decreases the probability that a firm will be involved in exporting. [EconLit citations: Q170, Q130]. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] | ||||||||||