Digital Commons Network^™

Origin Of Human Consciousness, Milan Meszaros

Milan Meszaros physicist

There are certain conditions regarding the expansion of man’s existence on Earth, but these are not identical to those conditions regarding man’s existence itself. Thus in the violating the symmetry of the fundamental processes of consciousness, man’s intellectual development can become multi-dimensional.

Our conscious functioning with its non-Earth lifebase gives rise to the following questions: how and why did our consciousness come to be on Earth? Where did we originate from?

The search of solution is recommendable to all those who are interested in a scientific, high level, responsible approach to the experiments and solutions concerning the problems: Where do …

A Harmadik Világháború. Minden Héten Háromszor., Pal R. Molnar

Pal R. Molnar

Pesszimista jóslatok szerint közeledik a harmadik világháború, a világégés. Ezt a háborút valószínűleg atomfegyverekkel vívják, ami évezredekre megmérgezi a földet és elhozza az emberiség végét.

The World War Iii. Three Times In Every Week, Pal R. Molnar

Pal R. Molnar

The pessimistic prophecies say the third world war, the ‘world burning’ is approaching. This war probably will fight by nuclear weapons, it will poison the Earth for thousands of years, and it will bring the end of mankind.

Trading Carbon Under Uncertainty: How Much Credit Should Be Given For Afforestation?, Ram Ranjan, James Shortle

Ram Ranjan

This paper designs an optimal trading ratio between carbon abatement measures that are certain (such as curtailing carbon emissions) and those that have elements of uncertainty associated with them (such as sequestration through afforestation). Carbon sequestration through afforestation is prone to leak back into the atmosphere through loss of forestry caused by natural disasters or harvesting. When stock of carbon sequestered in plantations is uncertain its value should be discounted compared to measures that have a permanent impact on the atmospheric stock of carbon. An optimal trading mechanism would involve equating the ratio of the marginal costs of the two …

Exit Timing Decisions Under Land Speculation And Resource Scarcity In Agriculture, Ram Ranjan, Sorada Tapsuwan

Ram Ranjan

This paper models the impact of water scarcity in agriculture on the timing of exit decisions for farmers faced with the prospect of declining profitability in agriculture but increasing benefits from land rezoning in the future. The prospects of land rezoning are modeled as a Poisson process. The analysis highlights the role of speculative rewards in making farmers resilient to declining profitability in agriculture and also identifies the circumstances under which water prices may become an ineffective policy tool for allocating water. An empirical application is performed for the case of a drought prone region in Western Australia. Results indicate …

Customizing Subject Guide Content For Different Disciplines: A User-Centered Approach, Shannon M. Staley

Shannon M. Staley

Very few studies examine how campus communities actually make use of subject guides, which is key to informing how they should be created. Usability studies of subject page use often yield inconclusive results because the test sample is not representative of the actual campus population. Usability studies / focus groups are an excellent way of supplementing data already in existence. Survey data from a previous study, "Academic Subject Guides: A Case Study at San Jose State University," is examined to provide more rigorous guidance in developing user-centric models of online research guides.

Federal And State Laws Regarding Bottled Water – Testimony Before The House Oversight And Government Reform Committee, Domestic Policy Subcommittee, Noah D. Hall

Noah D Hall

Water bottling is big business and getting bigger, growing by about ten percent annually over the past five years. The most important environmental concerns from a legal and regulatory perspective relate to the impact of water extraction to fill the billions of bottles Americans purchase every year. While water bottling has almost no impact on the total national freshwater supply, the majority of bottled water comes from groundwater which has a direct hydrologic connection to springs and other vulnerable surface waters. Thus, even relatively small water withdrawals for bottled water can produce significant impacts at the local scale on other …

Constitutional Responses To Paradigmatic Shifts In Technology, Noel Cox

Noel Cox

The technological revolution affecting the global economy has profound implications not merely for society, but also for global and national legal systems. This paper considers the nature of the constitutional responses to paradigmatic shifts in technology. It considers the nature of constitutions and of their relationship with technology. It then proceeds to briefly examine several seminal technological changes in the past, in order to identify common elements in relation to constitutions and technology. It then looks at several contemporary technological revolutions, with a similar purpose. Finally, it seeks to draw some common themes from these examples, with the intention of …

Emergence Of Knowledge Economy, Nazish Irshad Husain

Nazish Irshad Husain

No abstract provided.

Revisiting Injunctive Relief: Interpreting Ebay In High-Tech Industries With Non-Practicing Patent Holders, Anne S. Layne-Farrar

Anne S. Layne-Farrar

The Supreme Court’s 2006 eBay ruling marked a turning point in injunctive relief policy. Unfortunately, there seems to be considerable confusion about the implications of the decision. Some authors, concerned over patent holdup and excessive royalty rates, interpret the eBay decision as giving a green light to district courts to deny injunctive relief to “non-manufacturing patent owners”. Using an error cost framework, we examine the theory and evidence behind patent holdup concerns as they relate to injunctive relief policy. We find that the holdup theory justifying categorical limitations on injunctive relief rests upon overly narrow assumptions. As a result, categorical …

Subadditivity And The Unpacking Effect In Political Opinions, Renan Levine

Renan Levine

To explain subadditivity in judgments of probabilities, support theory (Tversky and Koehler 1994) emphasizes the increased availability of information about component events. This paper demonstrates that similar processes occur in responses to public opinion questions. When a broad description of a policy is “unpacked” into more specific component policies, support for the component policies exceeds support for the original, broad policy. This effect is especially strong when one or more of the unpacked policies make information available to the decision-maker that was not accessible when the broad description was provided. This behavior violates Luce’s (1959) axiom of independence of irrelevant …

Student & Faculty Perspective: Are We Engaged Yet?, Yuhfen Diana H. Wu

Diana H. Wu

No abstract provided.

Review: Steve: The Art Museum Social Tagging Project., Mark Mcbride

Mark F McBride

The Steve Museum is a social tagging project created by volunteers from art museums and galleries. The main goal is to create user generated descriptions for works of art, because we all view, experience, and describe art differently.

Evaluating The Book “Triz: The Right Solutions At The Right Time”, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The book has 10 chapters, all on different approaches and methods of solving problems. Each chapter tries to solve problems using different techniques of TRIZ. The book not only describes all 40 Inventive Principles, 76 Inventive Standards, 39 Contradiction Parameters and other Techniques of TRIZ, but also illustrates a series of 114 practical problems and their solutions. The book has been translated into many languages including Japanese. This is undoubtedly one of the most impressive and essential textbooks on TRIZ.

The Role Of Religious Values In Politics, Darrin P. Dixon

Darrin P Dixon

No abstract provided.

Not All It’S Quacked Up To Be: Why State And Local Efforts To Ban Foie Gras Violate Constitutional Law, Alexandra R. Harrington

Alexandra R. Harrington

Abstract: Not All It’s Quacked Up To Be: Why State and Local Efforts to Ban Foie Gras Violate Constitutional Law

What do Egyptian Pharaohs, Roman Jews, French farmers, immigrants to America, consumers of haute cuisine – and the chefs who create it – and business owners in Long Island, New York, and Sonoma, California have in common? Strangers in time, language, culture, and geography, these groups form an unlikely cohort around the humble duck and, more specifically, the love of its liver. Foie gras, as the fatty liver of a duck, goose, or mulard is commonly known, is an ingredient …

Powerpoint At 20: Back To Basics, Robert Gaskins

Robert Gaskins

Let simplicity inspire, and resist the lure of unreadable fonts, stock clip art, sound effects, and flying bullet points.

To Cross Or Not To Cross? Subjectivization And The Absent State In Cyprus, Olga Demetriou

Olga Demetriou

This article is an ethnographic exploration of the process through which citizens come to conceptualize their identities as political subjects in rapidly changing contexts. The focus of the article is the lifting, in 2003, of a ban on crossing between the northern and southern parts of the island of Cyprus, which had been instituted in 1974. The article examines how this new political change affected state rhetoric, and concentrates on the reactions of Greek-Cypriot citizens to this shift. These data are related to the wider discussion on the political theory of subjectivity and the concept of ‘event’, where, it is …

A Dynamic Model Of Sectoral Agglomeration Effects, Nicole Andréa Mathys

Nicole Andréa Mathys

This note derives a theoretical model that justifies the dynamic specification used in empirical works investigating the impact of agglomeration effects on regional industry-specific labour productivity. It extends the seminal multi-regional framework of Ciccone (2002) to allow for sectoral disaggregation and a temporal dimension. As a result, present productivity becomes a function of past productivity and other contemporaneous and lagged control variables.

A Product-Market Theory Of Industry-Specific Training, Hans Gersbach, Armin Schmutzler

Armin Schmutzler

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms provide their workers with skills that are sufficiently general to be potentially useful for competitors. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in industry-specific human capital, then make wage offers for each others' trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market competition. Equilibria with and without training, and multiple equilibria can emerge. If competition is sufficiently soft, firms may invest in non-specific training if others do the same. Thereby, they avoid having to pay high wages in order to attract trained workers.

Systematic Content Analysis Of Judicial Opinions, Ronald F. Wright, Mark A. Hall

Ronald F. Wright

Our article traces the use of “content analysis” — a standard research technique in political science, communications, and other fields — to study judicial opinions. As it turns out, this is a high-growth area that nobody has noticed. We collect over 130 examples of such research projects that other scholars performed between 1956 and 2006, and draw lessons from the ways that scholars have used this technique, for good and for bad. We document the growth of this research technique, and offer guidance to future scholars on how best to adapt the standard requirements of the technique to the specialized …

The Simple Economics Of Risk-Sharing Agreements Between The Nhs And The Pharmaceutical Industry, Pedro P. Barros

Pedro P Barros

The Janssen-Cilag proposal for a risk-sharing agreement regarding bortezomib received a welcome signal from NICE. The Office of Fair Trading report included risk-sharing agreements as an available tool for the National Health Service. Nonetheless, recent discussions have somewhat neglected the economic fundamentals underlying risk-sharing agreements. We argue here that risk-sharing agreements, although attractive due to the principle of paying by results, also entail risks. Too many patients may be put under treatment even with a low success probability. Prices are likely to be adjusted upward, in anticipation of future risk-sharing agreements between the pharmaceutical company and the third-party payer. An …

Lessons For Democratic Transitions: Case Studies From Asia, Tom Ginsburg

Tom Ginsburg

In an era when democratization is stalled or in retreat in many parts of the world, it is important to highlight the successful democratic experience of East and Southeast Asia in recent decades. Five consolidated democracies have emerged since the mid-1980s; only Thailand has seen some backsliding with the 2006 coup. The Asian cases provide insights into several major debates in the democratization literature, including the relative importance of culture, history, economic structure, and the optimal sequencing of political and economic reform. This article reviews these issues, with particular attention to the role of outside powers in underpinning democratization. Ultimately, …

Icwa And The Commerce Clause, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act, it said, in accordance with its authority under the Indian Commerce Clause and because it has assumed responsibility over Indian affairs. But under the line of cases developed by the Rehnquist Court, the Court takes a very dim view of Congressional authority under the Commerce Clause, while resurrecting the Tenth Amendment from its stasis as a “truism.” At least one Justice asserts that there is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to assume authority over Indian affairs to the exclusion of the Executive branch or the states. This paper argues that, despite …

Agricultural Applications For Electromagnetic Exposure, H. Aliakbarian, A. Enayati, Hossein Ameri Mahabadi, M. Ashayer Soltani

Hossein Ameri Mahabadi

Despite the advances in bug controlling and antifreezing operations of agricultural products, the devastation of Sunne pests and freezing is still enormous. Traditional treatments such as chemical insecticides for bug controlling and covering to avoid freezing have not been sufficient. In the presented paper, new ideas of using electromagnetic treatment for anti-freezing operation, pre-harvest Sunne pest control, and Orchid flower control are introduced.

Construction And Analysis Of An Ozone Profile Climatology Over Houston, Texas, Gary A. Morris, Anne M. Thompson, Ryan Perna, John Yorks, Bernhard Rappengluek, Greg Ostermann, Barry Lefer, Renee Boudreaux, Aaron Chow, Bonnie Ford, Elizabeth Thompson, Scott Hersey, Brittni Emery

Gary A. Morris

Since the summer of 2004, over 200 ozonesondes have been launched from the campuses of Rice University or the University of Houston (29.7 N, 95.3 W), each about 3 miles from downtown Houston. These sounding launches have been sponsored by NASA, the Shell Center for Sustainability of Rice University, and the Texas Commissions for Environmental Quality as part of a large effort to understand Houston’s ozone problem. Data from these soundings have provided valuable insight into the seasonal and diurnal variations of the vertical ozone distribution and their relationship to changes in atmospheric conditions. In this presentation, we show annual …

El Proceso De Selección Del Candidato Presidencial Del Pan En 2005, Flavia Freidenberg, Victor Alarcón-Olguín

Flavia Freidenberg

No abstract provided.

Leading, Engaging, Selecting And Designing, Hamish Bennett Coates

Professor Hamish Coates

This first edition reviews recent work in the areas of higher education leadership, evaluation, student selection, and in the design of educational standards and processes. Higher education update is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER)

Affordable Housing And Civic Participation: Two Sides Of The Same Coin, Goutam U. Jois

Goutam U Jois

Over the past several decades, America’s inner cities have deteriorated socially, economically, and politically. Simultaneously, civic engagement, almost by any measure, has been on the decline: Americans vote less and volunteer less, go out to dinner with friends less and attend PTA meetings less. In this Article, I argue that the two phenomena are linked, at least from the perspective of remedies. Specifically, by rebuilding our inner cities to promote mixed-use, mixed-income development, we can revitalize some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in our country while simultaneously engendering the mechanisms to foster increased civic engagement in our participatory democracy.

Introduction: Theorising Politics, Cillian Mcbride

Cillian McBride

No abstract provided.