Indexation: Some Problems

SUMMARY Indexation and export?earning stabilisation schemes face an overwhelming difficulty—the variety in the trade structures of the developing world. An oil/manufactured goods link would do nothing to guarantee the purchasing power of non?oil developing countries. The inclusion of foodstuffs in a basket of primary exports would greatly embarrass Asian and African food importers and give disproportionate diplomatic power to temperate zone food exporters. Even indexation of a major group of developing country exports such as coffee, cotton etc., against an agreed basket of food, oil and manufactured goods, could hardly be agreed given the variety of different weightings of these commodities in developing countries' trade structure, and indexation is no solution for the commodities (rubber, cotton, sisal, leather, etc.) threatened by synthetic substitutes. Commodity pacts linked to buffer stocks have severe limitations but are more hopeful than schemes for indexation. RESUMEN El Reajuste por Indice: Algunos Problemas Los esquemas de reajuste por índice y de estabilización de retornos de exportaciones enfrentan una abrumadora dificultad : la variedad de estructuras de comercio en los paises en desarrollo. Ligar los precios del petróleo y de los productos manufacturados no ayudaria en nada a garantizar el poder de compra de los paises en desarrollo que no producen petróleo. La inclusión de alimentos en una canasta de exportaciones primarias produciria grandes problemas para los importadores de alimentos asiáticos y africanos y le daría un poder diplomático desmesurado a los exportadores de alimentos de la zona templada. Incluso seria difícil Ilegar a acuerdo sobre el reajuste por índice de un grupo básico de exportaciones de países en desarrollo, tales como café, algodón, etc., en relación con una canasta aceptada de alimentos, petróleo y productos manufacturados, dada la variedad en la importancia de los diferentes productos en la estructura del comercio de los países en desarrollo; el reajuste por indices además no es solución para los productos amenazados por substitutos sintéticos (goma, algodón, sisal, cuero, etc.). Los convenios sobre productos primarios ligados a stocks de amortiguación tienen graves limitaciones, pero son más promisorios que los esquemas de reajuste por Indices. RESUME Indexation : quelques problémes Les projects visant à lier les revenus aux prix d'exportation se heurtent au problème insurmontable que présente la diversité de la structure commerciale du monde en développement. Le lien pétrole/produits fabriqués ne saurait garantir le pouvoir d'achat des pays en développement. L'inclusion de produits alimentaires auprès d'exportations principales ferait grand tort aux importateurs asiatiques et africains d'aliments, et conférerait un pouvoir diplomatique disproportionné aux exportateurs d'aliments des zones tempérées. Même l'indexation d'un groupe des exportations principales d'un pays en développement (telles que café, coton, etc) avec un groupe convenu, comprenant pétrole, aliments et produits fabriqués, ne saurait être admissible, vu la diversité des dispositions qui conditionnent le lestage de ces produits dans les différents pays en développement. Or l'indexation ne présente aucune solution lorsqu il sagit de produits de base (caoutchouc, coton, sisal, cuire, etc) menacés de substituts synthétiques. Les ententes sur les produits de base liés a des stocks régulateurs, bien qu'assujetties à de restrictions sévères, sont préferables aux projets d'indexation

Nano-Bio-Technology and Sensing Chips: New Systems for Detection in Personalized Therapies and Cell Biology

Further advances in molecular medicine and cell biology also require new electrochemical systems to detect disease biomarkers and therapeutic compounds. Microelectronic technology offers powerful circuits and systems to develop innovative and miniaturized biochips for sensing at the molecular level. However, microelectronic biochips proposed in the literature often do not show the right specificity, sensitivity, and reliability required by biomedical applications. Nanotechnology offers new materials and solutions to improve the surface properties of sensing probes. The aim of the present paper is to review the most recent progress in Nano-Bio-Technology in the area of the development of new electrochemical systems for molecular detection in personalized therapy and cell culture monitoring

The Double Galaxy Cluster Abell 2465 I. Basic Properties: Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy

Optical imaging and spectroscopic observations of the z = 0.245 double galaxy cluster Abell 2465 are described. This object appears to be undergoing a major merger. It is a double X-ray source and is detected in the radio at 1.4 GHz. This paper investigates signatures of the interaction of the two components. Redshifts were measured to determine velocity dispersions and virial radii of each component. The technique of fuzzy clustering was used to assign membership weights to the galaxies in each clump. Using redshifts of 93 cluster members within 1.4 Mpc of the subcluster centres, the virial masses and anisotropy parameters are derived. 37% of the spectroscopically observed galaxies show emission lines and are predominantly star forming in the diagnostic diagram. No strong AGN sources were found. The emission line galaxies tend to lie between the two cluster centres with more near the SW clump. The luminosity functions of the two subclusters differ. The NE component is similar to many rich clusters, while the SW component has more faint galaxies. The NE clump's light profile follows a single NFW profile with c = 10 while the SW is better fit with an extended outer region and a compact inner core, consistent with available X-ray data indicating that the SW clump has a cooling core. The observed differences and properties of the two components of Abell 2465 are interpreted to have been caused by a collision 2-4 Gyr ago, after which they have moved apart and are now near their apocentres, although the start of a merger remains a possibility. The number of emission line galaxies gives weight to the idea that galaxy cluster collisions trigger star formation.Comment: 21 pages, 18 Figures Replaced typos, mostly in references To appear in MNRAS, Accepted 2010 December 16. Received 2010 December 15; in original form 2010 November 0

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe