Contracts between Legal Persons

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives.contract law, law and economics, contract breach, contract theory, incomplete contracts

Double step structure and meandering due to the many body interaction at GaN(0001) surface in N-rich conditions

Growth of gallium nitride on GaN(0001) surface is modeled by Monte Carlo method. Simulated growth is conducted in N-rich conditions, hence it is controlled by Ga atoms surface diffusion. It is shown that dominating four-body interactions of Ga atoms can cause step flow anisotropy. Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations show that parallel steps with periodic boundary conditions form double terrace structures, whereas initially V -shaped parallel step train initially bends and then every second step moves forward, building regular, stationary ordering as observed during MOVPE or HVPE growth of GaN layers. These two phenomena recover surface meandered pair step pattern observed, since 1953, on many semiconductor surfaces, such as SiC, Si or GaN. Change of terrace width or step orientation particle diffusion jump barriers leads either to step meandering or surface roughening. Additionally it is shown that step behavior changes with the Schwoebel barrier height. Furthermore, simulations under conditions corresponding to very high external particle flux result in triangular islands grown at the terraces. All structures, emerging in the simulations, have their corresponding cases in the experimental results.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

Contracts between Legal Persons

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The review thus provides an overview of the literature for economists who are interested in exploring the economic implications of contract law. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives.

Climatic controls on hurricane patterns: A 1200-y near-annual record from Lighthouse Reef, Belize

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are powerful agents of destruction, and understanding climatic controls on TC patterns is of great importance. Over timescales of seasons to several decades, relationships among TC track, frequency, intensity and basin-scale climate changes are well documented by instrumental records. Over centuries to millennia, climate-shift influence on TC regimes remains poorly constrained. To better understand these relationships, records from multiple locations of TC strikes spanning millennia with high temporal resolution are required, but such records are rare. Here we report on a highly detailed sedimentary proxy record of paleo-TC strikes from the Blue Hole of Lighthouse Reef, Belize. Our findings provide an important addition to other high-resolution records, which collectively demonstrate that shifts between active and inactive TC regimes have occurred contemporaneously with shifts hemispheric-scale oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns such as MDR SSTs and NAO mode, rather than with changes in local climate phenomena as has previously been suggested

Faster subsequence recognition in compressed strings

Computation on compressed strings is one of the key approaches to processing massive data sets. We consider local subsequence recognition problems on strings compressed by straight-line programs (SLP), which is closely related to Lempel--Ziv compression. For an SLP-compressed text of length $\bar m$, and an uncompressed pattern of length $n$, C{\'e}gielski et al. gave an algorithm for local subsequence recognition running in time $O(\bar mn^2 \log n)$. We improve the running time to $O(\bar mn^{1.5})$. Our algorithm can also be used to compute the longest common subsequence between a compressed text and an uncompressed pattern in time $O(\bar mn^{1.5})$; the same problem with a compressed pattern is known to be NP-hard

Transition rates and nuclear structure changes in mirror nuclei 47Cr and 47V

Lifetime measurements in the mirror nuclei 47Cr and 47V were performed by means of the Doppler-shift attenuation method using the multidetector array EUROBALL, in conjunction with the ancillary detectors ISIS and the Neutron Wall. The determined transition strengths in the yrast cascades are well described by full pf shell model calculations.Comment: Latex2e, 11 pages, 3 figure

Local species assemblages are influenced more by past than current dissimilarities in photosynthetic activity

Most land on Earth has been changed by humans and past changes of land can have lasting influences on current species assemblages. Yet few globally representative studies explicitly consider such influences even though auxiliary data, such as from remote sensing, are readily available. Time series of satellite-derived data have been commonly used to quantify differences in land-surface attributes such as vegetation cover, which will among other things be influenced by anthropogenic land conversions and modifications. Here we quantify differences in current and past (up to five years before sampling) vegetation cover, and assess whether such differences differentially influence taxonomic and functional groups of species assemblages between spatial pairs of sites. Specifically, we correlated between-site dissimilarity in photosynthetic activity of vegetation (the Enhanced Vegetation Index) with the corresponding dissimilarity in local species assemblage composition from a global database using a common metric for both, the Bray-Curtis index. We found that dissimilarity in species assemblage composition was on average more influenced by dissimilarity in past than current photosynthetic activity, and that the influence of past dissimilarity increased when longer time periods were considered. Responses to past dissimilarity in photosynthetic activity also differed among taxonomic groups (plants, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals), with reptiles being among the most influenced by more dissimilar past photosynthetic activity. Furthermore, we found that assemblages dominated by smaller and more vegetation-dependent species tended to be more influenced by dissimilarity in past photosynthetic activity than prey-dependent species. Overall, our results have implications for studies that investigate species responses to current environmental changes and highlight the importance of past changes continuing to influence local species assemblage composition. We demonstrate how local species assemblages and satellite-derived data can be linked and provide suggestions for future studies on how to assess the influence of past environmental changes on biodiversity

Piliation of Invasive Streptococcus pneumoniae Isolates in the Era before Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine Introduction in Malawi

The pneumococcal pilus has been shown to be an important determinant of adhesion and virulence in mouse models of colonization, pneumonia, and bacteremia. A pilus is capable of inducing protective immunity, supporting its inclusion in next-generation pneumococcal protein vaccine formulations. Whether this vaccine target is common among pneumococci in sub-Saharan Africa is uncertain. To define the prevalence and genetic diversity of type I and II pili among invasive pneumococci in Malawi prior to the introduction of the 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) into routine childhood immunization, we examined 188 Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates collected between 2002 and 2008 (17% serotype 1). In this region of high disease burden, we found a low frequency of invasive piliated pneumococci (14%) and pilus gene sequence diversity similar to that seen previously in multiple global pneumococcal lineages. All common serotypes with pilus were covered by PCV13 and so we predict that pilus prevalence will be reduced in the Malawian pneumococcal population after PCV13 introduction