A Precious Bequest: Contemporary Research with the WPA-CCC Collections from Moundville, Alabama *

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72459/1/j.1749-6632.1981.tb28184.x.pd

Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges

Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and interactions in models of decision. We argue that the Random Field Ising model (RFIM) indeed provides a unifying framework to account for many collective socio-economic phenomena that lead to sudden ruptures and crises. We discuss different models that can capture potentially destabilising self-referential feedback loops, induced either by herding, i.e. reference to peers, or trending, i.e. reference to the past, and account for some of the phenomenology missing in the standard models. We discuss some empirically testable predictions of these models, for example robust signatures of RFIM-like herding effects, or the logarithmic decay of spatial correlations of voting patterns. One of the most striking result, inspired by statistical physics methods, is that Adam Smith's invisible hand can badly fail at solving simple coordination problems. We also insist on the issue of time-scales, that can be extremely long in some cases, and prevent socially optimal equilibria to be reached. As a theoretical challenge, the study of so-called "detailed-balance" violating decision rules is needed to decide whether conclusions based on current models (that all assume detailed-balance) are indeed robust and generic.Comment: Review paper accepted for a special issue of J Stat Phys; several minor improvements along reviewers' comment

Self management for large-scale distributed systems: An overview of the SELFMAN project

10.1007/978-3-540-92188-2_7Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)5382 LNCS153-17

Ribonucleic acid synthesis by chromatin isolated from Phaseolus aureus Roxb. : The effect of endogenous ribonuclease

Chromatin was isolated from the hypocotyls of Phaseolus aureus Roxb. and assayed for endogenous RNA polymerase (EC 2.7.7.6) activity in vitro. The molecular size of the RNA product, measured by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, was found to be much smaller than that known to be synthesised in vivo and was affected by the assay temperature. Although conventional enzyme assays provided no evidence for the presence of ribonuclease in chromatin, a more sensitive technique revealed sufficient ribonuclease activity to degrade high-molecular weight RNA to smaller fragments. The inclusion of unlabelled exogenous RNA in the media for chromatin preparation and RNA polymerase assay substantially increased the molecular-weight of the RNA products synthesised in vitro.Peer reviewe

The threat of regulatory environmental inspection: impact on plant performance

Environmental regulation, Regulatory inspection, Compliance, Emission, K42, Q28, L51, K32,