Rules and Disciplines in Government Procurement Agreements

The negotiation of rules and disciplines established in the normative body of government procurement agreements has the aim of ensuring that the principles of national treatment and non-discrimination are fully enforced in all the steps and procedures that are present in the tendering processes carried out by governments.Integration & Trade :: Trade Agreements, Integration & Trade, Integration & Trade :: Globalization & Regionalization, Compras del sector público, Public sector acquisitions, Rules and Disciplines in Government Procurement Agreements

Degrees of difference: Social inequalities in graduates' job opportunities in the UK and Germany

In 2011, the UK White Paper 'Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility' recognised that 'there is a long way to go' for the achievement of a fair society in which every individual can achieve their potential, irrespective of their family circumstances (Cabinet Office, 2011:5). It also acknowledged that individuals from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds continue to be more likely to enter high-paid professional and managerial occupations than individuals from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. We refer to these as 'top-level' occupations; examples include doctors, lawyers or managers in large organisations

Patterns of Absolute and Relative Social Mobility: a Comparative Study of England, Wales and Scotland

We use the British Household Panel Study to analyse change over birth cohorts in patterns of social mobility in England, Scotland and Wales. In several respects, our conclusions are similar to those reached by other authors on the basis of wider comparisons. There has been a large growth in non-manual employment since the middle of the twentieth century. This led first to a rise in upward mobility, but, as parents of younger people have now themselves benefited from that, has more recently forced people downward from their middle-class origins. These changes have largely not been a growth in relative social mobility: it is change induced by the occupational structure. The conclusions apply both to current class and to the class which people entered when they first entered the labour market. The patterns of relative mobility could not be explained statistically by measures of the respondents\' educational attainment. The conclusions were broadly the same for the three countries, but there was some evidence that in the youngest cohort (people born between 1967 and 1976) experience of people from Wales was diverging from that of people from England and Scotland, with rather greater amounts of downward mobility. There were two methodological conclusions. Out-migration from country of birth within the UK did not seem to make any important difference to our results. That is encouraging for analysis of surveys confined to one of the three countries, because it suggests that losing track of out-migrants would not distort the results. The second methodological conclusion is that the comparative study of social mobility can find interesting topics to investigate at social levels lower than that of the state, here the comparison of the three countries which make up Britain.Social Mobility; Comparative Research; British Household Panel Study; Loglinear Modelling

Quantification of gliadin levels to the picogram level by flow cytometry

Celiac disease is a widely prevalent enteropathy caused by intolerance to gliadin, one of the gluten proteins. We developed two methods for the analysis of gliadin levels. Both methods use flow cytometry and rat antibodies against a 16-residue peptide of gliadin. The peptide is common to the alpha-, beta-, gamma-, and omega-gliadins

R0R_0 and the global behavior of an age-structured SIS epidemic model with periodicity and vertical transmission

In this paper, we study an age-structured SIS epidemic model with periodicity and vertical transmission. We show that the spectral radius of the Frechet derivative of a nonlinear integral operator plays the role of a threshold value for the global behavior of the model, that is, if the value is less than unity, then the disease-free steady state of the model is globally asymptotically stable, while if the value is greater than unity, then the model has a unique globally asymptotically stable endemic (nontrivial) periodic solution. We also show that the value can coincide with the well-know epidemiological threshold value, the basic reproduction number $\mathcal{R}_0$

Vascular prosthesis

A vascular endoprosthesis (1) is disclosed which is capable of being arranged internally to the aortic arch (O), comprising: a tubular main body (2), to be housed in the internal lumen of the aortic arch (O); three tubular secondary bodies (3, 4, 5), originating from the main body (2) and to be housed in the right carotid artery (R), in the left carotid artery (L) and in the subclavian artery (S); and stent-type engagement means (10, 11, 13, 14, 15), intended to hold a longitudinal end portion (21, 22, 31, 41, 51) of the main and secondary bodies onto the internal wall of the respective vessel (FIG. 5)

Nonlinear Aeroelastic Analysis of Highly Deformable Joined-Wing Configurations

The present work focuses on the analysis of the aeroelastic response of Joined-Wings configurations through nonlinear tools. A comparison between the stability predictions of linear and nonlinear in-house tools when high deformations are encountered is pursued. It is also attempted a better understanding of which are the important features to be retained in the models employed, in order to have on one side good accuracy and at the same time an acceptable computational cost