Regulation in the Taxi Industry.

This paper examines some of the economic reasons for price and entry regulation in the taxi industry and presents the legal framework under which taxis and hire cars are regulated in England and Wales outside London. It is argued that the current law is defective and should be amended to incorporate explicitly the inter-relationship between fares and vehicle numbers such that the regulators have the discretion to choose between a high price/high availability service and a low price/low availability service

The 1935 Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake

The history of natural disasters in Taiwan has frequently been linked to the practice of historical preservation, archival science, oral history, and museum curatorship. All are collectively hallmarks of a broad range of activities that fall under the umbrella of public history. The problem for Taiwan, however, concerns the legitimacy. Taiwan does not have a single national narrative. It has been subjected to waves of colonialism since the seventeenth century and does not presently have a fully post-colonial narrative. The earthquakes discussed in this paper occurred in two different periods of colonisation.  In order to situate the history of earthquakes into a public history discourse, the field of earthquake-based research in Taiwan has to incorporate different audiences and integrate into a much broader understanding. By this, I mean that the present regimental academic disciplines in Taiwan need to be cross disciplinary, especially since public history is by its very nature collaborative. It illuminates a shared authority over a much wider area. It needs to. It is my argument that it is in digital humanities that Taiwanese academics work best in collaboration. Efforts have been made to digitise the personal experiences of those involved in typhoon reconstruction efforts. A natural synergy, therefore, for the understanding of earthquakes, as public history, is to emphasise access and broad participation in the creation of knowledge. Digital humanities enables this. Attention to this is particularly important in historical preservation of particular sites on an island that frequently develops and re-develops brownfield sites

Comments on AdS2 solutions of D=11 Supergravity

We study the supersymmetric solutions of 11-dimensional supergravity with a factor of $AdS_2$ made of M2-branes. Such solutions can provide gravity duals of superconformal quantum mechanics, or through double Wick rotation, the generic bubbling geometry of M-theory which are 1/16-BPS. We show that, when the internal manifold is compact, it should take the form of a warped U(1)-fibration over an 8-dimensional Kahler space.Comment: 11 pages, no figure, JHEP3.cl

R&D in Developing Countries: What Should Governments Do?

I consider the implications of recent research for R&D policy in developing countries. Typical new growth models, which assume free entry and no strategic behaviour by R&D producers, are less appropriate for policy guidance than strategic oligopoly models. But the latter have ambiguous implications for targeted R&D subsidies, and caution against the anti-competitive effects of research joint ventures. A better policy is to raise the economy-wide level of research expertise. This avoids the need for governments to pick winners, is less prone to capture, and dilutes the strategic disincentive to undertake R&D with unappropriable spillovers.R&D spillovers, R&D cooperative agreements, RJVs (Research Joint Ventures), strategic trade and industrial policy, absorptive capacity

True Multilateral Indexes for International Comparisons of Purchasing Power and Real Income

I consider the problem of choosing index numbers of purchasing power and real income for international comparisons. I show that the desirable properties of methods based on the Fisher "Ideal" index do not extend to multilateral comparisons, except when tastes are homothetic. By contrast, the Geary method, which underlies the Penn World Tables, provides an approximation to a set of "true" exchange rate indexes which have many desirable properties. In particular, if demands exhibit generalized linearity, the true indexes measure real incomes relative to a hypothetical country whose income is an appropriate average of individual countries' incomes.

Behaviour of carbon dioxide and water vapour flux densities from a disturbed raised peat bog

Measurements of carbon dioxide and water vapour flux densities were carried out for a disturbed raised peat bog in the north of the Netherlands during an 18 month continuous experiment. Tussock grass (sp. Molinea caerulae) mainly dominated the vegetation of the bog area. The maximum leaf area index (LAI) of the vegetation reached a numerical value of about 1.7 in mid-August. When the LAI is large enough (LAI > 0.2), a mean net uptake of carbon dioxide is observed with a clear daily pattern. The total evapotranspiration consists of a soil, an open water, and a plant transpiration part. When the LAI is large enough (LAI > 0.2), plant transpiration dominates the total evapotranspiration. The mean daily transpiration pattern, however, is not similar to the carbon dioxide uptake pattern. During the summer months, the daytime carbon dioxide uptake shows a single early morning maximum value followed by a decline in uptake during the rest of the day. The evapotranspiration, however, follows more or less the incoming short-wave radiation pattern. Effects of the vapour pressure deficit are suggested as a possible cause of this discrepanc

The denatured state of N-PGK is compact and predominantly disordered

The Organisation of the structure present in the chemically denatured N-terminal domain of phosphoglycerate kinase (N-PGK) has been determined by paramagnetic relaxation enhancements (PREs) to define the conformational landscape accessible to the domain. Below 2.0 M guanidine hydrochloride (GuHCl), a species of N-PGK (denoted I-b) is detected, distinct from those previously characterised by kinetic experiments [folded (F), kinetic intermediate (I-k) and denatured (D)]. The transition to I-b is never completed at equilibrium, because F predominates below 1.0 M GuHCl. Therefore, the ability of PREs to report on transient or low population species has been exploited to characterise I-b. Five single cysteine variants of N-PGK were labelled with the nitroxide electron spin-label MTSL [(1-oxyl-2,2,5,5-tetramethyl-3-pyrroline-3-methyl)methanesulfonate] and the denaturant dependences of the relaxation properties of the amide NMR signals between 1.2 and 3.6 M GuHCl were determined. Significant PREs for I-b were obtained, but these were distributed almost uniformly throughout the sequence. Furthermore, the PREs indicate that no specific short tertiary contacts persist. The data indicate a collapsed state with no coherent three-dimensional structure, but with a restricted radius beyond which the protein chain rarely reaches. The NMR characteristics Of I-b indicate that it forms from the fully denatured state within 100 mu s, and therefore a rapid collapse is the initial stage of folding of N-PGK from its chemically denatured state. By extrapolation, I-b is the predominant form of the denatured state under native conditions, and the non-specifically collapsed structure implies that many non-native contacts and chain reversals form early in protein folding and must be broken prior to attaining the native state topology. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Herd behavior, the "Penguin effect", and the suppression of informational diffusion: An analysis of informational externalities and payoff interdependency

Technology;Information;Econometric Models;Group Behaviour