The Effect of Information and Communication Technologies on Urban Structure

The geographic concentration of economic activity occurs because transport costs for goods, people and ideas give individuals and organisations incentives to locate close to each other. Historically, all of these costs have been falling. Such changes could lead us to predict the death of distance. This paper is concerned with one aspect of this prediction: the impact that less costly communication and transmission of information might have on cities and the urban structure. We develop a model which suggests that improvements in ICT will increase the dispersion of economic activity across cities making city sizes more uniform. We test this prediction using cross country data and find empirical support for this conclusion.ICT, urban structure, cross country data

Special 301 and Taiwan: A Case Study of Protecting United States Intellectual Property in Foreign Countries

On April 30, 1993, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) placed Taiwan on the priority watch list of countries that failed to protect United States intellectual property rights.\u27 Although countries on the priority watch list are not as egregious in violating United States intellectual property rights as those identified as priority foreign countries, Taiwan was targeted for an immediate action plan, requiring it to take specific actions before July 31, 1993, or else risk being the subject of a trade sanction. Under the intense pressure from the United States, the ruling party of Taiwan rammed through the legislature the first law governing the island\u27s booming cable-television industry on July 16, 1993. The authority of the USTR to target trading partners of the United States for their unsatisfactory protection of United States intellectual property rights comes from the Special 301 provision of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988. The Special 301 provision is designed to use the threat of unilateral retaliation by the United States to pressure its trade partners to reform their currently deficient intellectual property practices. The idea is the carrot and the stick, where the carrot is the right to export to the United States as a most favored nation, and the stick is the trade sanction. This paper will trace and analyze the interaction between the United States and Taiwan in the process of resolving disputes on intellectual property protection, and will discuss the implications of Taiwan\u27s experience, which can be useful for understanding conflicts over intellectual property protection in other countries

A Prediction of Observable Rotation in the ICM of Abell 3266

We present a numerical Hydro+N-body model of A3266 whose X-ray surface brightness, temperature distribution, and galaxy spatial and velocity distribution data are consistent with the A3266 data. The model is an old (~3 Gyr), off-axis merger having a mass ratio of ~2.5:1. The less massive subcluster in the model is moving on a trajectory from southwest to northeast passing on the western side of the dominant cluster while moving into the plane of the sky at ~45 degrees. Off-axis mergers such as this one are an effective mechanism for transferring angular momentum to the intracluster medium (ICM), making possible a large scale rotation of the ICM. We demonstrate here that the ICM rotation predicted by our fully 3-dimensional model of A3266 is observable with current technology. As an example, we present simulated observations assuming the capabilities of the high resolution X-ray spectrometer (XRS) which was to have flown on Astro-E.Comment: 9 pages, 7 postscript figures, Fig. 3 and 6 are color postscript, Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

A Grounded theory of Chinese students\u27 leisure behavior in American university

The number of international students at colleges and universities in the United States increased to a record high of 623,805 in the 2007/08 academic year (Institute of International Education, 2008). Among them, 81,127 (13%) students were from China, which is the second- leading place of origin for students coming to the United States, trailing only India (Institute of International Education, 2008). Due to the importance of international students to culturally diverse make-up of colleges and universities, American institutions have developed support services to assist international students with a variety of special needs ranging from adjusting to the academic requirements, to dealing with cultural factors of being submerged in new societal settings (Heggins & Jackson, 2003). The literature suggests there is one more element that is important in college students’ experience: leisure. Leisure forms a major component of active campus life, spanning a range of activities from daydreaming or drinking beer at the campus pub to tutoring disadvantaged children (Bloland, 1987). However, how international college students spend their leisure time and how their different cultures have impact on their leisure behavior has not been studiedextensively. Few empirical investigations focused on international students and no theory or process model of leisure behavior of international students exists. Therefore, this study intended to develop a theoretic model of Chinese students’ leisure behavior in American universities. In the study, we selected the grounded theory approach to construct a preliminary paradigm model of Chinese student’s leisure behavior based on in-depth interviews

Two types of electron events in solar flares

The fluxes and spectra of the flare electrons measured on board Venera-I3 and I4 space probes are compared with the parameters of the hard (E sub x approximately 55 keV) and thermal X-ray bursts. The electron flux amplitude has been found to correlate with flare importance in the thermal X-ray range (r approximately 0.8). The following two types of flare events have been found in the electron component of SCR. The electron flux increase is accompanied by a hard X-ray burst and the electron spectrum index in the approximately 25 to 200 keV energy range is gamma approximately 2 to 3. The electron flux increase is not accompanied by a hard X-ray burst and the electron spectrum is softer (Delta gamma approximately 0.7 to 1.0)

Higher-order corrections to the short-pulse equation

Using renormalization group techniques, we derive an extended short- pulse equation as approximation to a nonlinear wave equation. We investigate the new equation numerically and show that the new equation captures efficiently higher- order effects on pulse propagation in cubic nonlinear media. We illustrate our findings using one- and two-soliton solutions of the first-order short-pulse equation as initial conditions in the nonlinear wave equation