Monitoring Costs and the Mode of International Investment

Our central proposition is that monitoring costs increase with physical distance, and hence, direct investments located further from the foreign investor’s home base should be more likely formed as joint ventures. Tests on a data set of Taiwanese direct investments in Mainland China provide robust support to the hypothesis. A project that was located 1000 kilometers further away was 13-17% more likely to be formed as a joint venture.contract, vertical integration, opportunism, international investment, China

Crystalline Oxide Solid Solutions in Oxygen Potential Gradients

The steady state demixing of an initially homogeneous oxide solid solution (A, B)O in an oxygen potential field is studied theoretically and experimentally. In case that DA > Db ≫ D0, the crystal is shifted with respect to the oxide lattice system toward the higher oxygen potential and is enriched in A at the side of the higher oxygen potential, while the transport of oxygen in the crystal is negligible. A numerical solution of the transport problem is presented, and the predicted effect is verified experimentally. © 1979, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved

Development and in-vitro evaluation of an optimized carvedilol transdermal therapeutic system using experimental design approach

AbstractThe effect of formulation variables on in-vitro release and permeation properties of carvedilol from transdermal patch was studied by varying one factor at a time as preliminary study. Based on these results, design of experiments technique was applied followed by regression analysis and response surface methodology to optimize formulation variables. Central Composite IV model design was used with four formulation variables: drug loading, matrix thickness, adhesive layer thickness, and propylene glycol concentration. Nineteen formulations were prepared according to the design; and the effect of formulation variables was studied on in-vitro release and permeation profiles of these formulations. In all cases, the permeation profiles paralleled in-vitro release profiles. The drug released at 7 h and 24 h was used as release response parameters while permeation flux obtained was employed as permeation response parameter. All four formulation variables were found to be significant for release properties and three of these exhibited significant effect on permeation profile of carvedilol across artificial membrane. Constrained optimization, using 47.9% of cumulative carvedilol released at 7 h and 99.8% at 24 h as well as 25.7 μg/cm2/h of permeation flux, was applied to obtain desired release and permeation profiles. Experimentally, carvedilol was observed to release from the optimized formulation with 51.4% drug release at 7 h and 98.5% at 24 h with an observed flux value of 27.4 μg/cm2/h across artificial membrane, which showed an excellent agreement with the predicted values. The results of this investigation show that the quadratic mathematical model developed could be used to further predict formulations with desirable release and permeation properties

Blow up criterion for compressible nematic liquid crystal flows in dimension three

In this paper, we consider the short time strong solution to a simplified hydrodynamic flow modeling the compressible, nematic liquid crystal materials in dimension three. We establish a criterion for possible breakdown of such solutions at finite time in terms of the temporal integral of both the maximum norm of the deformation tensor of velocity gradient and the square of maximum norm of gradient of liquid crystal director field.Comment: 22 page

Energy Dissipation and Regularity for a Coupled Navier-Stokes and Q-Tensor System

We study a complex non-newtonian fluid that models the flow of nematic liquid crystals. The fluid is described by a system that couples a forced Navier-Stokes system with a parabolic-type system. We prove the existence of global weak solutions in dimensions two and three. We show the existence of a Lyapunov functional for the smooth solutions of the coupled system and use the cancellations that allow its existence to prove higher global regularity, in dimension two. We also show the weak-strong uniqueness in dimension two

Majority versus minority dynamics: Phase transition in an interacting two-state spin system

We introduce a simple model of opinion dynamics in which binary-state agents evolve due to the influence of agents in a local neighborhood. In a single update step, a fixed-size group is defined and all agents in the group adopt the state of the local majority with probability p or that of the local minority with probability 1-p. For group size G=3, there is a phase transition at p_c=2/3 in all spatial dimensions. For p>p_c, the global majority quickly predominates, while for p<p_c, the system is driven to a mixed state in which the densities of agents in each state are equal. For p=p_c, the average magnetization (the difference in the density of agents in the two states) is conserved and the system obeys classical voter model dynamics. In one dimension and within a Kirkwood decoupling scheme, the final magnetization in a finite-length system has a non-trivial dependence on the initial magnetization for all p.ne.p_c, in agreement with numerical results. At p_c, the exact 2-spin correlation functions decay algebraically toward the value 1 and the system coarsens as in the classical voter model.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, revtex4 2-column format; minor revisions for publication in PR

On 2D Viscoelasticity with Small Strain

An exact two-dimensional rotation-strain model describing the motion of Hookean incompressible viscoelastic materials is constructed by the polar decomposition of the deformation tensor. The global existence of classical solutions is proved under the smallness assumptions only on the size of initial strain tensor. The proof of global existence utilizes the weak dissipative mechanism of motion, which is revealed by passing the partial dissipation to the whole system.Comment: Different contributions of strain and rotation of the deformation are studied for viscoelastic fluids of Oldroyd-B type in 2

Proteinlike behavior of a spin system near the transition between ferromagnet and spin glass

A simple spin system is studied as an analog for proteins. We investigate how the introduction of randomness and frustration into the system effects the designability and stability of ground state configurations. We observe that the spin system exhibits protein-like behavior in the vicinity of the transition between ferromagnet and spin glass. Our results illuminate some guiding principles in protein evolution.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Nonlinear Dynamical Stability of Newtonian Rotating White Dwarfs and Supermassive Stars

We prove general nonlinear stability and existence theorems for rotating star solutions which are axi-symmetric steady-state solutions of the compressible isentropic Euler-Poisson equations in 3 spatial dimensions. We apply our results to rotating and non-rotating white dwarf, and rotating high density supermassive (extreme relativistic) stars, stars which are in convective equilibrium and have uniform chemical composition. This paper is a continuation of our earlier work ([28])