China’s rise and New Zealand’s interests: a policy primer for 2030

In this study, we seek to do three things. First, we examine what we believe China’s economic, political and military trajectory will resemble between now and the early 2030s. Second, we contemplate the effects that this trajectory for China will have on international institutions and Asia-Pacific regional affairs. Third, we propose a series of issues that New Zealand’s policy-makers will need to bear in mind. The emergence of China as an international power in the early decades of the 21st century is widely accepted as the consequence of economic, political and military trends which are already apparent today. The familiar patterns of power centred on western predominance and American leadership will no longer offer the reassurance they once did. Dealing with a prosperous and powerful China, which is by no means a novelty in world history, is commonly accepted as the main foreign policy adjustment that needs to be made by all countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The effects of China’s rise on the global and Asia-Pacific regional order are likely to be the main preoccupations for New Zealand foreign policy-makers in the next twenty years and more

NUCLEOTIDE SEQUENCES FOR DETECTION OF SERPULINA HYODYSENTERIAE

The invention provides a method for detecting the presence of Serpulina hyOdysenteriae in a biological Sample, an oligonucleotide primer and an S. hyodysenteriae-specific oligonucleotide probe useful in that method, and an article of manufacture that contains the primers and/or probe. Also provided are an about 2.3-kb DNA fragment derived from genomic DNA of S. hyodysenteriae and encoding for an about 56 kDa polypeptide, a recombinant expression vector containing the DNA fragment, the 56 kDa polypeptide and a monoclonal antibody reactive with the peptide, and a method of assaying for antibodies reactive with the 56 kDa peptide

Measuring the Efficiency of Residential Real Estate Brokerage Firms

This article measures overall, allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency levels for a sample of residential real estate brokerage firms using data envelopment analysis, a linear-programming technique. The results suggest that real estate brokerage firms operate inefficiently. Inefficiencies are primarily a function of sub-optimal input allocations and the failure to operate at constant returns to scale rather than from poor input utilization. Regression analysis is employed to determine which firm and/or market characteristics affect efficiency levels. The results show that increasing firm size increases efficiency while choosing to franchise, adding an additional multiple listing service and increasing operating leverage decreases firm performance.

Battalion review, Special 34th Battalion, USN, 1944-1945

Throughout the months of war stevedores kept the supplies in constant movement toward the front-transferring them from ship to shiploading, unloading, impelled by the exigency of war, in the days and in the nights at Pearl Harbor, on Hilo, Maui, and Guam -- these names signify the dock locations worked by the 34th stevedores. From December 1944 to August 1945 the 34th stevedores handled 410,882 tons of cargo, and at the close of the war the men were waiting, at long last, on Guam -- still stevedoring. We present our stevedores who supplied their portion of sweat, blood, and tears, and who kept the hook moving. They performed the rugged, tedious, physical activity that is stevedoring, lived out of their seabags, followed their cargo, and were still smiling, enjoying their beer, their liberties, while in the States, which had become so precious to all of us. They played ball when they had the time, wrote their letters, and in the hours of their days and nights thought about home, and continued to do their job under the tension of the military, and in the heat of the tropics, thousands of miles, and endless months from home.https://digicom.bpl.lib.me.us/ww_reg_his/1051/thumbnail.jp

Parameter-free predictions of the viscoelastic response of glassy polymers from non-affine lattice dynamics

We study the viscoelastic response of amorphous polymers using theory and simulations. By accounting for internal stresses and considering instantaneous normal modes (INMs) within athermal non-affine theory, we make parameter-free predictions of the dynamic viscoelastic moduli obtained in coarse-grained simulations of polymer glasses at non-zero temperatures. The theoretical results show very good correspondence with rheology data collected from molecular dynamics simulations over five orders of magnitude in frequency, with some instabilities that accumulate in the low-frequency part on approach to the glass transition. These results provide evidence that the mechanical glass transition itself is continuous and thus represents a crossover rather than a true phase transition. The relatively sharp drop of the low-frequency storage modulus across the glass transition temperature can be explained mechanistically within the proposed theory: the proliferation of low-eigenfrequency vibrational excitations (boson peak and nearly-zero energy excitations) is directly responsible for the rapid growth of a negative non-affine contribution to the storage modulus.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure