Beyond contested elections: the processes of bill creation and the fulfillment of democracy's promises

Long before 1996, earlier promises of 'development' had splintered into a million shards. Development -- defined as the use of state power to bring about social, political, and economic change in favor of the mass of the population almost everywhere had seemingly imploded. 5 Babies in the poorer countries could expect to live from ten to thirty years fewer than those born in industrialized countries. [TRUNCATED

Numerical investigation of aeroelastic mode distribution for aircraft wing model in subsonic air flow

In this paper, the numerical results on two problems originated in aircraft wing modeling have been presented. The first problem is concerned with the approximation to the set of the aeroelastic modes, which are the eigenvalues of a certain boundary-value problem. The affirmative answer is given to the following question: can the leading asymptotical terms in the analytical formulas be used as reasonably accurate description of the aeroelastic modes? The positive answer means that these leading terms can be used by engineers for practical calculations. The second problem is concerned with the flutter phenomena in aircraft wings in a subsonic, incompressible, inviscid air flow. It has been shown numerically that there exists a pair of the aeroelastic modes whose behavior depends on a speed of an air flow. Namely, when the speed increases, the distance between the modes tends to zero, and at some speed that can be treated as the flutter speed these two modes merge into one double mode

1998 Sewall Wright Award: William Donald Hamilton

Journal ArticleThe Sewall Wright Award was established in 1991 to honor active investigators who have contributed in especially significant ways to the conceptual unification of the biological sciences. This year's recipient is William D. Hamilton of Oxford University. Beginning in the 1960s with his papers on the theory of inclusive fitness and the evolution of eusociality, Bill Hamilton's publications have permanently changed the landscape of ideas and interpretation surrounding a wide range of biological phenomena. His papers have clarified murky problems, generated new research agendas, and unified our understanding of many central concepts, on a truly revolutionary scale

Natural enemies and biodiversity : the double-edged sword of trophic interactions

Natural enemies, that is, species that inflict harm on others while feeding on them, are fundamental drivers of biodiversity dynamics and represent a substantial portion of biodiversity as well. Along the life history of the Earth, natural enemies have been involved in probably some of the most productive mechanisms of biodiversity genesis; that is, adaptive radiation mediated by enemy-victim coevolutionary processes. At ecological timescales, natural enemies are a fundamental piece of food webs and can contribute to biodiversity preservation by promoting stability and coexistence at lower trophic levels through top-down regulation mechanisms. However, natural enemies often produce dramatic losses of biodiversity, especially when humans are involved

Rapid, Precise, and High-Sensitivity Acquisition of Paleomagnetic and Rock-Magnetic Data: Development of a Low-Noise Automatic Sample Changing System for Superconducting Rock Magnetometers

Among Earth sciences, paleomagnetism is particularly linked to the statistics of large sample sets as a matter of historical development and logistical necessity. Because the geomagnetic field varies over timescales relevant to sedimentary deposition and igneous intrusion, while the fidelity of recorded magnetization is modulated by original properties of rock units and by alteration histories, "ideal" paleomagnetic results measure remanent magnetizations of hundreds of samples at dozens of progressive demagnetization levels, accompanied by tests of magnetic composition on representative sister specimens. We present an inexpensive, open source system for automating paleomagnetic and rock magnetic measurements. Using vacuum pick-and-place technology and a quartz-glass sample holder, the system can in one hour measure remanent magnetizations, as weak as a few pAm2, of ~30 specimens in two vertical orientations with measurement errors comparable to those of the best manual systems. The system reduces the number of manual manipulations required per specimen ~8 fold