Retail Consolidation And The Price Elasticity Of Demand For Books

This paper estimates a translogarithmic utility function to derive price elasticities of demand for nine categories of books published for the period 1975 to 1996.  In general, more popular categories of books, such as adult fiction and non-fiction hardcover and paperbound publications, tended on average to have higher price elasticities of demand, suggesting lower retail margins than more specialized categories, such as professional books and mail order specialty items.  This study also briefly examines increased consolidation and concentration in the retail book industry.  While increases in oligopsony power suggests larger publisher to retailer discounts, price elasticity estimates indicate that retail margins were generally virtually unaffected during the period considered.  One possible explanation is that increases in retailer profits were at the expense of publishers, which augur further concentration in the retail book industry

15 years of commercializing nanomedicine into real medical products

Department of Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA and There is an acute shortage of organs due to disease, trauma, congenital defects, and most importantly, age related maladies. The synthetic materials used in tissue engineering applications today are typically composed of millimeter or micron sized particles and/or fiber dimensions. Although human cells are on the micron scale, their individual components, e.g. proteins, are composed of nanometer features. By modifying only the nanofeatures on material surfaces without changing surface chemistry, it is possible to increase tissue growth of any human tissue by controlling the endogenous adsorption of adhesive proteins onto the material surface. In addition, our group has shown that these same nanofeatures and nano-modifications can reduce bacterial growth without using antibiotics, which may further accelerate the growth of antibiotic resistant microbes. Inflammation can also be decreased through the use of nanomaterials. Finally, nanomedicine has been shown to stimulate the growth and differentiation of stem cells, which may someday be used to treat incurable disorders, such as neural damage. This strategy also accelerates USA FDA approval and commercialization efforts since new chemistries are not proposed, rather chemistries already approved by the FDA with altered nanoscale features. This invited talk will highlight some of the advancements and emphasize current nanomaterials approved by the USA FDA for human implantation

Quasar-galaxy associations

There is controversy about the measurement of statistical associations between bright quasars and faint, presumably foreground galaxies. We look at the distribution of galaxies around an unbiased sample of 63 bright, moderate redshift quasars using a new statistic based on the separation of the quasar and its nearest neighbour galaxy. We find a significant excess of close neighbours at separations less than about 10 arcsec which we attribute to the magnification by gravitational lensing of quasars which would otherwise be too faint to be included in our sample. About one quarter to one third of the quasars are so affected although the allowed error in this fraction is large.Comment: uuencoded Postscript file (including figures and tables), SUSSEX-AST 94/8-