Market Structure and R∧D Joint Ventures: The Case of Product Innovations

Departing from the received fact that research joint venture agreements are allowed on the grounds of a permissive ruling, we study what conditions are necessary for venture partners to carry on RD cooperation to the marketing stage. We treat the case of product innovations exploitable with different usages in unconnected markets. Two main results appear: firms always have incentives for a distribution of varieties, but not always agree on the distribution of products. The condition for the last result to happen gives a useful rule for antitrust authorities relating the degree of sustitutability across varieties and the relative profitability of the markets.     

Deteriorating public and private sector relations in Central America

The Central American countries are divided by profound political differences. Yet surprising similarities exist in the changing relations between the public and private sectors. Throughout the region, public and private sectors lock into a vicious circle. The inability of the state to provide order and social harmony creates disincentives for the private sector to invest or even to continue existing levels of production. The government responds by increasing its responsibilities at the expense of the private sector. In doing so it assumes risks the private sector refuses, but further alienates the private sector nonetheless.     

When Green and Amber Meet

Through the ages Scotch whisky has been the drink of kings, politicians, entertainers and those who aspire to the finer things in life.It’s traditionally drunk with a splash of water,straight up or with the debonair "on the rocks" by-line.     

Extreme versus quotidian: addressing temporal dichotomies in Philippine disaster management

Brief narratives of two recent events in Luzon island—a flashflood in Angeles City and an eruption of Mayon volcano—underscore the disparity between natural hazards as amplifiers of everyday hardship for many Filipinos and the Philippine disaster management system's orientation towards extreme‐event response. Three major factors contribute to this dichotomy. First, population dynamics combined with the lack of access to resources compels poor Filipinos to live and work in hazardous areas, discounting risk from extreme natural events to focus on daily needs. Second, the institutional setting of the country's disaster management within the military establishment makes it difficult, though not impossible, to focus and address the underlying causes of vulnerability. Third, existing modes of funding disaster expenditures are all biased towards immediate response rather than long‐term risk‐reduction. The implications of these findings to disaster management and research in the Philippines are identified. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Influence of environmental variables on fear of crime: Comparing self-report data with physiological measures in an experimental design

Objectives

Self-reports and questionnaires have been the preferred research methods in the criminological field of “fear of crime” (FOC) since its rise in the 1960s. Our study had two main goals: (1) to measure the physiological indicators of fear in real time and (2) to compare these data with those obtained through self-reports, designed also to measure the emotion of fear.

Methods

An experimental study was conducted over the course of a week during late February 2016 in Aarhus (Denmark), in which the focus was on traditional environmental variables in the field of FOC (i.e., poor lighting conditions).

Results

Our results support the ideas that: (1) the absence of good luminosity in an open public space in an urban setting elicits physiological reactions of arousal that can be taken as indicators of experiences of fear and (2) heart rate appears to capture aspects of the emotion of fear that are not reflected in data obtained through self-report questionnaires.

Conclusions

This study, introducing a pioneering approach to the study of FOC, presents great potentials in complementing traditional methods in the crime sciences. The many challenges we faced are significant and reported with the hope that subsequent literature will build upon. We propose that traditional methods and new measurements could be combined to advance research in the field by allowing researchers to more unambiguously constrain the interpretation of their data. This becomes particularly relevant in a field like FOC, which has long suffered from irreconcilable results stemming from different investigations.

     

Comparison Among Manual Facial Approximations Conducted by Two Methodological Approaches of Face Prediction

This study verified the difference between two methods of forensic facial approximation (FFA) regarding recognition and resemblance rates. Three‐dimensional models of skulls were obtained from computerized tomography (CT) scans of two subjects (targets). Two manual FFAs were performed for each target, by applying two different guidelines for the facial structures (what we called “American method” (AM) and “Combined method” (CM)). Unfamiliar assessors evaluated the sculptures by recognition and resemblance tests. The AM was that which allowed more correct responses of recognition and higher resemblance's scores for the male target (p < 0.001). Regarding guidelines for modeling characteristics of the face, the ones that are practical and easily performed for sculptures, such as the length of the anterior nasal spine multiplied by 3 for nose prediction, may offer better results in terms of resemblance.     

DXAGE: A New Method for Age at Death Estimation Based on Femoral Bone Mineral Density and Artificial Neural Networks

Age at death estimation in adult skeletons is hampered, among others, by the unremarkable correlation of bone estimators with chronological age, implementation of inappropriate statistical techniques, observer error, and skeletal incompleteness or destruction. Therefore, it is beneficial to consider alternative methods to assess age at death in adult skeletons. The decrease in bone mineral density with age was explored to generate a method to assess age at death in human remains. A connectionist computational approach, artificial neural networks, was employed to model femur densitometry data gathered in 100 female individuals from the Coimbra Identified Skeletal Collection. Bone mineral density declines consistently with age and the method performs appropriately, with mean absolute differences between known and predicted age ranging from 9.19 to 13.49 years. The proposed method—DXAGE—was implemented online to streamline age estimation. This preliminary study highlights the value of densitometry to assess age at death in human remains.     

The Evolution and Convergence of the Government Expenditure Composition in the OECD Countries

In the light of models of composition ofgovernment expenditure and economic growthand the growing globalization process, weinfer that countries should tend to asimilar structure of government spendingover time. In fact, using Tukey box-plotsand σ-convergence we show evidenceof an approaching process in thecomposition of government expenditures inOECD countries for the period 1970–1997. Wealso identify by means of cluster analysisthat most countries are converging towardstwo different models: one including twelveEuropean and non-European countries and theother composed solely of eight countries ofthe European Union.     

Y-chromosome STR haplotypes in two population samples: Azores Islands and Central Portugal

The Y-chromosome haplotypes defined by nine STRs (DYS19, DYS385, DYS389I, DYS389II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392 and DYS393) were studied in 207 unrelated individuals from Central Portugal and 63 from Azores Islands. The most common haplotype in Central Portugal was shared by 3.4% of the males, while 160 haplotypes were unique. In Azores Islands the most common haplotype was shared by 6.4% of the males, while 40 haplotypes were unique. The values of haplotype diversity were 0.993 for Central Portugal and 0.976 for Azores Islands.