Mutual fund providers serve two principals with opposing interests: their owners, who want them to maximize profits, and their fund shareholders, who want them to maximize fund returns. I investigate what role is played by customer power and information, as well as by competition among fund providers in influencing the balance of power between these two opposing principals. Using a data set of ...

This commentary compares the primary energy requirement for apples (cultivar 'Braeburn'), which were either imported or locally-grown in Meckenheim, Germany. Imported apples of the same cultivar were grown in a Southern hemisphere winter in Nelson, Southland, New Zealand, and were picked at the end of March with subsequent 28 d transport by sea for sale in April in Germany. Locally-grown apples...

The under-representation of women in the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines is of broad national concern. This paper reports on the development of new Transtheoretical Model-based measures to assess readiness to take action to advance women scientists. Reliable, valid measures of stage of change, decisional balance, and self-efficacy were developed with a sample of science f...

Argumentation, whether philosophical or formal and mathematical, is a discipline of interdisciplinary nature, per se. The recent works on the computational argumentation formalism and their foundations, however, have rested only on logic or logical account. In this paper, we reconsider Dung’s seminal argument acceptability notion in the context of Heider’s socio-psychological balance theory, wh...

Onsager’s theory is based on three assumptions [1,2]: i) The probability distribution function for the fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities (Temperature, pressure, degree of advancement of a chemical reaction etc.) is a Maxwellian ii) Fluctuations decay according to a linear law and iii) The principle of the detailed balance (or the microscopic reversibility) is satisfied. Onsager showed th...

Energy is a concept of universal importance. In applying it to body weight regulation, the focus has been on energy balance and how this balance is affected by intakes and expenditures. However, energy is an abstract concept without biological equivalent and applying it to explain body weight regulation has led to various misconceptions and created intellectual obstacles in understanding the ob...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether equine-assisted therapy (hippotherapy) produces alterations in the balance of the elderly. METHODS The sample included 17 older adults who were divided into experimental (7 subjects) and control (10 subjects) groups. Stabilometry data were acquired with a force platform. The Timed Up and Go test (TUG) was used for clinical analysis of seated balance, transfer fr...

With the advancement in metabolic engineering technologies, reconstruction the genome of a host organism to achieve desired phenotypes for example, to optimize the production of metabolites can be made. However, due to the complexity and size of the genome scale metabolic network, significant components tend to be invisible. This research utilizes Flux Balance Analysis (FBA) to search the essen...