Mariano Raho: Рolitical Portrait

Polleit and Mariano

In their paper “Credit Default Swaps from the Viewpoint of Libertarian Property Rights and Contract Theory,” Thorsten Polleit and Jonathan Mariano attempt to show that credit default swaps (CDS) are legitimate and enforceable contracts under Murray Rothbard’s conception of property rights and contract theories. They also try to demonstrate that “CDS are an efficient and effective instrument for...

Portrait

Born in 1944, I grew up in a world in which polio was both a gripping fear and real threat. Then in a matter of a few years-polio was eradicated by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. Later I learned that Salk's efforts were built on pioneering work of many others, including John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins (Nobelists, 1954), and David Bodian, who pioneered studies of polio patho...

Mariano Barbacid: Bringing cancer biology back home

After spending half of his life in the US, where he achieved considerable recognition as a discoverer of human oncogenes first and a researcher in molecular oncology afterwards, Spanish biologist Mariano Barbacid, now 50 years old, returned to Spain two years ago, full of hope and of plans for a first class research centre on oncology. He can now keep a close eye on the old hospital, in which t...

Google Portrait

Exemplar-Based Portrait Photograph Enhancement as Informed by Portrait Paintings

This paper proposes an approach to enhance the regional contrasts in snap-shot style portrait photographs by using pre-modern portrait paintings as aesthetic exemplars. The example portrait painting is selected based on a comparison of the existing contrast properties of the painting and the photograph. The contrast organization in the selected example painting is transferred to the photograph ...