A study was conducted to examine the effects of nation-states’ political institutions on state relations. War-fighting and selection-effects explanation were compared to explain why democracies were more likely to win wars. An analysis of all interstate wars between 1816 and 1982 revealed that democracies that initiate wars often win them. Results also suggest that domestic political structure ...

Global fits to precision cosmological data which show that there is a dark energy component comprising about 2/3 of the total cosmological energy also hint that a dark energy with w = P/ρ < −1 is viable, even favored. Here we discuss implications of such a surprising w, including whether it jeopardizes vacuum stability. It appears to be secure in microscopic processes, but why bulk dark energy ...

Investors significantly reduce their future returns by selecting mutual funds with higher fees, allured by higher past returns that do not predict future performance. This suboptimal behavior, which can roughly halve an investor’s retirement savings, is driven by two psychological factors. One factor is difficulty comprehending rate information, which is critical given that mutual fund fees and...

Two emergent “green” forms of regional development are compared and contrasted in terms of a concept of sustainability that includes ecological, economic, and equity considerations. The green technopole is built around the ecological modernization of existing industries or the development of new environmentally oriented industries, and green localism is based on production for the regional econ...

Dilemmas of China’s Modernization: Population Problem and the Strategy of Sustainable Development by Hongbo Tang By reexamining the process of China’s modernization centered on its population in the past half century, this paper explores the grim situation of China’s population, historical factors, and the relationship between population, resources, and environment. Also, focused on controlling...

The commonly discussed forms of ‘strong’ sustainable development are rooted in either ecocentric or anthropocentric perspectives. Both eco-socialism and social ecology constitute anthropocentric (or ‘homocentric’) strong sustainability: being essentially humanistic but also embracing stewardship of nature, environmentally benign but centred on social justice. The bases of this development model...

Migrating to the Service Cloud Paradigm implies the migration of legacy software systems to a service-oriented architecture with deployment in the cloud. Although this specific software modernization paradigm promises numerous strategic and operational advantages, it poses also many complex organizational and technical challenges, among which is the lack of mature processes, methods and techniq...

Legacy systems are usually made of two kind of artifacts: source code and databases. Typically, the maintenance of those systems is carried out through reengineering processes. Although both artifacts can be independently maintained, for a more effective re-engineering of the whole system both should be analyzed and evolved jointly. This is mainly due to the fact that the knowledge expected to ...