Building on the political economy literature, we develop a conceptual model and apply it to explain the OPEC pricing behavior. We model OPEC as a cartel-of-nations where politician use two instruments: production quotas and domestic fuel consumption subsidies. Our model explains the wedge between domestic fuel prices in OPEC countries and in the rest of the world. The empirical estimates show t...

Widespread availability of location aware devices (such as GPS receivers) promotes capture of detailed movement trajectories of people, animals, vehicles and other moving objects. We investigate spatio-temporal movement patterns in large tracking data sets, i.e. in large sets of polygonal paths. Specifically, we study so-called ‘popular places’, that is, regions that are visited by many entitie...

he tumor suppressor p53 can act as a transcription factor, T but only a few p53-activated genes have been found, and the biochemical basis of p53-mediated apoptosis has been especially difficult to probe. Now, Bourdon et al. describe the discovery and characterization of a novel p53-inducible proapoptotic gene (page 235). By comparing gene expression in normal and p53-knockout mice exposed to i...

This chapter adopts a phenomenological understanding of ‘place’, as a distinctive coming together of ‘actants’ (humans and their identities, geographical spaces and the material world), thereby imbuing a particular space (more or less bounded or diffuse) with an array of intersubjectively constructed meanings (Agnew 2011). Given that place is therefore socially constructed in the critical reali...

In [Clark, 2000], Austen Clark argues convincingly that a widespread view of perception as a complicated kind of feature-extraction is incomplete. He argues that perception has another crucial representational ingredient: it must also involve the representation of “sensory individuals” that exemplify sensorily extracted features. Moreover, he contends, the best way of understanding sensory indi...

Glutamate in unusual places lutamate has a critical physiological function unrelated to its job as a neurotransmitter, according to results from M.M. Reddy and Paul Quinton (University of California, San Diego, CA). The duo find that glutamate activates an epithelial ion channel that is mutated in patients with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis is caused by mutations in the CFTR anion channel, w...