On December 2, when Venezuelans delivered President Hugo Chávez his first electoral defeat in nine years, most analysts were taken by surprise. According to o⁄cial results, 50.7 percent of voters rejected Chávez’s proposed constitutional reform, which would have expanded executive power, gotten rid of presidential term limits, and paved the way for the construction of a “socialist” economy. It ...

on the complex upper half-plane H, provably invariant under the linear fractional action of SL2(R), but it is oppressive to verify this directly. Worse, the goal is not merely to verify an expression presented as a deus ex machina, but, rather to systematically generate suitable expressions. An important part of this intention is understanding reasons for the existence of invariant operators, a...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the political, social and economic background of the divergence of Belarusian and Ukrainian transitions. We focus on Belarus in order to find explanation for questions such as why could Lukashenko remain the authoritarian leader of Belarus, while in Ukraine the position of the political elite had proved less stable and collapsed in 2004. On the theoretical fr...

These are but a few of the major problems the author had to tackle in writing this book, and he does justice to both sides of the arguments with unrelenting impartiality. The volume obviously is a survey-book for the non-professional public, nevertheless one would still prefer to have some of the author's own opinions instead of sweeping and often contradictory generalizations in an almost epig...

a reliable method is described for rapid proliferation of axillary shoots from nodal segment of mature field-grown aromatic and medicinal plant vitex negundo through in vitro culture. of different concentrations of n6-benzyladenine (ba) evaluated as supplements to murahige and skoog (ms) medium, ba at 1mg/l was effective in enhancing bud break and shoot regeneration. response of explants was al...

The objective of this work is to try to define and calculate the optimal growth path, in the presence of exogenous technical change, without resorting to the discounted-sum criterion. The solution suggested is to consider an optimality criterion expressing an Allais-anonymous intergenerational consensus. The partial characterization of consensual optimality was made possible thanks to the decom...

In this position paper, we argue that when we are looking for the best fuzzy logic, we should specify in what sense the best, and that we get different fuzzy logics as “the best” depending on what optimality criterion we use.

In this paper the problem of determining optimal designs for least squares estimation is considered in the common linear regression model with correlated observations. Our approach is based on the determination of ‘nearly’ universally optimal designs, even in the case where the universally optimal design does not exist. For this purpose we introduce a new optimality criterion which reflects the...

At the end of their debate with R. H. Str&, F. M. Fisher and J. Rothenberg make a plea for going beyond the Pareto optimality criterion in analyzing issues in welfare eoonomies.l The present study is in the spirit of this plea: an attempt is made in this paper to derive bounds on the optimal distribution of income under a particular set of value judgments. Because of a general reluctance of eco...