We present a new cross-national measure of de facto judicial independence, which is available for 200 countries from 1948 to 2012. To do so, we introduce a statistical measurement model for uncovering latent concepts commonly encountered in time-series, cross-sectional analyses in comparative politics and international relations. Our approach addresses unique challenges that arise in these data...

The chemist is aware of the synergetic effects arising from a simultaneous application of thermodynamic and kinetic concepts. To give a few examples, the (thermodynamical) Langmuir adsorption isotherm has a simple kinetic derivation, basing on the assumption of a dynamical equilibrium [La18]. We evaluate adsorbate binding energies from the temperature-dependence of desorption rates [Re62], wher...

In this paper, we propose the linear model of the relationship between the physical changes in speech and perceived emotional concepts. We make use of orthogonal bases in spite of emotional words and physical parameters themselves in order to avoid dependence on the method of selecting words and parameters. Furthermore we regard the emotions that listeners perceive from speech as the standard o...

Among the most popular models for decision under risk and uncertainty are the rank-dependent models, introduced by Quiggin and Schmeidler. Central concepts in these models are rank-dependence and comonotonicity. It has been suggested in the literature that these concepts are technical tools that have no intuitive or empirical content. This paper describes such contents. As ¤corresponding author...

Information systems are socio-technical systems. Their design, analysis and implementation requires appropriate languages for representing social and technical concepts. However, many symbolic modelling approaches fall into the trap of underemphasizing social aspects of information systems. This often leads to an inability of ontological models to incorporate effects such as contextual dependen...

In an interesting and quite exhaustive review on Random Forests (RF) methodology in bioinformatics Touw et al. address--among other topics--the problem of the detection of interactions between variables based on RF methodology. We feel that some important statistical concepts, such as 'interaction', 'conditional dependence' or 'correlation', are sometimes employed inconsistently in the bioinfor...

conclusions low onset age of smoking cigarettes, high novelty seeking and low cooperativeness in opiate dependents are among the important personality traits in future use of drugs that can predict the subsequent onset of using opiate drugs. results opiate addicts had higher scores in novelty seeking dimension and lower scores in cooperativeness compared to nicotine addicts. the onset age of sm...

conclusions results showed that sexual dysfunction is a prevalent disorder in opioid-dependent males. addiction withdrawal centers should be warned about the dysfunction caused by opioids and, from a clinical perspective, it is imperative that patients misusing opiates and those treated with methadone are routinely asked about their sexual functioning so that, if indicated, appropriate investig...

background :impact of substance abuse on outcome of hospitalized patients with acute myocardial infarction (mi) is a frequent question. available studies show disagreements over its impact, thus we performed this study to find a clear answer.   methods : in a cross sectional study, 304 patients (include 152 consecutive opium dependents and equal number of independents) with acute mi admitted to...

glutathione s-transferases (gsts; ec: 2.5.1.18) are ubiquitous multifunctional enzymes, which play a key role in cellular detoxification. functional genetic polymorphisms in genes encoding gstm1 (a member of gst class mu; omim: 138350), and gstt1 (a member of gst class theta; omim: 600436) have been well defined. the functional null alleles of gstm1 and gstt1 represent deletions of gstm1 and gs...