While democratization is regularly associated with elite renewal, established elites often succeed in maintaining their dominance after the fall of authoritarian regime that fostered them. This constitutes a relatively understudied challenge facing processes: when and how do democratic reforms fostering emergence new elites? paper addresses this question through study village head elections thr...

In recent years, the Energy Charter Treaty has come under immense scrutiny and criticism for allegedly protecting fossil fuel industry undercutting sovereignty. As a key stakeholder in modernisation process, EU been determined to reform investment protection standards investor–state dispute settlement mechanism include new provisions on sustainable development climate change. However, after thr...

Abstract. This paper presents a method for rapid and automatic visualisation of over-undercutting based on 3D reconstruction rendering tunnel point clouds. The uses model filtering our improved voxel cloud lite to maximise the preservation original features while streamlining cloud. is then completed according proposed alpha-shape algorithm with low parameters combined fast optimisation model, ...

GeSn alloys offer a promising route towards CMOS compatible light source and the realization of electronic-photonic integrated circuits. One tactic to improve lasing performance lasers is use high Sn content, which improves directness. Another popular approach low moderate content with either compressive strain relaxation or tensile engineering, but these engineering techniques generally requir...

The article puts forward a hypothesis according to which the violation of nominal setting wheel pairs in railway rolling stock carts is main reason for increase guiding forces flange contacts wheels freight cars with rails. Increased loads are cause number other negative phenomena: increased intensity wear (undercutting) flange, side surfaces rail heads, decrease coefficient stability wagons fr...

How do cosmological visions unsettle animistic and scientific ways of approaching the world? Whereas ‘cosmovisions’ have narrow meaning ‘worldviews’, people unleash new ‘cosmological visions’ through creative act relating to—and simultaneously dismantling—their constructs world at large. Drawing on my ethnography Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group Southwest China, I show how an ethnohistorian priest ...

In fields, such as oil and gas pipelines nuclear power, narrow-gap welding has often been used for the connection of thick medium-thick plates. During process, a lack fusion was prone to occur due groove size limitations, seriously affecting service safety large structures. The vertical oscillation arc pulsed metal (P-GMAW) method adopted in this study. influence width on morphology, droplet tr...

We are indifferent between two cups of coffee when one differs from the other in having only one more grain of sugar. But such an indifference is not transitive, because eventually, after many enough grains of sugar are added, we will become able to tell one cup is sweeter than the other. When consumers feature intransitive indifference, putting a bad deal alongside a good deal can boost the sa...

Existing reputation systems used by online auction houses do not address the concern of a buyer shopping for commodities—finding a good bargain. These systems do not provide information on the practices adopted by sellers to ensure profitable auctions. These practices may be legitimate, like imposing a minimum starting bid on an auction, or fraudulent, like using colluding bidders to inflate th...

A two-sided, pair-wise matching model is developed to analyse the strategic interaction between two information intermediaries who compete in commission rates and network size, giving rise to a fragmented duopoly market structure. The model suggests that network competition between information intermediaries has a distinctive market structure, where intermediaries are monopolist service provide...