Starting in 1998, the electricity market in England and Wales will be opened up to full competition, and all consumers will be allowed to choose their electricity supplier. This promises to result in lower prices, but there will be additional transactions costs exceeding £100 million a year for the first five years. Relative to a counterfactual without competition, there are likely to be large ...

Arrestin blocks the interaction of rhodopsin with the G protein transducin (G(t)). To characterize the sites of arrestin that interact with rhodopsin, we have utilized a spectrophotometric peptide competition assay. It is based on the stabilization of the active intermediates metarhodopsin II (MII) and phosphorylated MII by G(t) and arrestin, respectively (extra MII monitor). The protocol invol...

In the last few decades, there has been considerable agreement in academic and practical fields that the total value of an organization is not adequately expressed by traditional accounting tools. The gap between accounting values and market values has resulted in an increase in the interest of Intellectual Capital (IC) (Cordazzo, 2005; Mouritsen et al., 2005; Sveiby, 1997). In this background,...

An IC component socket is an electromechanical system that provides a separable connection between an electronic component and a Printed Circuit Board. IC component sockets provide many advantages in IC design, selection, assembly, test, upgrade, and maintenance, and they have found extensive application in the microelectronics industry. However, some challenges exist for their applications. So...

In today’s era the demand of Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit (VLSI) is increase due to the growth of the Electronics industry. VLSI has high performance and high functionality at minimum cost and power dissipation. Continuously scaling of VLSI circuits is reducing gate delays but rapidly increasing interconnects delays. The higher power consummation is due to long wiring networks and clock ...

This paper presents an effective and general purpose search algorithm for alignment, and we applied it to IC printed mark quality inspection. The search procedure is based on normalized cross correlation, and we improve the method with hierarchical resolution pyramid, dynamic programming, subpixel accuracy, multiple target search, and automatic model selection. The proposed search method can be...

The IC industry is built on a foundation of simulation and prediction. We use models for frequency, power, yield, cost... We rarely prototype, or crash test! Models are derived from “characterization” which is done at multiple nested levels. Manufacturing, Devices, Gates, Units, Chips. Technology complexity beyond the 90nm node is making this characterization and representation increasingly dif...

Hardware Trojans are an increasingly significant threat to the integrated circuit (IC) industry in both commercial and military fields due to the progress of globalization and the rapidly improving IC manufacturing technology in various countries. Because of global economic pressures, the development and fabrication of advanced ICs are often outsourced offshore in order to reduce cost. As a res...

This paper examines takeover and divestiture activity at the industry level for the population of UK firms over the period 1986 to 2000. Consistent with US research, takeovers and divestitures in the UK cluster both across industries and over time. The paper further investigates whether broad economic shocks, industry-specific shocks (e.g., deregulation, foreign competition, technology) and mis...

Recent empirical work on the e ects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment. We develop a model of monopsonistic competition with free entry to analyze the e ects of minimum wages, and our predictions t the empirical results closely. Under monopsonistic competition, we nd that a rise in the minimum wage a) raises employme...