The phrase ‘global land grab’ has become a catch-all framework to describe and analyze the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions revolving around the production and sale of food and biofuels. Initially deployed and popularised especially by activist groups deeply concerned and opposed to such transactions from an environmental-agrarian justice perspective, the signif...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare between weight and gender categories the attack and pause times during the 2007 Taekwondo World Championship. METHODS A total of 88 rounds (47 male and 41 female contests) were analyzed. RESULTS There was no difference in attack/balancing times ratio between genders (0.13 ± 0.06 vs 0.13 ± 0.06, P > 0.05). The attack number was significantly hi...

This article analyses the development of competitive party politics in post-communist East Central Europe from a comparative perspective. The central concerns are party system stabilisation and change in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and implications for comparative theory. Starting from Lipset and Rokkan’s ‘cleavage model’, the article assesses the relevance of their key va...

This paper uses the Banzhaf power measure to calculate the a priori voting power of individual voters under the existing Electoral College system for electing the President of the United States, as well as under variants of this system in which electoral votes are either apportioned among the states in a different manner or cast by the states in a different manner. While the present winner-take...

In this paper multiphase oscillators built using fractional-order allpass filters are presented. We examine the theory behind their operation and demonstrate their usefulness in the design of both multiphase and quadrature oscillators. Case design examples are given for various scenarios, while PSPICE and experimental results verify their operation

We discuss duality in N = 1 SUSY gauge theories in Seiberg’s conformal window, (3Nc/2) < Nf < 3Nc. The ’t Hooft consistency conditions – the basic tool for establishing the infrared duality – are considered taking into account higher order α corrections. The conserved (anomaly free) R current is built to all orders in α. Although this current contains all orders in α the ’t Hooft consistency co...

The notion of Equality of Opportunity (EO) has pervaded much of economic and social justice policy and research over the last half century. The sense that differences in agent outcomes that are the consequence of their individual choice and effort are acceptable, whereas variation in agent outcomes that are the consequence of circumstances beyond their control are not has underpinned much gende...

The “convex hull problem” is a catch-all phrase for computing various descriptions of a polytope that is either specified as the convex hull of a finite point set in R or as the intersection of a finite number of halfspaces. We first define the various problems and discuss their mutual relationships (Section 26.1). We discuss the very special case of the irredundancy problem in Section 26.2. We...

This paper proposes secure regenerating codes that are composed of non-secure regenerating codes and a new all-or-nothing transform. Unlike the previous analysis of secure regenerating codes, the security of the proposed codes is analyzed in the sense of the indistinguishability. The advantage of the proposed codes is that the overhead caused by the security against eavesdropping is much less t...

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that promises competitive advantages, cost savings, enhanced business processes and services, and various other benefits to enterprises. Despite the rapid technological advancement, the adoption of cloud computing is still growing slowly among small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). This paper presents a model to support the decisionmaking process, us...