While the CPI may have overstated inflation in the mid-1990s by about one percent per year, as concluded by the Boskin Commission, it does not make sense to extrapolate that rate of bias backwards over long periods of time. The "Hulten-Bruegel paradox" shows that any such exercise in backward extrapolation yields levels of real consumption two or four centuries ago that are implausibly low, bar...

An Interactive Scene Interpretation System (ISIS) is being developed by Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center as a tool for constructing and experimenting with man-• achine and automatic scene analysis methods tailored for particular image domains. A region analysis subsystem was developed recently based on the work of Brice and Fennema, and Yaklmovsky. Using this subsyst...

In Burkina Faso, women make up nearly 52% of the population, but they account for less than 20% business start-ups. This paper seeks to identify factors that explain entrepreneurial intent Burkinabe women. It is based on socio-cognitive career theory and a quantitative approach involving sample 935 The results multinomial logistic regression show five variables (perception skills, fear failure,...

Crystal structures of protein kinases continue to reveal new mechanisms for the regulation of catalytic activity of these enzymes. In this issue of Cell, Rosenberg et al. (2005) report the structure of the catalytic and regulatory domains of CaMKII, a protein kinase important in the cellular response to changes in intracellular calcium ion concentration. This study provides new mechanistic insi...

Minimal surfaces and surfaces with constant mean curvature (cmc) have fascinated differential geometers for over two centuries. Indeed these surfaces are solutions to variational problems whose formulation is elegant, modelling physical situations quite simple to experiment using soap films and bubbles; however their richness has not been exhausted yet. Advances in the comprehension of these su...

Amongst the most remarkable successes of quantum computation are Shor’s efficient quantum algorithms for the computational tasks of integer factorisation and the evaluation of discrete logarithms. In this article we review the essential ingredients of these algorithms and draw out the unifying generalization of the so-called abelian hidden subgroup problem. This involves an unexpectedly harmoni...