This article reviews three recent books on the EU: T.R. Reid’s The United States of Europe:The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (Penguin, New York, 2004); Mark Leonard’s Why Europe will Run the 21st Century (Fourth Estate, London, 2005); and Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2...

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t The lightning current derivative data recorded at the CN Tower during the past 18 years contain different kinds of noise and needs to be denoised for accurately determining the lightning current waveform parameters. It is usually a challenging task to denoise transient signals having large bandwidth without altering their waveshapes or shrinking their ampli...

We examine the dynamics of laser droplet generation that is dependent on the detachment pulse power. In the absence of the detachment pulse, undulating pendant droplets are formed at the end of a properly fed metal wire due to the impact of the primary laser pulse that induces melting. Eventually, these droplets detach, i.e. overcome the surface tension, because of their increasing mass. We sho...

Nietzsche’s criticisms were directed against what he reckons as the progressive ‘moral’ disintegration of late 19 century Germany. He described morality as “the doctrine of the relations of supremacy (Herrschafts-Verhältnissen) under which the phenomenon of ‘life’ comes to be.” This definition, however, is broad and mired in ambiguity, and as will be pointed out later, escapes multitudinous ‘mo...

The growing tension between China and a number of countries in Southeast Asia over the contested waters of the South China Sea has become one of the biggest potential flashpoints in the region—thus, a good indicator to use in testing the “China threat.” Concurrently, America’s handling of this “Asian problem” is becoming a litmus test for the future status of US primacy as the nation faces cruc...

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders’ supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the interests of top management and directors should be increasingly aligned to shareholder’ interests by...

Machine loading problem in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) encompasses various types of flexibility aspects pertaining to part selection and operation assignments. The evolution of flexible manufacturing systems offers great potential for increasing flexibility by ensuring both cost-effectiveness and customized manufacturing at the same time. This paper proposes a linear mathematical prog...

Public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive’s key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who frequently play one of two roles: Congressional allies, where they help Congress implement policy and Congressional adversaries, where they fight with Congress to shift policy strongly toward...

Most of the research in comparative corporate governance has, implicitly or explicitly, taken the US as benchmark. But recent corporate scandals, such as Enron and Worldcom, question this alleged supremacy. What went wrong? In this chapter we claim that the problem is not just lack of appropriate disclosure or legislation, but a more fundamental one: deficient incentives for the media to expose...

Introduction The challenges related to the preservation of Mongolia’s pastureland, its quality and condition are key concerns for the livestock sector. However, scientists, researchers and government agencies tend to focus solely on rangeland ecology and livestock. All too often, herders are overlooked and omitted from the discourse. This is the main reason I want to talk about people of the M...