1 What Is Regional Integration? In 1965 Sir Arthur Lewis wrote, “These islands did not start on the federal road in a fit of idleness. They started because it was clear that a Federation is the only possible solution of their problems.” To better understand what Sir Arthur meant, we must first define the term regional integration. Although this term has been in existence for a long time, a prec...

The evolution of altruistic behaviour is studied in a simple action-response game with a tunable degree of conflict of interest. It is shown that for the continuous, mixed-medium approach no stable polymorphism favours altruism. Ecological dynamics are explored with the addition of a spatial dimension and a local energy variable. A continuous spatial model with finite local range does not intro...

Infinitists argue that their view outshines foundationalism because infinitism can, whereas foundationalism cannot, explain two of epistemic justification’s crucial features: it comes in degrees and it can be complete. I present four different ways that foundationalists could make sense of those two features of justification, thereby undermining the case for infinitism.

We present a simple approach to the analysis of fMRI data collected from several runs, sessions and subjects. We take advantage of the spatial nature of the data to reduce the noise in certain key parameters, achieving an increase in degrees of freedom for a mixed effects analysis. Our main interest is the analysis of the resulting images of test statistics using the geometry of random fields. ...

Background Evidence based policy-making has been promoted as a means of ensuring better outcomes but what counts as evidence in policy-making lies within a spectrum of expert knowledge through scientifically generated information. Different actors provide varying degrees of support for and use of different types of evidence in policy development. Since not all forms of evidence share an equal v...

Raman laser pulses are used to induce coherent tunneling between neighboring sites of a vertical 1D optical lattice. Such tunneling occurs when the detuning of a probe laser from the atomic transition frequency matches multiples of the Bloch frequency, allowing for a spectroscopic control of the coupling between Wannier-Stark (WS) states. In particular, we prepare coherent superpositions of WS ...

The notion that decoherence rapidly reduces a superposition state to an incoherent mixture implicitly adopts a special representation, namely, the representation of preferred (pointer) states (PS). For weak or strong system-envrionment interaction, the behavior of PS is well known. Via a simple dynamical model that simulates a two-level system interacting with few other degrees of freedom as it...

We propose an operational degree of polarization in terms of the variance of the Stokes vector minimized over all the directions of the Poincaré sphere. We examine the properties of this second-order definition and carry out its experimental determination. Quantum states with the same standard (first-order) degree of polarization are correctly discriminated by this new measure. We argue that a ...

Strengthening executive constraints is one of the key means of improving political governance. This paper examines how such reforms are related to threats to the tenure of ruling political incumbents. We formalize this idea theoretically and test it empirically, using data on leaders since 1875. Specifically, we distinguish leaders with different degrees of resilience as leaders who die from na...