The popularity of online auctions is a relatively recent phenomenon. eBay, the leading online auctioneer, is one of the most popular websites and has become synonymous for trading online. Wine is a good well suited for online trading and there is a huge market for it on eBay's websites in France and Germany. Buying and selling Bordeaux reds is especially popular on eBay in Germany where about 2...

In April 2007, an Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) assessment mission estimated that more than 400,000 hectares of cultivated area had been damaged or lost affecting the food security of thousands of subsistence farmers. Thousands of rural communities that lost all their crops did not have sufficient seeds for the next sowing season. A CEPAL mission calculated tha...

To formulate an efficient and eco-friendly strategy for the management of cotton seedling disease complex, pot experiments were conducted and the efficiency of eight Bacillus strains against seven fungi involved in the disease were determined. A greenhouse evaluation of the interaction between fungal isolates and Bacillus strains was carried out. The evaluation revealed a very highly significan...

A study is presented which assesses agricultural production in a Purchase Land area over a seven-year period and tries to identify certain socio-psychological and other variables which might be acting as constraints on farming behavior in terms of change. A survey was conducted of the whole population of 198 resident farm families; it included six questionnaires. Subjects covered included agric...

In long-term care facilities, the participation of older people relates to individual care provision (individual level) and to policy decisions that affect all residents in a care organization (collective level). In the Netherlands, resident councils are set up in order to improve resident participation on a collective level. However, our research shows that managers and resident councils are f...

INTRODUCTION As attending surgeons' comfort with single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) grows, and with continued improvement in surgical instruments, advanced laparoscopic techniques are increasingly being incorporated into surgical training. The aim of our study was to evaluate resident performance and patient outcomes in patients undergoing resident-performed SILS versus a resident-perf...

We study the dynamics of a population of residents that is being invaded by an initially rare mutant. We show that under relatively mild conditions the sum of the mutant and resident population sizes stays arbitrarily close to the initial attractor of the monomorphic resident population whenever the mutant has a strategy sufficiently similar to that of the resident. For stochastic systems we sh...

CONTENTS Introduction: an international workshop on the global burden of COPD K.R. Chapman, A.S. Buist, D.M. Mannino, J.B. Soriano and P.A. Vermeire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Worldwide epidemiology of COPD and BOLD A.S. Buist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Surveillance of COPD:...