This paper analyzes the net effect of integration, as a measure of changes in trade barriers, on reducing the border effects between European countries. In order to study this contribution, we examine the size of home bias in the market for goods among 18 European countries over the period 1995-2006. The construction of a gravity model, using disaggregated data for 23 sectors, allowed us to com...

The development of integrated care through the promotion of 'partnership working' is a key policy objective of the Scottish Executive, the administration responsible for health services in Scotland. This paper considers the extent to which this goal is being achieved in mental health services, particularly those for people with severe and enduring mental illness. Distinguishing between the hori...

In this paper, we present a new theoretical framework for the quantification of strategic advantages associated with horizontal mergers through the integration of supply chain networks. The framework is a system-optimization one in which each firm is represented as a network of economic activities associated with manufacturing, distribution, and storage and with explicit capacities imposed on t...

In this paper, the Elzaki transform method is used for solving two-dimensional (2D) elasticity problems in plane polar coordinates. Airy stress function was used to express the stress compatibility equation as a biharmonic equation. Elzaki transform was applied with respect to the radial coordinate to a modified form of the stress compatibility equation, and the biharmonic equation simplified t...

The right and left visual hemifields are represented in different cerebral hemispheres and are bound together by connections through the corpus callosum. Much has been learned on the functions of these connections from split-brain patients [1-4], but little is known about their contribution to conscious visual perception in healthy humans. We used diffusion tensor imaging and functional magneti...

The receptive field of a visual neurone is classically defined as the region of space (or retina) where a visual stimulus evokes a change in its firing activity. Intracellular recordings in cat area 17 show that the visually evoked synaptic integration field extends over a much larger area than that established on the basis of spike activity. Synaptic depolarizing (dominant excitation) decrease...

Due to invisibility and complexity of the underground displacement monitoring, there exit few practical monitoring sensors capable of monitoring the underground horizontal and vertical displacements simultaneously. A novel electromagnetic underground displacement sensor able to monitor both the horizontal and the vertical displacements was proposed in our previous studies and abbreviated as the...