[1] We investigate the stability of marine ice sheets by coupling a gravitationally self-consistent sea level model valid for a self-gravitating, viscoelastically deforming Earth to a 1-D marine ice sheet-shelf model. The evolution of the coupled model is explored for a suite of simulations in which we vary the bed slope and the forcing that initiates retreat. We find that the sea level fall at...

Extracellular enzymes are ubiquitous in soil environments. Produced by microorganisms and plant roots, these enzymes serve a dual function of degrading complex organic material into simpler forms and acquiring resources for the enzyme producer (Burns 1982; Sinsabaugh 1994). Without extracellular enzymes, microbes and plants would be unable to obtain resources from complex compounds, and cycles ...

We show that evolution in a population of adaptive agents, repeatedly competing for a limited resource, can come to an abrupt halt. This transition from evolutionary to non-evolutionary behavior arises as the global resource level is changed, and is reminiscent of a phase transition to a frozen state. Its origin lies in the inductive decision-making of the agents, the limited global information...

We analyze the dynamic interaction between civil society organizations and Government in a representative developing economy. Government favors corruption and so fails to build efficient institutions. On its side, civil society exerts pressure on Government to constrain it to halt corruption. We distinguish between an authoritarian Government and an unrestrictive one: the latter does not repres...

In recent decades Europe has experienced periods of push and pull migration. Whereas pult migration has been seen as economically beneficial, there is concern that push migration will accelerate the employment crisis. This article qualifies this view by aigdng that migration may erode institutional constraints. The theoreticaX framework behind thts idea accounts for heterogeneous labor, monopol...

The motion of disks spun on tables has the well-known feature that the associated acoustic signal increases in frequency as the motion tends towards its abrupt halt. Recently, a commercial toy, known as Euler’s disk, was designed to maximize the time before this abrupt ending. In this paper, we present and simulate a rigid body model for Euler’s disk. Based on the nature of the contact force be...

0198-9715/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2008.09.010 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (C. I ntua.gr (C. Potsiou). The problem of informal settlements is of significant importance and has similar causes worldwide. In Greece, such buildings are relatively well built and number nearly 1,000,000 across the country. This social an...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been coming from the west, investment in equipment has fallen below the west German per capita level, and ...

As a consequence of the rapid growth of temporary agency employment in Germany, the debate on the poor working conditions of temps, specifically their remuneration, has intensified recently. The paper shows that the wage gap for German temp workers is rather large and varies between occupation and region. But temps already suffer from a marked wage decline before entering the temporary help sec...

With the development of novel assay technologies, biomedical experiments and analyses have gone through substantial evolution. Today, a typical experiment can simultaneously measure hundreds to thousands of individual features (e.g. genes) in dozens of biological conditions, resulting in gigabytes of data that need to be processed and analyzed. Because of the multiple steps involved in the data...