The “death of the high street” has become a common refrain, particularly in United Kingdom, often accompanied by calls for action and demands improved resilience town centres streets. This paper considers policy context towns Scotland recent review country’s approach to towns, places. With adoption National Outcomes linked Nations Sustainable Development Goals declaration Climate Emergency, con...

Empirical analysis shows that, on average, the productivity of a group log-normally depends on its size. The current explanations for this empirical fact are based on reasonably complex assumptions about the human behavior. In this paper, we show that the same conclusion can be made in effect, from first principles, without making these complex assumptions. 1 Formulation of the Problem How prod...

INTRODUCTION: This study was conducted to compare gender differences in the psychometric properties of the Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND). METHODS: The sample comprised 334 Korean immigrants (97 women and 237 men) who reported daily smoking for the past six months. Item-by-item responses and exploratory factor analyses (EFA) were compared by gender. Promax rotation was selected...

Pregabalin is an anticonvulsant used for the treatment of neuropathic pain and partial seizure in adults. The aim of this study was to develop a population pharmacokinetic (PK) model to describe the absorption characteristics of pregabalin given fasted or after meals. Data from five healthy subject PK studies (n=88) of single- or multiple-dose pregabalin (150 mg) were used. Pregabalin was admin...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to examine the hypoglycemic effect of a postprandial exercise program using brief stair climbing-descending exercise in people with type 2 diabetes. [Subjects and Methods] Seven males with uncomplicated type 2 diabetes (age 68.0 ± 3.7 years) performed two sets of stair climbing-descending exercise 60 and 120 min after each meal for the first 2 weeks but n...

Smoking prevalence among males is conspicuously high in Asian countries including Japan. There are few prospective intervention studies on the duration of smoking cessation within regions with a high prevalence of smokers, such as Asia. We investigated the extent to which subjects continued abstaining from smoking after receiving smoking cessation support provided for all smokers in an occupati...

We describe extensive computational experiments on spectral properties of random objects random cubic graphs, random planar triangulations, and Voronoi and Delaunay diagrams of random (uniformly distributed) point sets on the sphere). We look at bulk eigenvalue distribution, eigenvalue spacings, and locality properties of eigenvectors. We also look at the statistics of nodal domains of eigenvec...

JOHN CHRISTENSEN AND RICHARD MURPHY ABSTRACT Tax revenues are the lifeblood of democratic government and the social contract, but the majority of multinational businesses have been structured so as to enable tax avoidance in every jurisdiction in which they operate. John Christensen and Richard Murphy of the tax justice network argue that policy measures are required to redress the distortions ...

We consider a multimarket framework where a set of firms compete on two interrelated oligopolistic markets. Prior to competing in these markets, firms can spy on others in order to increase the quality of their product. We characterize the equilibrium espionage networks and networks that maximize social welfare under the most interesting scenario of diseconomies of scope. We find that in some s...

We present a new method based on B-spline snakes (active contours) for measuring high-accuracy contact angles. In this approach, we avoid making physical assumptions by defining the contour of the drop as a versatile B-spline curve. When useful, we extend this curve by mirror symmetry so that we can take advantage of the reflection of the drop onto the substrate to detect the position of the co...