This paper analyzes the impact of international trade on the quality of institutions, such as contract enforcement, property rights, or investor protection. It presents a model in which institutional differences play two roles: they create rents for some parties within the economy, and they are a source of comparative advantage in trade. Institutional quality is determined as an equilibrium of ...

Recent work shows that transcription factors are necessary for stomatal movements in plants. Different members of the plant-specific R2R3-MYB transcription factor family are required for mediating stomatal opening in response to light and stomatal closure in response to darkness.

In this paper, a class of transformations with reconstruction criteria is investigated. This class of transformations was initially proposed for obtaining intermediate results between the morphological opening and the opening by reconstruction. Here, the transformations are presented in the general case, as in the reconstruction transformations case, by imposing some conditions on the marker. T...

In this paper a novel approach for detecting the defects in weld radiographs is presented by using combinatorial morphological and statistical operations. The proposed method consists of several stages. The procedure first involves the application of wiener for noise removal and enhancing the original image. Then, the morphological opening operation is applied to find the fine interior segments...

In this paper, a new approach is proposed for extracting human gait features from a walking human based on the silhouette images. The approach consists of six stages: clearing the background noise of image by morphological opening; measuring of the width and height of the human silhouette; dividing the enhanced human silhouette into six body segments based on anatomical knowledge; applying morp...

CO2 acts as an environmental signal that regulates stomatal movements. High CO2 concentrations reduce stomatal aperture, whereas low concentrations trigger stomatal opening. In contrast to our advanced understanding of light and drought stress responses in guard cells, the molecular mechanisms underlying stomatal CO2 sensing and signaling are largely unknown. Leaf temperature provides a conveni...

Due to architectural, mechanical and even structural considerations, in some cases there is need to create some openings in the composite steel shear walls. Presence of the openings can considerably affect the wall behavior. Therefore in this study, the effects of the opening on the behavior of composite steel shear walls are investigated. For this purpose, first an experimental specimen withou...

the effect of steel plate thickness on the repair effectiveness of rc beam is presented in this paper. a total of four beams were tested, one beam repaired by cfrp with a thickness of 1.2 mm and used as a control beam, and three beams repaired by a steel plate. steel plates with a thickness of 2 mm, 3 mm, and 4 mm were used in repairing the beams. the maximum load-carrying capacity, deflection ...

a mild, green and highly efficient route for regio-selective amination of oxiranes was developed via incorporation of mn(ii), fe(ii), co(ii), ni(ii), cu(ii) and zn(ii) cations onto the surface of hydroxyapatite-encapsulated γ-fe2o3 nanoparticles (γ-fe2o3@hap). among six magnetically recoverable catalytic systems denoted as [γ-fe2o3@hap-mii], the catalyst in which m designated as fe(ii) showed t...