The concept of geographically concentrated ‘clusters’ of firms, research institutions and other organisations became popular in economic development policy circles during the 1990s, following the publication of Michael Porter’s (1990) Competitive Advantage of Nations. Today there is widespread acceptance of the need to design policies that nurture and support cooperative relationships among groups

Disentangling the factors shaping species distributions remains a central goal in biogeography, ecology and evolutionary biology. The extrinsic pressures that may facilitate range shifts, such as climatic factors or biotic interactions are well known. However, in contrast, the possible intrinsic factors are manifold and hard to generalize across taxa. Recently, several theoretical studies have inv

Introduction: Although biomarkers are useful diagnostic tools to assess joint damage in osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, few data exist for biomarkers of haemophilic arthropathy. Aim: To evaluate the association between biomarkers and compatible additive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scores in patients with severe haemophilia A. Methods: Patients aged 12–35 years with no history of fact

This thesis makes a contribution to systemic risk literature in the European banking system. The intimate interdependence between the European banking industries and the fragile GIIPS debt market has jeopardized the banking sector in Europe. The threats of unfavourable financial conditions in European bank- ing sufficiently highlight the importance of the dissertation’s distinct focus on systemic

Looking at the Swedish public sector from a Scandinavian perspective, this chapter argues for a challenged but resilient (although not uniform) Scandi- navian public sector. Sweden is a nation with a long tradition of decentral- ized decision-making, semi-autonomous government agencies and independent local governments. This is considered a receptive context for continuous and incremental moderniz

Some local government organisations stand out in terms of their capability to adopt and use management accounting innovations and become a model for those struggling with issues such as performance measurement. But what happens to the innovations if the organisation is forced into transformational change? This longitudinal case study is based on the theory that the use and impact of performance me

The result of this study showed that the scientific and technological stations (stations in short) play a pivotal role in rural development and experiences of these stations could be replicated in many other places. These stations have made the considerable achievements in enhancing socioeconomic development and functioned as a common platform for the rural areas. These stations have formed a netw

We aim to introduce some new solutions in the studies involving the subjects who are not able to use spoken language, both animals and pre-verbal infants. Although our research focuses in general on the episodic memory introduced by Tulving in 1972, this paper is to present the case of Wistar rats and domestic cats.

We present an advanced approach for single-cell analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) by integrating an acoustofluidic chip for sample preparation, including simultaneous acoustophoretic separation and enrichment of the separated cells, onto an electroactive microwell array (EMA) for single-cell arraying. The integrated device shows highly efficient cell recovery of target cells (82.5%) and d

As the current nuclear PDF analyses are mainly constrained by fixed-target Drell-Yan and deeply inelastic scattering data only the quark nuclear modifications at fairly large x values are in a good control. Inclusive pion production in d+Au collisions at RHIC provides some constraints for gluons but due to the limited kinematic reach of the data the gluon modifications remain uncertain especially

We use the economic policy uncertainty indices of Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) in combination with the mixed data sampling (MIDAS) approach to investigate the US and UK stock market movements. The long-run US-UK stock market correlation depends positively on US economic policy uncertainty shocks. The US long-run stock market volatility depends significantly on the US economic policy uncertainty

The effect of curvature on the performance of electromagnetic functional structures, such as electromagnetic absorbers and frequency selective surfaces, is investigated in this work. The monostatic radar cross section of a doubly curved, rotationally symmetric scatterer, with and without a coating electromagnetic absorber, is calculated. An analytical expression for calculating the far-field from

Pre-aeration was investigated for enhancing biodegradation of recalcitrant lignocellulosic structure of rice straw under various low temperatures regimes (25, 35 and 45 °C) and aeration durations (0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 days). It was demonstrated aerated rice straw for 2 days at 35 °C resulted in highest hydrolytic efficiency and biochemical methane potential (BMP) (355.3 ± 18.7 ml CH4/gVS). Furthermore

The concept of smart specialization has attracted great interest and has been adopted widely in European regional and innovation policy. Foresight is an important part of creating smart specialization strategies. However, both the smart specialization concept and foresight have been criticized for lacking an empirical and theoretical foundation that can help guide their application in practice. Th

Background: Six different N-terminal amyloid precursor protein (APP) fragments, with molecular weight ∼12 kDa, have previously been identified in human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). In a pilot study, both the sum of their concentrations, measured by western blot, and the relative abundance pattern, measured by mass spectrometry, were different in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients compared to healthy