Analyzing nineteen cases, this title offers practical perspective on the implications of constitution-making procedure, and explores emerging international legal norms.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book provides an unprecedented synthesis of the current status of scientific and management knowledge regarding global rangelands and the major challenges that confront them. It has been organized around three major themes. The first summarizes the conceptual advances that have occurred in the rangeland profession. The second addresses the implications of these conceptual advances to management and policy. The third assesses several major challenges confronting global rangelands in the 21st century. This book will compliment applied range management textbooks by describing the conceptual foundation on which the rangeland profession is based. It has been written to be accessible to a broad audience, including ecosystem managers, educators, students and policy makers. The content is founded on the collective experience, knowledge and commitment of 80 authors who have worked in rangelands throughout the world. Their collective contributions indicate that a more comprehensive framework is necessary to address the complex challenges confronting global rangelands. Rangelands represent adaptive social-ecological systems, in which societal values, organizations and capacities are of equal importance to, and interact with, those of ecological processes. A more comprehensive framework for rangeland systems may enable management agencies, and educational, research and policy making organizations to more effectively assess complex problems and develop appropriate solutions.

Once heralded in the 1950s and 1960s as a model welfare state, Sweden is now in transition and in trouble since its economic plunge in the early 1990s. This volume presents ten essays that examine Sweden's economic problems from a U.S. perspective. Exploring such diverse topics as income equalization and efficiency, welfare and tax policy, wage determination and unemployment, and international competitiveness and growth, they consider how Sweden's welfare state succeeded in eliminating poverty and became a role model for other countries. They then reflect on Sweden's past economic problems, such as the increase in government spending and the fall in industrial productivity, warning of problems to come. Finally they review the consequences of the collapse of Sweden's economy in the early 1990s, exploring the implications of its efforts to reform its welfare state and reestablish a healthy economy. This volume will be of interest to policymakers and analysts, social scientists, and economists interested in welfare states.

DVD features highlights from the conference held at Columbia University.

The fact that magnetite (Fe304) was already known in the Greek era as a peculiar mineral is indicative of the long history of transition metal oxides as useful materials. The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 has renewed interest in transition metal oxides. High-temperature su perconductors are all cuprates. Why is it? To answer to this question, we must understand the electronic states in the cuprates. Transition metal oxides are also familiar as magnets. They might be found stuck on the door of your kitchen refrigerator. Magnetic materials are valuable not only as magnets but as electronics materials. Manganites have received special attention recently because of their extremely large magnetoresistance, an effect so large that it is called colossal magnetoresistance (CMR). What is the difference between high-temperature superconducting cuprates and CMR manganites? Elements with incomplete d shells in the periodic table are called tran sition elements. Among them, the following eight elements with the atomic numbers from 22 to 29, i. e. , Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni and Cu are the most im portant. These elements make compounds with oxygen and present a variety of properties. High-temperature superconductivity and CMR are examples. Most of the textbooks on magnetism discuss the magnetic properties of transition metal oxides. However, when one studies magnetism using tradi tional textbooks, one finds that the transport properties are not introduced in the initial stages.

The transition state is the critical configuration of a reaction system situated at the highest point of the most favorable reaction path on the potential-energy surface, its characteristics governing the dynamic behavior of reacting systems decisively. This text presents an accurate survey of current theoretical investigations of chemical reactions, with a focus on the nature of the transition state. Its scope ranges from general basic theories associated with the transition states, to their computer-assisted applications, through to a number of reactions in a state-of-the-art fashion. It covers various types of gas-phase elementary reactions, as well as some specific types of chemical processes taking place in the liquid phase. Also investigated is the recently developing transition state spectroscopy. This text will not only serve as a contemporary reference book on the concept of the transition state, but will also assist the readers in gaining valuable key principles regarding the essence of chemical kinetics and dynamics.

The transItIOn-state theory has been, from the point of its inception, the most influential principle in the development of our knowledge of reaction mechanisms in solution. It is natural that as the field of biochemical dynamics has achieved new levels of refinement its students have increasingly adopted the concepts and methods of transition-state theory. Indeed, every dynamical problem of biochemistry finds its most elegant and economical statement in the terms of this theory. Enzyme catalytic power, for example, derives from the interaction of enzyme and substrate structures in the transition state, so that an understanding of this power must grow from a knowledge of these structures and interactions. Similarly, transition-state interactions, and the way in which they change as protein structure is altered, constitute the pivotal feature upon which molecular evolution must turn. The complete, coupled dynamical system of the organism, incorporating the transport of matter and energy as well as local chemical processes, will eventually have to yield to a description of its component transition-state structures and their energetic response characteristics, even if the form of the description goes beyond present-day transition-state theory. Finally, the importance of biochemical effectors in medicine and agriculture carries the subject into the world of practical affairs, in the use of transition-state information for the construction of ultra potent biological agents.