Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

The coarse (0.4–2 µm) clay fraction of an Albian black shale collected in the Atlantic Ocean (Deep Sea Drilling Project leg 11) consists chiefly (90–95%) of smectite and 5–10% illite. Both minerals are locally surrounded by overgrowth structures, such as fine laths about 0.05–0.4 µm long and 0.02–0.1 µm wide. Individual laths or assemblages of laths protrude from the center of smectite flakes at angles of about 60° to each other. Laths occur around illite crystals in a similar manner or coalesce into a rim that consists of 0.05–0.1-µm-size particles. On the basis of scanning transmission electron microscopy: (1) the center of individual illite crystals consists of a dioctahedral mineral, but the overgrowth structures are Al-Fe beidellites; and (2) the smectite flakes have highly variable compositions, but correspond chiefly to Fe-Al-beidellite, whereas the overgrowths are compositionally close to montmorillonite.

The overgrowth structures seem to have formed during early diagenesis. The chemical composition of overgrowths around illite and smectite tend to be similar in response to the new environment, implying an addition of silica to both materials.

Advice from avian influenza experts suggests that there is a high risk that highly pathogenic avian influenza will arrive in the Southern Ocean during the austral summers.

We assessed the subjective quality of life (QOL) of 30 deficit schizophrenic patients compared to 112 nondeficit schizophrenic patients. The deficit patients did not differ in term of QOL, total score of positive symptoms, general psychopathology from the nondeficit patients. This result suggested an absence of impact of primary negative symptoms on the subjective QOL in schizophrenic patients.

Coupled with the social practice of female hypergamy, the male surplus within the never-married population means that today's Chinese marriage market is extremely tight in particular for men from a rural background and the least privileged socio-economic categories. Drawing on quantitative data from a survey conducted in 2014–2015, this article sheds light on the situation of single men who are past prime marriage age in three rural districts of Shaanxi particularly affected by this phenomenon. It compares single men's characteristics to those of their married counterparts and offers insights into the heterogeneity of single men with the aim of challenging some commonly accepted assumptions about bachelorhood in rural China. Results suggest a strong internalization of the various characteristics, centred on being able to offer social mobility to a potential wife, that a man is expected to have to be attractive to women in a context where women have more choice in mate selection. We conclude that mate selection is highly marked by class, social norms, social interactions, health, generation and age, and requires the mobilization of certain amounts of individual, social and economic resources. Unwanted bachelorhood would thus be better understood using an intersectional approach rather than mainly in numeric terms.

Small-scale mariculture of high-value species for trade in remote islands can offer valuable alternative livelihoods to local communities. The endangered giant clam species Tridacna maxima is naturally abundant in some atolls in French Polynesia (FP) and has been the focus of commercial mariculture activities since 2012. Shortly after spat collectors became operational in two atoll lagoons, FP rose to become one of the main exporters of giant clams for the aquarium trade. However, this activity has been threatened recently by a mass clam-bleaching event triggered by the 2015–2016 El Niño. This study reviews the roles that international (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) and national regulatory frameworks play in the development of this activity in a small island context, and how they can indirectly promote better science and monitoring in order to inform adaptive management strategies. The links between the nine main groups of stakeholders show the necessary adaptation measures required to mitigate climate-driven mortalities. While this case study remains specific to giant clam farming in FP, general lessons are provided that could help in mitigating economic impacts from climate-related events on other islands.

The electrophoretic transport of ions through single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) of diameters between 1.2 and 1.8 nm was studied for different monovalent chloride salts using microfluidic devices incorporating either a single or few SWCNTs in parallel. The ionic conductance was found to be about one order of magnitude higher than would be expected from simple bulk electrophoresis without any surface effect. Importantly, the ionic conductance measured for different cations did not scale with their bulk electrophoretic mobility thus indicating a selective cation transport through these sub-2 nm SWCNTs. The transport of Na+ was notably found to be favored in comparison to that of Li+, K+ and Cs+. These results highlight the influence of steric and surface effects induced by the nano-confinement on the transport of ions through sub-2 nm SWCNTs.

This paper addresses the fulfillment of requirements related to case-based reasoning (CBR) processes for system design. Considering that CBR processes are well suited for problem solving, the proposed method concerns the definition of an integrated CBR process in line with system engineering principles. After the definition of the requirements that the approach has to fulfill, an ontology is defined to capitalize knowledge about the design within concepts. Based on the ontology, models are provided for requirements and solutions representation. Next, a recursive CBR process, suitable for system design, is provided. Uncertainty and designer preferences as well as ontological guidelines are considered during the requirements definition, the compatible cases retrieval, and the solution definition steps. This approach is designed to give flexibility within the CBR process as well as to provide guidelines to the designer. Such questions as the following are conjointly treated: how to guide the designer to be sure that the requirements are correctly defined and suitable for the retrieval step, how to retrieve cases when there are no available similarity measures, and how to enlarge the research scope during the retrieval step to obtain a sufficient panel of solutions. Finally, an example of system engineering in the aeronautic domain illustrates the proposed method. A testbed has been developed and carried out to evaluate the performance of the retrieval algorithm and a software prototype has been developed in order to test the approach. The outcome of this work is a recursive CBR process suitable to engineering design and compatible with standards. Requirements are modeled by means of flexible constraints, where the designer preferences are used to express the flexibility. Similar solutions can be retrieved even if similarity measures between features are not available. Simultaneously, ontological guidelines are used to guide the process and to aid the designer to express her/his preferences.

Combining high resolution transmission electron spectroscopy, electron diffraction, and resonant Raman spectroscopy experiments on the same suspended (free-standing) individual carbon nanotubes is the ultimate approach to relate unambiguously the structure and the intrinsic phonon features of these nano-systems.

By using this approach, the effect of coupling between nanotubes on the phonons is investigated in two model nano-systems: (i) a bundle of two non-identical SWNTs (inhomogeneous dimer), (ii) double-walled carbon nanotubes.

Introduction. Mango-based orchards in Senegal occur in a large diversity ofcropping systems, but few typologies of these systems exist and none are associated withtheir comprehensive and quantitative analysis. In this study we defined and characterizedthe typology of these systems based on a quantitative assessment of their planting design,management, vegetative state, hedgerow structure and infestation by a major pest of mango,the Bactrocera invadens fly. Materials and methods.Multivariate analysis and clustering methods were applied to data from 64 mango-basedorchards and their surrounding hedgerows sampled in the Dakar and Thiès regions, inSenegal. Results and discussion. Four types of cropping systems wereidentified according to orchard design and management patterns: (1) ‘No-input mangodiversified orchards’, (2) ‘Low-input mango orchards’, (3) ‘Medium-inputcitrus-predominant orchards’ and (4) ‘Medium-input large mango- or citrus-predominantorchards’. Orchard characteristics varied among these patterns. For instance, vegetationwas dense and homogeneous in system 1, and the mortality rate of trees was high insystem 2 but low in system 3. Orchards of systems 3 and 4 were mostly associated withhedgerows with, respectively, boundary-marking and defensive species. Lastly, the numberof B. invadens flies was high in orchards of system 4, whereas it was lowin those of system 2. Conclusion. The diversity of mango-based croppingsystems in Senegal is now well described and quantified. This characterization is apreliminary step that is essential for further studies aiming to improve these systems.

Pollux is considered as an archetype of a giant star hosting a planet: its radial velocity (RV) presents sinusoidal variations with a period of about 590 d, which have been stable for more than 25 years. Using ESPaDOnS and Narval we have detected a weak (sub-gauss) magnetic field at the surface of Pollux and followed up its variations with Narval during 4.25 years, i.e. more than for two periods of the RV variations. The longitudinal magnetic field is found to vary with a sinusoidal behaviour with a period close to that of the RV variations and with a small shift in phase. We then performed a Zeeman Doppler imaging (ZDI) investigation from the Stokes V and Stokes I least-squares deconvolution (LSD) profiles. A rotational period is determined, which is consistent with the period of variations of the RV. The magnetic topology is found to be mainly poloidal and this component almost purely dipolar. The mean strength of the surface magnetic field is about 0.7 G. As an alternative to the scenario in which Pollux hosts a close-in exoplanet, we suggest that the magnetic dipole of Pollux can be associated with two temperature and macroturbulent velocity spots which could be sufficient to produce the RV variations. We finally investigate the scenarii of the origin of the magnetic field which could explain the observed properties of Pollux.

This article focuses on Jean-Guy Belley's interest in the relationship between law and the economy—an interest illustrated by his major work on the contractual practices of the multinational company Alcan. They lament contemporary economic sociology's lack of interest—until recently—in legal phenomena, which contrasts with the close attention paid by two historic figures in “economic sociology,” Max Weber and John R. Commons, to the relationships between law and economics. The authors argue that to fully grasp the importance of the legal dimension in socio-economic analysis, we must return to the foundational insights of Weber and Commons. However, they particularly stress differences between Weber and Commons as to the unity or heterogeneity of law and the economy, the role of ethics, the search for an all-encompassing approach in the construction of ideal-types, the various forms of constraint that characterize law (whether psychological, economic, or physical), and the distinction between state law and non-state law. The latter element is why the authors, like Belley himself, argue that due consideration for legal plurality should be a central thread in any sociological analysis of the interplay between law and the economy.