The phenomenon of bubu tradition in the cycle of time: Portrait of reciprocity in rural Madura

Bubu is a form of reciprocity that occurs in Madura generally and Langkap Village particularly. Generally, the exchange is made by the community as a form of “donations” to the celebration host. The host hopes for a return in the future. The reciprocal incident that occurred in Madura was not just a hope but more of an “obligation” to pay the “donation” or bubu that had been given on the previous occasion. This study seeks to describe the form and meaning of the bubu as well as to explain the changes that occur in the bubu phenomenon which used to be only in the form of voluntary donations into various forms of bubu with their meanings. The research design used was an ethnographic study with a moderate method where the researcher was occasionally directly involved in the tradition. The results of this study reveal several forms of bubu that occur in Langkap Village with different ways and meanings with the same motivation. The bubu given is a transaction of accounts payable and investment with the hope of a return in the future. More than that, there are social sanctions that will await if the bubu that have been given are not returned with the same value.

Competition in a Variety Seeking Market With Brand Name Awareness

This article investigates service and price competition in a variety seeking market, with the consideration of brand name awareness on consumers. Variety seeking behavior is modeled as a decrease in the willingness to pay for product purchased on the previous occasion. Under a three-stage Hotelling-type model, we show that variety seeking intensifies the competition when both firms are equally known. However, when one firm is better known than the other, it softens the competition observing the differentiation of equilibrium policies. In addition, variety seeking increases both the price and service gaps to exaggerate market differentiation. Under both scenarios firms adjust the service level in the second period so as to prevent consumers from switching, if keeping prices committed across periods. Furthermore, if consumers on average have a higher propensity to one firm, the variety seeking behavior leads to a higher total profits and a higher consumer surplus.

An Improved Mathematical Model Applying Practicable Algorithms

In this article, we have considered the problem of estimation of population variance on two occasion successive sampling. A class of estimators of population variance has been proposed and its asymptotic properties have been discussed. The proposed class of estimators is compared with the sample variance estimator when there is no matching from the previous occasion. Numerical illustrations are also given in support of the present study.

Danaus chrysippus chrysippus (Linnaeus, 1758) ff. 'alcippus' and 'alcippoides' (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae, Danainae) from Cyprus

We report a recent observation of D. c. chrysippus f. 'alcippus' in Cyprus, a variant of the Plain Tiger or African Queen butterfly infrequently seen in the Mediterranean, especially in the east of the region. D. c. chrysippus f. 'alcippus' appears to have been recorded from Cyprus on just one previous occasion, by R. E. Ellison, in 1939. However, a specimen of the similar f. 'alcippoides' collected by D. M. A. Bate in Cyprus in 1901 could perhaps be the source of Ellison's otherwise undocumented claim. These records are assessed in relation to the known distributions of the various forms of D. chrysippus across the Mediterranean, North Africa and Middle East, and more briefly with respect to the vast range of this butterfly across much of the Old World tropics and subtropics. The ambiguity and potential confusion caused by using an available name to designate both a geographically circumscribed subspecies or semispecies, and a genetically controlled phenotype that can be found far beyond the range of the putative subspecies or semispecies, is also discussed.

Deflation

The demonization of deflation has drawn attention away from the key problem of productivity. It arises from the two errors that deflation causes recessions and that investment responds to real interest rates. Deflation can be a symptom of inadequate demand but it can also occur when demand is strong. The fallacy depends on ignoring history and the importance of inflationary expectations. These were low in the late nineteenth century, allowing output to grow strongly while prices declined. Low expectations today have allowed stable prices to be combined with falling unemployment. But such expectations are very volatile. Should they rise a sharp increase in interest rates will be needed to prevent stagflation. This will be more dangerous today that it was on the previous occasion in 1982, as asset prices are now overvalued and were then cheap and debt levels were low.

Competition with Variety Seeking and Habitual Consumption: Price Commitment or Quality Commitment?

This paper investigates price and quality competition in a market where consumers seek variety and habit formation. Variety seeking is modeled as a decrease in the willingness to pay for product purchased on the previous occasion while habitual consumption may increase future marginal utility. We compare two competing strategies: price commitment and quality commitment. With a three-stage Hotelling-type model, we show that variety seeking intensifies while habitual consumption softens the competition. With price commitment, firms supply lower quality levels in period 1 and higher quality levels in period 2, while, with quality commitment, firms charge higher prices in period 1 and lower prices in period 2. However, the habitual consumption brings the opposite effect. In addition, with quality commitment variety seeking leads to a lower profit and a higher consumer surplus, while habitual consumption leads to the opposite results. On the other side, with price commitment these behaviors have no effect on the consumer surplus, although they still lower down the firm profits. Finally, we also identify conditions under which one strategy outperforms the other.

Morganand the New Dealers

Readers of theNew York Timeswere not accustomed to encountering in its pages a Cabinet official picking a fight with the Supreme Court, but that is what they did on May 8, 1938. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, had recently ruled that Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace had used the wrong procedures to set the rates that “commission men” charged farmers for marketing cattle, pigs, and sheep at Kansas City's stockyards. It was the second time the case had come before the Court. On the previous occasion, the justices had sent the case back to the lower courts to determine whether the secretary had personally studied the factual record before issuing the rates. In fact, Wallace had given the matter “more personal attention than any previous Secretary of Agriculture had ever given to any case under the Packers and Stockyards Act or for that matter any half dozen cases,” so when the case returned to the Court, the justices had to shift their ground. Now they objected that the Department of Agriculture had not revealed its case to the commission men, leaving them with no way of addressing the government's arguments. Wallace fumed that Hughes had implied that “the present Administration” was to blame for the procedures he followed, when in fact earlier, Republican administrations had established them. Besides, the procedures had already been revised in light of the Supreme Court's first decision in the case.

After the Critique of Lyric

Lyric studies has been new before. Many students of lyric will remember Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker'S 1985 COLlection of essays, Lyric Poetry beyond New Criticism, as a previous occasion for reevaluating the course of lyric studies. Hošek and Parker's ambitious volume measured the distance between New Critical and later theories of interpretation: “structuralist and post-structuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, semiotic, reader-response” (7). Features highlighted by then-recent theory—the difference dramatized by intertextuality, for example, or the impossibility, as opposed to transparency, of many putative forms of address in lyric—revealed what had been repressed and implied by Western academic assumptions about poetry earlier in the twentieth century; Hošek and Parker gathered an ambitious representation of such modifications of canonical lyric reading. Familiar units of Western literary vocabulary such as “apostrophe” continued to be used, but observation of their destabilizing causes and effects and reflection on their inner contradictions helped to break the illusion of the verbal icon's centripetal force. Parker notes in her introduction that the question “What would enable future work on the lyric?” remains as open as ever at the end of their project (16). So now that another twenty-two years have passed, how is lyric studies differently new, as gauged by the 2006 MLA convention's focus on lyric?

Acupuncture-Induced Galactorrhoea – a Case Report

A case of acupuncture-induced galactorrhoea in a healthy subject is described. The acupuncture was performed at a non-traditional site using a periosteal technique and galactorrhoea occurred on two separate occasions. Galactorrhoea following acupuncture has been reported on one previous occasion.

The refining influence of ethics committees on animal experimentation in Sweden

Mandatory scrutiny of projects by animal ethics committees was introduced in Sweden in 1979. The present study investigated the minutes of meetings held between 1989 and 2000 at which consideration of applications for experimental work in animals resulted in requests for modification ( n = 3607). 18.1% of the applications received were approved only after modifications. The majority of the changes requested may be classified as 'Refinement'. The most common requests were for improvement of project design, euthanasia method and housing and husbandry. There was a relative increase in modifications requested by the committees related to anaesthesia, choice of licensed supervisor and the need for licenses or informed consent from animal owners during the period investigated. There was a relative decrease in modifications related to euthanasia, housing and husbandry, and general endpoint assertions. The results suggest that the work of the committees may be perceived as an ongoing process, since several of the applications for which modification was requested were projects that had been approved on a previous occasion but were now up for renewal. In order to have maximal influence on the refinement of scientific protocols it is important that the scientists in the committees are continuously updated on developments in laboratory animal science.