Book review : Entrepreneurship in emerging regions around the world : theory, evidence and implications

P.H. Phan, S. Venkataraman and S.R. Velamuri (2008) Entrepreneurship in emerging regions around the world: Theory, evidence and implications, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, United Kingdom

Mortality disparities between geographic regions : results from a risk percentiles model for coronary heart disease

Background: Planning of disease prevention strategies requires information regarding the distribution of absolute risk in the population to allow targeting of people at high disease risk. It is well known that death rates from coronary heart disease (CHD) are higher in remote areas of Australia compared with major cities. Less well understood is the distribution of the absolute risk of CHD death within the different geographic regions. We present a mathematical model of CHD which projects the lifetime risk of death among individuals in different percentiles of CHD risk. We apply this to model the distribution of CHD risk within different geographic regions.

Methods: Using information from the Framingham1, MRFIT2 and AusDiab3 studies, the Australian population was divided into percentiles of CHD risk within age and gender groups by geographic location. Absolute mortality risk was determined at each percentile using current Australian mortality data. Survival curves were generated for each percentile using these risk estimates. Approximate confidence intervals were derived using bootstrap methods.

Conclusions: The difference in life expectancy at age 25 between those in the lowest decile of CHD risk compared to the highest was 5.8 years (95%CI:4.7,6.7) in major cities compared to 8.5 years (95%CI:7.6,9.7) in remote areas. The difference in risk of premature death (before age 75) was 12% (95%CI:10%,14%) in major cities compared to 33% (95%CI:28%,38%) in remote areas.

lnvestigating spatial linkages of construction prices in Australia's regions

Linkages among different construction markets have attracted great of attention from the construction economist. With notable exceptions, most of this infestation has carried out by using input-output analysis. Interactions among regional construction markets have been discussed in few studies and none of them investigate spatial effects on the regional construction markets. This study employed spatial econometric techniques, spatial autocorrelation and convergence tests, to analysis interactions and linkages among construction price indices in Australian six states and two territories. The empirical results indicate the presence of significant positive spatial correlation between the construction prices in Australian eight construction markets and the degree of dependence decrease sufficiently quickly as the space between units increase. The results of convergence test further present evidence on "ripple effect" in the construction prices in Australian regional markets and the changes in regional construction price would positively influence neighboring states first, and then spread out into others, and then the regional prices converge and reach a long-run equilibrium in the following quarters. Urban development policymakers and construction developers could benefit from the analysis of spatial linkages in regional construction markets.

Home based business in suburban peripheral regions and government policy: a case study of Casey, Melbourne, Australia

Home based businesses (HBB) are increasingly becoming an alternative to salaried employment. This research explores the potential for HBB to contribute significantly to the economic development of peripheral metropolitan centres. Without economic development, these centres remain dormitory suburbs with unresolved associated social and ecological issues. By mapping the diversity and limitations of HBB in the City of Casey, an outer suburban peripheral area of Melbourne, Australia, this study aims to evaluate what exists and the response by governments at all levels to further business development. This study finds that the role of government is restricted to broad initial start-ups, with no programs or support for the type of innovative HBB that need to be husbanded and encouraged to grow outside of the narrow confines of their home base.

Defining sub-regions in locally sparsified compressive sensing MRI

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important imaging technique. However, it is a time consuming process. The aim of this study is to make the imaging process ef?cient. MR images are sparse in the sensing domain and Compressive Sensing exploits this sparsity. Locally sparsi?ed Compressed Sensing is a specialized case of CS which sub-divides the image and sparsi?es each region separately; later samples are taken based on sparsity level in that region. In this paper, a new structured approach is presented for de?ning the size and locality of sub-regions in image. Experiments were done on the regions de?ned by proposed framework and local sparsity constraints were used to achieve high sparsity level and to reduce the sample set. Experimental results and their comparison with global CS is presented in the paper.

Synthesis and growth mechanism of Thin-film TiO2 nanotube arrays on focused-ion-beam micropatterned 3D isolated regions of titanium on silicon

In this paper, the fabrication and growth mechanism of net-shaped micropatterned self-organized thin-film TiO2 nanotube (TFTN) arrays on a silicon substrate are reported. Electrochemical anodization is used to grow the nanotubes from thin-film titanium sputtered on a silicon substrate with an average diameter of ?30 nm and a length of ?1.5 ?m using aqueous and organic-based types of electrolytes. The fabrication and growth mechanism of TFTN arrays from micropatterned three-dimensional isolated islands of sputtered titanium on a silicon substrate is demonstrated for the first time using focused-ion-beam (FIB) technique. This work demonstrates the use of the FIB technique as a simple, high-resolution, and maskless method for high-aspect-ratio etching for the creation of isolated islands and shows great promise toward the use of the proposed approach for the development of metal oxide nanostructured devices and their integration with micro- and nanosystems within silicon-based integrated-circuit devices.