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The market equilibrium model predicts that the supply and demand schedules of labor to an industry will cross at a level at which labor receives the value of its marginal product as contributed to the output produced. The imposition of an effective minimum wage in that industry creates a price floor for labor which will reduce employment as it promotes incentives to substitute capital for labor and/or workers with higher marginal productivity for those with lower skill and lower marginal productivity. This means in effect that it will lead employers to eliminate less productive jobs. Teenagers (youths 16–19 years old) with little training or work‐experience may be priced out of the market because they are not “worth” (in terms of productivity) the minimum wage.

Many texts display circular indifference curves. The rationale for such curves typically requires that goods become bads — that is, their marginal utilities become negative — over some range (e.g., Baumol [1], p. 199). In this note we develop what seems to be a far more general and intuitively appealing rationale for “approximately circular” indifference curves. This rationale suggests that the phenomenon may be far more widespread than previous analysis implies.

“All things are in a constant state of change”, said Heraclitus of Ephesus. The waters if a river are for ever changing yet the river endures. Every particle of matter is in continual movement. All death is birth in a new form, all birth the death of the previous form. The seasons come and go. The myth of our own John Barleycorn, buried in the ground, yet resurrected in the Spring, has close parallels with the fertility rites of Greece and the Near East such as those of Hyacinthas, Hylas, Adonis and Dionysus, of Osiris the Egyptian deity, and Mondamin the Red Indian maize‐god. Indeed, the ritual and myth of Attis, born of a virgin, killed and resurrected on the third day, undoubtedly had a strong influence on Christianity.

Working with documents in electronic format is inherently different from dealing with materials in print; nor can all electronic formats be considered equivalent. Processing and presenting SGML is not the same as processing and presenting materials in other markup or word processing formats. To maximize flexibility and extensibility, SGML is highly modular, which complicates implementation. Its emphasis on content structure rather than appearance enhances searchability but makes consistent and precise display difficult. Mechanisms used to maximize platform and software independence (e.g., entities, link protocols), though effective, can be used incorrectly or in ways difficult to implement on some systems or using certain software. Difficult questions remain for libraries planning to implement SGML.

The World Library Summit on Global Knowledge Renaissance was a conference organised by the National Library Board of Singapore in April 2002. An overview of the papers presented which covered the broad themes of knowledge augmentation, cultural entrepreneurship and knowledge governance is given. In addition descriptions of visits made to libraries in Singapore following the conference are provided.

Libraries must actively support humanities text files, but we must remember that to focus exclusively on texts tied to specific systems is to put ourselves in opposition to the needs of the researchers we intend to serve. A working model of the sort of system and resource provision that is appropriate is described. The system, one put in place at the University of Michigan, is the result of several years of discussions and investigation. While by no means the only model upon which to base such a service, it incorporates several features that are essential to the support of these materials: standardized, generalized data; the reliance on standards for the delivery of information; and remote use. Sidebars discuss ARTFL, a textual database; the Oxford Text Archive; InteLex; the Open Text Corporation; the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); the machine‐readable version of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition; and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.

The World‐Wide Web (W3) initiative is a practical project designed to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This article describes the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the “web” and compares them with various contemporary systems.

The purpose of this postmortem is to assess whether the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system's demise.

To draw conclusions about the policy determinants of the crisis, the paper studies five important policies: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) policies toward credit rating agencies, Federal Reserve policies concerning bank capital and credit default swaps, SEC and Federal Reserve policies about over‐the‐counter derivatives, SEC policies toward the consolidated supervision of major investment banks, and government policies toward two housing‐finance entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products (“suicide”). Rather, the evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. Moreover, although the major regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies, they chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system's collapse.

Although influential policymakers presume that international capital flows, euphoric traders, and insufficient regulatory power caused the crisis, this paper shows that these factors played only a partial role. Thus, current reforms represent only a partial and thus incomplete step in establishing a stable and well‐functioning financial system. Since systemic institutional failures helped cause the crisis, systemic institutional reforms must be a part of a comprehensively effective response.

The World‐Wide Web (W³) initiative is a practical project designed to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This paper seeks to describe the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the “web” and to compare them with various contemporary systems.

Since Vannevar Bush's article, men have dreamed of extending their intellect by making their collective knowledge available to each individual by using machines. Computers provide us two practical techniques for human‐knowledge interface. One is hypertext, in which links between pieces of text (or other media) mimic human association of ideas. The other is text retrieval, which allows associations to be deduced from the content of text. The W³ ideal world allows both operations and provides access from any browsing platform.

Various server gateways to other information systems have been produced, and the total amount of information available on the web is becoming very significant, especially since it includes all anonymous FTP archives, WAIS servers, and Gopher servers as well as specific W³ servers.

The paper notices that a W³ server could provide the functions of each of these servers, and so it looks forward to a single protocol that can be used by the whole community.