Legislative Activity in the Canadian House of Commons: Does Majority or Minority Government Matter?
This study assesses the impact of majority and minority governments on legislative activity in the Canadian House of Commons. The quantitative analysis spans the 22nd to the 40th Parliaments (1953–2009) and examines legislative productivity and success by government type. The analysis of descriptive data confirms that minority governments are somewhat less productive and successful than their majority counterparts. However, the analysis emphasizes significant variation for majority governments. Neither governing context guarantees success or failure as contextual factors largely condition legislative activity.
Decision-making potential and ‘detailed’ legislation of Western European parliamentary governments (1990–2013)
The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Consequently, studies on governments should deal above all with their ability to produce legislation. To this respect, this article analyses the legislative productivity of 112 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom) from 1990 to 2013. My independent variable is an index offering an immediate picture of the decision-making potential of parliamentary governments, while the dependent variable is the ‘detailed’ legislative production of those governments. If we are able to differentiate between governments who decide, and governments who do not, we could answer a considerable number of interesting questions: which Western European parliamentary democracies tend to produce more (detailed) laws and which – on the contrary – are used to facing greater difficulties for achieving that goal? What are the reasons behind these opposing trends? The empirical results largely confirms that the more a parliamentary government has got decision-making potential (in terms of the proposed index), the more likely it will pass ‘detailed’ legislation.
Computational fluid dynamics as a development tool for rotary blood pumps.
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is beginning to significantly impact the development of biomedical devices, in particular rotary cardiac assist devices. The University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Center for Artificial Organ Development has extensively used CFD as the primary tool to analyze and design a novel axial flow blood pump having a magnetically suspended rotor. The blood-contacting surfaces of the pump were developed using a design strategy based on CFD that involved closely coupling a Navier-Stokes solver to a parameterized geometry modeler and advanced mesh movement techniques. CFD-based blood damage models for shear-induced hemolysis as well as surrogate functions describing thrombosis potential were employed to help guide design improvements. This CFD-based design approach resulted in the timely development of a pump subjected to multiple geometric refinements without building expensive physical prototypes for each design iteration. A physical prototype of the final improved pump was fabricated and experimentally analyzed using particle imaging flow visualization. The CFD predicted results correlated well with the experimental data including pressure-flow (H-Q) performance and specific flow field features. It is estimated that the present CFD-based design approach shortened the overall design time frame from an order of years to months.