The beginnings of farming, 10,000 or more years ago, have often been discussed in relation to a few discrete "centres of origin", for example the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and Central America.
Indeed, before this week's visit the worry of many Asian security experts, and especially of Japan's American allies, was that Mr Koizumi might be willing to go soft on Mr Kim in exchange for the public relations coup of bringing a few of the abductees home.
The relation of this occupies a few lines only, but the disclaimer is of first importance for the appreciation of the method that characterises the whole.
To accurately model some phenotypes has required the introduction of a few relations that are not defined in the OBO Relations Ontology (RO; http://code.google.com/p/obo-relations/) or the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO; http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/) at present.
Relations generate a few special problems of their own, but for the most part properties and relations raise the same philosophical issues.
Urbanism is not considered a process by which people are linked with a place, but as the outcome of a wider system of relations deriving from a few variables that determine the urban condition as they interact with each other.
They also guess, probably rightly, that the West will not jeopardise its new relations with Sudan for the sake of a few bombs dropped on the UN.
But perhaps because Mr Havel never took a higher degree in law, economics or international relations, a few sentences of his shed more light on such topics than dozens of expert reports.
When the company's new head of public relations started work a few months ago, she told Kozlowski she felt like she had just parachuted into a jungle without a compass to find her way out.
When the company's new head of public relations started work a few months ago, she told Kozlowski that she felt as if she had just parachuted into a jungle to find her way out without a compass.
