China : improving unemployment insurance

The objective of this policy note is to assist the Chinese government in assessing implementation of the unemployment insurance (UI) program to date, identifying key challenges, and exploring possible policy responses. The note begins with a background section on recent developments in the country's economy and labor market and briefly describes the evolution of the UI program within this context. The note then provides an overview and analysis of the current UI program, touching upon critical issues such as coverage, benefit levels, effects on work incentives, provision of employment services, and financial performance. For this analysis, the note draws upon results from recent UI policy simulation pilots in Qingdao and Tianjin; lessons from a World Bank-supported UI technical assistance project in Liaoning province; interviews with government officials involved in UI; and various UI-related studies and project reports. The note concludes with policy recommendations and suggests some future directions for UI system reform.Labor Markets,,Labor Policies,Access to Finance,Population Policies

The physics goals of the TESLA project

As next generation e+e- linear collider the superconducting accelerator project TESLA has been proposed. In this note the physics potential goals of this project, which is highly complementary to LHC, are described.Comment: Invited talk presented at the ``Seventh Topical Seminar on The legacy of LEP and SLC'', Siena, October 200

A new approach to onset detection: towards an empirical grounding of theoretical and speculative ideologies of musical performance

This article assesses aspects of the current state of a project which aims, with the help of computers and computer software, to segment soundfiles of vocal melodies into their component notes, identifying precisely when the onset of each note occurs, and then tracking the pitch trajectory of each note, especially in melodies employing a variety of non-standard temperaments, in which musical intervals smaller than 100 cents are ubiquitous. From there, we may proceed further, to describe many other “micro-features” of each of the notes, but for now our focus is on the onset times and pitch trajectories

N = 2 world-sheet approach to D-branes on generalized Kaehler geometries: I. General formalism

We present an N = 2 world-sheet superspace description of D-branes on bihermitian or generalized Kaehler manifolds. To accomplish this, D-branes are considered as boundary conditions for a nonlinear sigma-model in what we call N = 2 boundary superspace. In this note the general formalism for such an approach is presented and the resulting classification sketched. This includes some remarks regarding target spaces whose parameterization includes semi-chiral superfields which have not appeared in the literature yet. In an accompanying note we turn to some examples and applications of the general setup presented here.Comment: 7 pages, contribution to the proceedings of the Fourth Workshop of the RTN project 'Constituents, Fundamental Forces and Symmetries of the Universe', Varna, September 11 - 17, 200

The AFP Project

AFP is a project to extend the diffractive physics programme of the ATLAS experiment by installing new detectors that will be able to tag forward protons scattered at very small angles. This will allow us to study Single Diffraction, Double Pomeron Exchange, Central Exclusive Production and photon-photon processes. This note presents the physics case for the AFP project and briefly describes the proposed detector system.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, presented at the Cracow Epiphany Conference on the first year of the LHC, Cracow, Poland, January 10--12, 201

Implementing Energy Efficiency & ESD from a Development Perspective

This note discusses the difficulties currently being experienced in implementing Ecological Sustainable Development (ESD) from a development perspective. It looks at what motivates developers and examines what is needed, either through mandatory measures or incentives to change the development culture in Australia. The note draws on experience from a number of current and recently completed projects and incorporates input from developers. It also includes discussion on the evolving outcomes of current industry initiatives aimed specifically at changing development processes and culture in Australia. The note focuses on new buildings. The way in which new buildings are financed and delivered generally differs significantly from retrofit projects being undertaken by building owners. Building owners can more easily factor long term operational costs of their buildings into their retrofit project financing. Typically, building developers are not the long-term owners, operators or tenants of the buildings that they deliver. Their projects are normally sold before or soon after completion to unrelated parties such as property trusts, superannuation funds, and other investors. It is this discontinuity in development and ownership of new buildings that creates perhaps the single biggest challenge to the uptake of ESD for the property industry

Recording and explaining : exploring the German ditransitive alternation

In this discussion note, we offer some thoughts on the relation between explanation and the extensive recording of data from a ‘moderate’ functional point of view. The paper takes the form of a case study in which we consider the variation in form and function of sentences with the ditransitive verb geben in present-day standard German. This is the subject matter of an ongoing corpus-based research project in the General Linguistics section of the Linguistics Department at Ghent University