ROOT Status and Future Developments

In this talk we will review the major additions and improvements made to the ROOT system in the last 18 months and present our plans for future developments. The additons and improvements range from modifications to the I/O sub-system to allow users to save and restore objects of classes that have not been instrumented by special ROOT macros, to the addition of a geometry package designed for building, browsing, tracking and visualizing detector geometries. Other improvements include enhancements to the quick analysis sub-system (TTree::Draw()), the addition of classes that allow inter-file object references (TRef, TRefArray), better support for templated and STL classes, amelioration of the Automatic Script Compiler and the incorporation of new fitting and mathematical tools. Efforts have also been made to increase the modularity of the ROOT system with the introduction of more abstract interfaces and the development of a plug-in manager. In the near future, we intend to continue the development of PROOF and its interfacing with GRID environments. We plan on providing an interface between Geant3, Geant4 and Fluka and the new geometry package. The ROOT GUI classes will finally be available on Windows and we plan to release a GUI inspector and builder. In the last year, ROOT has drawn the endorsement of additional experiments and institutions. It is now officially supported by CERN and used as key I/O component by the LCG project.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 5 pages, MSWord, pSN MOJT00

RunMC - an object-oriented analysis framework for Monte Carlo simulation of high-energy particle collisions

RunMC is an object-oriented framework aimed to generate and to analyse high-energy collisions of elementary particles using Monte Carlo simulations. This package, being based on C++ adopted by CERN as the main programming language for the LHC experiments, provides a common interface to different Monte Carlo models using modern physics libraries. Physics calculations (projects) can easily be loaded and saved as external modules. This simplifies the development of complicated calculations for high energy physics in large collaborations.This desktop program is open-source licensed and is available on the LINUX and Windows/Cygwin platforms.Comment: 15 pages, 1 eps figure, accepted by Comp. Phys. Commu

The role of technology in health care expenditure in the EU

Total health care expenditure in the EU countries accounts for between 4 and 11% of GDP, out of which between 3 and 9% of GDP is financed from public sources. As it accounts for between 10 and 18 % of total government spending, health care is therefore among the most significant items of social public expenditure. In addition, public expenditure on health care has been growing over most of the second half of the 20th century, not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to the national income.The paper analyses past developments of health care expenditure in EU Member States. The methodology used expands the set of standard explanatory variables, such as demographic structure, income and health status of the population, by a variable characterising the effect of the technological progress on health care spending.Subsequently the paper provides a projection of the long-term development of health care expenditure, with the methodology based on the EC-EPC model extended by the impact of technological development.Baltic States financial accelerator dynamic general equilibrium Roeger Lendvai External Deficits in the Baltics 1995 to 2007 Catching Up or Imbalances

Recognizing Kosovo’s independence: Remedial secession or earned sovereignty?

This paper examines the main justifications for recognising Kosovo’s ndependence: ‘remedial secession’ and ‘earned sovereignty’. Our paper begins by examining the applicability of the doctrine of remedial secession to Kosovo, the justifications for which can be seen clearly in the decade from 1989 to 1999. However, we argue that the doctrine of remedial secession was insufficiently ripe, in political and legal terms, to be used in 1999 to support Kosovo’s independence. An opposing approach is that of ‘earned sovereignty’ which aims to provide for the managed devolution of sovereign authority and functions from a state to a sub-state entity, resulting either in independence or rehabilitated autonomy within the host state. Based on the case of Kosovo, we propose an alternative explanation to this observed path towards recognisable’ statehood: ‘remedial sovereignty’ whereby a people realise statehood by invoking remedial secession and undergoing a transitional period of mediated international administration, characterized by elements of sovereignty which are externally designed and internally earned. Therefore, we propose ‘remedial sovereignty’ as a useful paradigm to provide the international community with a framework to confer statehood on those peoples for whom there is no other choice, thereby resolving the ‘recognition dilemma’ experienced in the aftermath of the Kosovo’s declaration of independence

The AliEn system, status and perspectives

AliEn is a production environment that implements several components of the Grid paradigm needed to simulate, reconstruct and analyse HEP data in a distributed way. The system is built around Open Source components, uses the Web Services model and standard network protocols to implement the computing platform that is currently being used to produce and analyse Monte Carlo data at over 30 sites on four continents. The aim of this paper is to present the current AliEn architecture and outline its future developments in the light of emerging standards.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, Word, 10 figures. PSN MOAT00

Patterns of grammaticalization in African languages

The approach outlined in the present paper is based on observations made with African languages. Although the 1000-odd African languages display a remarkable extent of structural variation, there are certain structures that do not seem to occur in Africa. Thus, to our knowledge, an African language having anything that could be called an ergative case or a numeral classifier system has not been discovered so far. It may turn out that our approach can, in a modified form, be made applicable to languages outside Africa. This , however, is a possibility that has not been considered here. The present approach is based essentially on diachronic findings in that it uses observations on language evolution in order to account for structural differences between languages. Thus, it has double potential: apart from describing and explaining typological diversity it can also be material to reconstructing language history

Fair Labor Association 2006 Annual Public Report

Introduction concerns effects of globalization. Examines changes from 2005-2006 as companies are encouraged to move towards self compliance, with a concentration on corporate responsibility. Data is broken down by company

Conceptualising sustainability in UK urban Regeneration: a discursive Formation

Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that conceptualisations of sustainability are fundamentally limited. The conceptualisation of sustainability operating within urban regeneration schemes should powerfully shape how they make manifest (or do not) the principles of sustainable development. Documents guide, but people implement regeneration—and the disparate conceptualisations of stakeholders demonstrate even less coherence than policy. The actions towards achieving sustainability have become a policy ‘fix’ in Eastside: a necessary feature of urban policy discourse that is limited to solutions within market-based constraints

Water ascends in woody plants : so what?

Woody plants are often considered as static individuals, taking up water via the root system and losing it again via leaf transpiration. Quite boring one might conclude when considering that more than 95% of the water taken up by the roots is transpired by the leaves. But the story suddenly becomes much more intriguing when the dynamics happening during the ascent of water in woody plants are included. This keynote talk will elaborate on water transport in woody plants, highlighting where the dynamics come from, what the relevance is and which tissues are involved. The power to decipher water transport dynamics with plant-based measurements, where sap flow and stem diameter variations are at the forefront, will be illustrated. The concept of plant-based measurements will be complemented with a viewpoint on how sophisticated mechanistic water transport models can assist in plant-based irrigation scheduling or early warning and stress detection systems