733 research outputs found
China’s “Great Wall” of Debt Chinese Debts and their Macroeconomic Implications. Bertelsmann Stiftung GED Focus Paper
The figures of the Chinese debts are subject to ongoing discussion among economists. The
question whether the enormous rise in Chinese corporate and private debt over the past
decade will lead to another global financial crisis or will be managed by the Chinese
government is one of vital importance to the global economy: if China’s debt management
fails, the macroeconomic effects are expected to overshadow the catastrophic effects of the
2008 financial and economic crises by large. The Economist (7 May 2016) even goes as far
as to state the question not if, but when China’s debt bubble will burst. The term “China’s
Great Wall of Debt” coined by Dinny McMahon (2018) to emphasize the connection between
recent Chinese growth and corresponding debt seems therefore very well put
Cortical Mirror-System Activation During Real-Life Game Playing: An Intracranial Electroencephalography (EEG) Study
Analogous to the mirror neuron system repeatedly described in monkeys as a
possible substrate for imitation learning and/or action understanding, a
neuronal execution/observation matching system (OEMS) is assumed in humans, but
little is known to what extent this system is activated in non-experimental,
real-life conditions. In the present case study, we investigated brain activity
of this system during natural, non-experimental motor behavior as it occurred
during playing of the board game "Malefiz". We compared spectral modulations of
the high-gamma band related to ipsilateral reaching movement execution and
observation of the same kind of movement using electrocorticography (ECoG) in
one participant. Spatially coincident activity during both conditions execution
and observation was recorded at electrode contacts over the premotor/primary
motor cortex. The topography and amplitude of the high-gamma modulations
related to both, movement observation and execution were clearly spatially
correlated over several fronto-parietal brain areas. Thus, our findings
indicate that a network of cortical areas contributes to the human OEMS, beyond
primary/premotor cortex including Brocas area and the temporo-parieto-occipital
junction area, in real-life conditions.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure, CCN 2018 conference pape
Reducing Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Meet Climate Targets : A Comprehensive Quantification and Reasonable Options
A model is presented which covers the global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG emissions) and the energy consumption (fuels, electricity) in five sectors of end users, industry, transport, buildings, agriculture, and fugitive emissions. The electricity sector is also considered, but the associated GHG emissions are reallocated to the five end users. Different GHG reduction measures were calculated ranging from substitution of coal for electricity generation by renewables, electrification of road transport and buildings, restructuring of the sector industry to finally a 50% reduction of both food waste and meat consumption. To elucidate the consequences of global warming, future emission scenarios were also incorporated. One major conclusion is that the world can only reach the 2-degree climate target if electricity is only produced by renewables, and if transportation, buildings, and the industry are completely electrified by 2050. Compared to today, the electricity production by renewables will then rise by a factor of 11, and the total electricity demand by a factor of 2.4
Design of Unsteady-State Fixed-Bed Processes for Heat Regeneration, Ad-/Desorption, and Gas-Solid Reactions
Boarding and Alighting Time of Passengers of the Berlin Public Transport System
The overall transportation speed is a significant factor influencing the attractiveness as well as the profitability of the transit system. If a vehicle needs less time to complete a tour, it can serve more tours and thus more passengers within the same time. Likewise, the passengers benefit from a decreased in-vehicle travel time. In this paper, the factors affecting the passenger transfer time are discussed for the case of Berlin, Germany. Furthermore, the paper presents the results of a survey that focuses (i) on the average time needed for passengers to board and alight a vehicle, (ii) its deviation, and (iii) the impact of the vehicle’s occupancy and number of boarding/alighting passengers. Such data can also be used to model the boarding and alighting process at stops in transport simulations in a more realistic way. For buses and subways, more passengers standing in the door area of a vehicle are found to slow down the boarding and alighting process. The Berlin specific policy to allow the boarding of a bus only at the first door induces a significantly higher boarding time per passenger
On the lifetime of bioinformatics web services
Web services are used through all disciplines in life sciences and the online landscape is growing by hundreds of novel servers annually. However, availability varies, and maintenance practices are largely inconsistent. We screened the availability of 2396 web tools published during the past 10 years. All servers were accessed over 133 days and 318 668 index files were stored in a local database. The number of accessible tools almost linearly increases in time with highest availability for 2019 and 2020 (∼90%) and lowest for tools published in 2010 (∼50%). In a 133-day test frame, 31% of tools were always working, 48.4% occasionally and 20.6% never. Consecutive downtimes were typically below 5 days with a median of 1 day, and unevenly distributed over the weekdays. A rescue experiment on 47 tools that were published from 2019 onwards but never accessible showed that 51.1% of the tools could be restored in due time. We found a positive association between the number of citations and the probability of a web server being reachable. We then determined common challenges and formulated categorical recommendations for researchers planning to develop web-based resources. As implication of our study, we propose to develop a repository for automatic API testing and sustainability indexing
Recent Advances of Differential Privacy in Centralized Deep Learning: A Systematic Survey
Differential Privacy has become a widely popular method for data protection
in machine learning, especially since it allows formulating strict mathematical
privacy guarantees. This survey provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of
differentially private centralized deep learning, thorough analyses of recent
advances and open problems, as well as a discussion of potential future
developments in the field. Based on a systematic literature review, the
following topics are addressed: auditing and evaluation methods for private
models, improvements of privacy-utility trade-offs, protection against a broad
range of threats and attacks, differentially private generative models, and
emerging application domains.Comment: 35 pages, 2 figure
School-Class Co-Ethnic and Immigrant Density and Current Smoking among Immigrant Adolescents
Although the school-class is known to be an important setting for adolescent risk behavior, little is known about how the ethnic composition of a school-class impacts substance use among pupils with a migration background. Moreover, the few existing studies do not distinguish between co-ethnic density (i.e., the share of immigrants belonging to one’s own ethnic group) and immigrant density (the share of all immigrants). This is all the more surprising since a high co-ethnic density can be expected to protect against substance use by increasing levels of social support and decreasing acculturative stress, whereas a high immigrant density can be expected to do the opposite by facilitating inter-ethnic conflict and identity threat. This study analyses how co-ethnic density and immigrant density are correlated with smoking among pupils of Portuguese origin in Luxembourg. A multi-level analysis is used to analyze data from the Luxembourg Health Behavior in School-Aged Children study (N = 4268 pupils from 283 classes). High levels of co-ethnic density reduced current smoking. In contrast, high levels of immigrant density increased it. Thus, in research on the health of migrants, the distinction between co-ethnic density and immigrant density should be taken into account, as both may have opposite effects
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Socio-spatial dimensions in energy transitions: Applying the TPSN framework to case studies in Germany
Energy transitions cannot be fully grasped without appreciating their spatial implications. This paper takes up the idea of conceptualizing the socio-spatial dimensions of energy transitions and examines the respective value of the Territory, Place, Scale, and Network (TPSN) framework. The fundamental contribution of this framework is to move the focus of the debate away from whether one ontology of the socio-spatial is ‘better’ than another. By applying the TPSN framework to emblematic cases of regional energy spaces in Germany, we realized that the dynamics of different fields of action within an energy transition are characterized in each case by a specific pattern of the four socio-spatial dimensions and related strategies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the benefits and the shortcomings of the framework as it relates to understanding energy transitions. The fundamental role of place-making at a nexus with territorializations, as well as the additional importance of networking and rescaling strategies, are to be understood with the additional factors of the role of governance spaces, the upscaling of local experiments, powerful space-related discourses, and the socio-materiality of spaces
Photoemission Orbital Tomography for Excitons in Organic Molecules
Driven by recent developments in time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we
extend the successful method of photoemission orbital tomography (POT) to
excited states. Our theory retains the intuitive orbital picture of POT, while
respecting both the entangled character of the exciton wave function and the
energy conservation in the process. Analyzing results from three organic
molecules, we classify generic exciton structures and give a simple
interpretation in terms of natural transition orbitals. We validate our
findings by directly simulating pump-probe experiments with time-dependent
density functional theory.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure
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