IS THE WORLD FLAT?

Globalization became more and more prominent during the last decades. There is no way to argue that globalization led to more interconnected economies, facilitating the communication and the collaboration around the world. But where is this going? Doesglobalization mean uniformity or diversity? As the world begins to resemble more, the people are trying to distinguish between them more, which can exacerbate nationalistic feeling. Friedman argues that globalization made the world smaller and flatter, allowing all countries to take chance of the available opportunities equally. But is this really true? Although politic and cultural factors can stand in front of a really flat world, what is the key for Chinese and Indian success and which are theirs perspectives?flat world, flattener, globalization, nationalism, China, India, communication, technology, emerging economy, education

PUBLIC GOODS AND THE PROBLEM OF ECONOMIC CALCULUS

Most papers regarding public goods have a certain predisposition to “classic aspects” like their characteristics of non-rivalry and non-excludability. In this paper we try to emphasize that in the area of public goods one of the major problems is, in fact, the one of economic calculus. The reality is that public finances exist in a limited quantity so the public authority is forced to choose between ways to spend them. According to the definition of public goods the expenditures should be for the production of essential assets that are neglected by private investors. The problem is how to choose between public possibilities of spending the money after the application of the first criteria.public goods, E.U., economic calculus, public spending, public distribution

THE ROLE AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE EVENT BASED COMMUNICATION IN THE ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN

The electoral campaigns are considered to be among the most delicate challenges for a marketer due to the limited time available, the sensible margin for error, the high impact of each statement and the condensation of a quite large amount of resources in a 30 day period. While the ultimate goal for the campaign staff is to bring the global electoral package closer to the electorate and earn their votes most, of the time various competitors use disappointingly similar tactics that create confusion among the electorate. The campaign related events turned out to be one of the tactics that allows for a pin-point targeting of the electorate and a better control on the receivers of the message. This paper focuses on the types of events used that can be used in an electoral campaign reinforced with their particularities and effects registered in previous campaigns.electoral marketing, communication, events, targeting, global electoral pachage

EUROPEAN UNION - WORLD ECONOMIC POWER

From establishing the European Coal and Steel and so far, European economic integration has seen remarkable success. There are however a number of difficult issues unresolved. Will EU succeed to move forward towards a political union and to shape a foreign policy that would enable a major role in international relations? The new confrontation that is taking place at the international level is not based on political-military conflict anymore, but rather on economic and technological competition to get a bigger part in the global economy. But will the acquisition of a world economic power status will allow them to remove American hegemony?global power, multipolarity, unipolarity, international relations, FDI, European Union

DOES POSITIONING HAVE A PLACE IN THE MINDS OF OUR STUDENTS?

Positioning is one of the most powerful marketing concepts. At the beginning, the meaning of positioning was rather limited, focusing on the concept of reputation. Then it became ”the place a brand occupies in the mind of its target audience”. Under this meaning , many companies have implemented the concept of positioning as a part of their everyday marketing activities. Nowadays, positioning is being used as a tool for explaining how consumers relate to foreign countries. The concept of positioning is simply to important to be ignored, but does it have a place in our students minds? This paper aims to determine whether we have an evolution or an involution in this matter.marketing, positioning, marketing research

Populism, nationalism, extremism: expressions of antipolitics in Europe?

The vast majority of the papers on populism describe this political phenomenon as one which is very dificult to explain and to analyze due to its discursive versatility and behavioural chameleonism. Furthermore, we would argue that the term populism covers more political and social realities than one single term would normatly concentrate from a semantic point of view. This is why many analysts of this phenomenon, such as Guy Hermet (2007) or Gianfranco Pasquino(2008) propose the use of the plural populisms instead of the singular populism, which would permit the formulation of a clearer definition of this ubiquitous phenomenon. On the other hand. in view of the new dynamics of populism in the period preceding the debut of the 2008 economic crisis, some authors (Mudde, 2004:541 Tourainie. 2007:38) have defined the phenomenon as a system of "post industrial" parties and thus, "post classical". Others (Taguieff. 2002; Knight, 1998; Viguera, 1993), trying to the give an interpretative unity to a process which is hard to classify, have defined populism as a certain style of making politics varying in discourse from one society to another, but similar through its intimate structures of behaviours and ideas

Asymptotic Results for Simultaneous Group Sequential Analysis of Rank-Based and Weighted Kaplan-Meier Tests with Paired Survival Data in the Presence of Censoring. Technical report

This research sequentially monitors paired survival differences using a new class of non-parametric tests based on functionals of standardized paired weighted log-rank (PWLR) and standardized paired weighted Kaplan-Meier (PWKM) tests. During a trial these tests may alternately assume the role of the more extreme statistic. By monitoring PEMAX, the maximum between the absolute values of the standardized PWLR and PWKM, one combines advantages of rank-based and non rank-based paired testing paradigms. Simulations show that monitoring treatment differences using PEMAX maintains type I error and is nearly as powerful as using the more advantageous of the two tests, in proportional hazards (PH) as well as non-PH situations. Hence, PEMAX preserves power more robustly than individually monitored PWLR and PWKM, while maintaining a reasonably simple approach to design and analysis of results. An example from the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) is given

Particle size distribution based on deep learning instance segmentation

Abstract. Deep learning has become one of the most important topics in Computer Science, and recently it proved to deliver outstanding performances in the field of Computer Vision, ranging from image classification and object detection to instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation. However, most of these results were obtained on large, publicly available datasets, that exhibit a low level of scene complexity. Less is known about applying deep neural networks to images acquired in industrial settings, where data is available in limited amounts. Moreover, comparing an image-based measurement boosted by deep learning to an established reference method can pave the way towards a shift in industrial measurements. This thesis hypothesizes that the particle size distribution can be estimated by employing a deep neural network to segment the particles of interest. The analysis was performed on two deep neural networks, comparing the results of the instance segmentation and the resulted size distributions. First, the data was manually labelled by selecting apatite and phlogopite particles, formulating the problem as a two-class instance segmentation task. Next, models were trained based on the two architectures and then used for predicting instances of particles on previously unseen images. Ultimately, accumulating the sizes of the predicted particles would result in a particle size distribution for a given dataset. The final results validated the hypothesis to some extent and showed that tackling difficult and complex challenges in the industry by leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning neural networks leads to promising results. The system was able to correctly identify most of the particles, even in challenging situations. The resulted particle size distribution was also compared to a reference measurement obtained by the laser diffraction method, but still further research and experiments are required in order to properly compare the two methods. The two evaluated architectures yielded great results, with relatively small amounts of annotated data

Simultaneous Group Sequential Analysis of Rank-Based and Weighted Kaplan–Meier Tests for Paired Censored Survival Data

This research sequentially monitors paired survival differences using a new class of nonparametric tests based on functionals of standardized paired weighted log-rank (PWLR) and standardized paired weighted Kaplan–Meier (PWKM) tests. During a trial, these tests may alternately assume the role of the more extreme statistic. By monitoring PEMAX, the maximum between the absolute values of the standardized PWLR and PWKM, one combines advantages of rank-based (RB) and non-RB paired testing paradigms. Simulations show that monitoring treatment differences using PEMAX maintains type I error and is nearly as powerful as using the more advantageous of the two tests in proportional hazards (PH) as well as non-PH situations. Hence, PEMAX preserves power more robustly than individually monitored PWLR and PWKM, while maintaining a reasonably simple approach to design and analysis of results. An example from the Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) is given.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65557/1/j.1541-0420.2005.00337.x.pd

Estimating the Quality-of-Life-Adjusted Gap Time Distribution of Successive Events Subject to Censoring

When treatment effects are studied in the context of successive or recurrent life events, separate analyses of the quality-of-life scores and of the inter-event, gap, times might lead to possibly contradictory conclusions. In an attempt to reconcile this, we propose a unitary and more comprehensive nonparametric analysis that combines the two separate analyses by introducing the quality-of-life-adjusted gap time concept. Inverse probability of censoring estimators of the quality-of-life-adjusted gap time joint and conditional distributions are proposed and are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Simulations performed in a variety of scenarios indicate that the joint and conditional quality-of-life-adjusted gap time distribution estimators are virtually unbiased, with properly estimated standard errors and asymptotic normality features. An example from the International Breast Cancer Study Group Trial V illustrates the use of the proposed estimators.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91896/1/Adi's Biometrika paper.pd