The development of the service sector in Germany and the Netherlands - a comparison

Ausgehend von verschiedenen Auffassungen über Modelle der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Länder von primär landwirtschaftlichen über Industrie- zu Dienstleistungsstrukturen wird die Herausbildung des Dienstleistungssektors in den Niederlanden und in Deutschland (1882 bis 1982) verglichen. Interessant sind diese beiden Länder nach Meinung der Autoren dabei vor allem, weil die Niederlande als Handelsnation bekannt sind, während sich in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert eine rapide Industrialisierung vollzog. (IAB)'In the sience of economics it is a general thought that a developing economy would enter three phases. In the first phase the majority of the occupational population would find employment in the agricultural sector. During the second phase the pith of the occupational population is shifted to the industrial sector. In the last phase a definite shift to the tertiary or service sector would take place. However, this manner of thought is exposed to more and more criticism. Despite predictions of the contrary, the economical development in 'third world' countries has been enacted according to this pattern. Also, through further reserach it has been determined that in far from all industrialized countries the process of economical development has progressed as literally. Only a few European countries have developed accordingly. In highly industrialized countries, such as Japan and the United States of America, as well as many undeveloped countries, the service sector was of old more importance for employment than that the industry was. Therefore one may wonder if the above-mentioned development model could not be considered as specifically European, rather than general. Moreover, with this confirmation one must realize that we are sooner concerned here with a West-European model and that within Western Europe a number of countries did not comply with the pattern. In this article a comparsion is made between the development of the service sector in the Netherlands and that of Germany. Why these two countries are so interesting is because the Netherlands was thought to be a trading nation and Germany a country that industrialized very rapidly in the 19th century. (authour's abstract

Equivalence of disturbance observer structures for linear systems

Several techniques exist to incorporate disturbance rejection requirements in a linear controller design. Contrary to, for example the H-infinity controller design technique where only one degree of freedom is available to obtain both disturbance rejection and performance, a disturbance observer adds a degree of freedom, thereby enabling a separate design of the disturbance rejection and the performance. There are many ways to design, implement and represent disturbance observers. We focus on two design methodologies and their corresponding representations. It can be shown that, in the case that the (SISO) plant is linear, the methodologies result in an equivalent disturbance observer. We use this equivalence to relate some properties well-known for one methodology to the other methodology, and vice vers

Religion between State and Society

In contrast to mainstream historiography, secularisation was not a distinct process in nineteenth-century Europe, since the century was a period of religious revival. In the late nineteenth century, in spite of weakening church attendance and rising agnosticism brought on by urbanisation and migration, religion remained attractive for the middle class and social movements related to church membership emerged in politics. In this chapter the diversity of religion in Europe is treated. The author distinguishes between hierarchical and nonhierarchical types of Christian churches, and between four religious regions in Europe. This situation had effects on the relationship between state and religion

The Decline of Industry. The Rurh Area in Germany

The effects of the decline of industry on urban development can particularly be felt in the former nineteenth-century industrial regions in Europe. In Germany the Ruhr Area was one of the most important industrial regions with a dominance of heavy industry (coal, steel, chemicals and energy). Although the area had a strong urbanisation level, the urbanisation pattern was strongly influ-enced by the development of industry. Thus, the southern parts were more urbanised as the later developed northern parts and suburbs in the neighbourhood of the plants soon dominated the urban fabric to the detriment of the former centres. Although the area had a population of over 5 million inhabitants and the urbanisation level was quite high, plans to make one administrative region never were successful. The decline of heavy industry, which started in the 1970s., showed a comparable pattern as in other European (and American) industrial regions. Compared to other regions of Europe, which were affected by the decline of industry, the Ruhr Area did not collapse totally.Thanks to the policies of the central and regional government (Bund and Land) it was possible to transform the area partially (ecological, cultural and educational policies). However, the existence of independent urban communities could be seen as a problem, because it led to strong inter-urban competition at a moment that the incomes of these communities dimin-ished. The decline of industry not only meant the development of social weaker traditional urban centres with mass unemployment, but also placed a heavy burden on urban governments to supply social help

Training opportunities report

The HILAS (Human Integration in the Life-cycle of Aviation Systems) project is a large, integrated European project which aims to improve safety in the civil air transport sector through the integration of human factors across the life-cycle, while simultaneously generating improved operational efficiencies. The Knowledge Integration strand plays an active role in ensuring that integration takes place across the HILAS project. It initiates activities such as integration workshops, newsletters, HUFAG, dissemination events and lecture series to ensure effective communications both within and external to the consortium. The current report represents a deliverable associated with the dissemination, training and knowledge support activities of the KI strand (WP1.2); more specifically deliverable D1.2.9: Training Opportunities Report. The objective of this deliverable is to identify the training opportunities from HILAS consortium outputs. Several methods are used to identify the training development opportunities arising from HILAS outputs: first, the evaluation of the lecture series 2007; then, the evaluation of WP1.3 deliverables D1.3.1 – 1.3.6; and finally, the interaction with the different HILAS strands (through questionnaires). Together, these complementing evaluations should result in the identification of interesting and relevant training development opportunities arising from HILAS consortium outputs. The evaluation of the lecture series 2007 was described in chapter 3. Results of this evaluation showed that participants were moderately interested in receiving training in the use of the specific tools and/or measures, especially concerning eye tracking and CRIA. Nonetheless, participants appreciated being briefed about the tools and/or measures through the lecture series. The tools and/or measures presented were believed to be useful, relevant and important for the HILAS project, especially with regard to the psychophysiological measures and Pamela. The competence requirements evaluated in WP1.3 deliverables D1.3.1 – 1.3.6 add valuable information to the process of identifying training opportunities. The implementation requirements listed in the deliverables D1.3.1 – D1.3.6 were summarized and, from these, competence/training requirements needed in HILAS organizations were extensively formulated in chapter 4. These competence requirements and the results of the evaluation of the lecture series 2007 together formed the basis for the strand leaders’ questionnaire used for the interaction with the different strands. Interaction with the strands (described in chapter 5) was necessary to identify the specific training opportunities for the different domains. The questions revealed rather diverse results and therefore, it seems difficult to present an all comprising conclusion with respect to the specific training opportunities. Nevertheless, partners have already provided different interesting and relevant training opportunities to implement. Of course, these opportunities often lie within the expertise of the different partners/strands; i.e. opportunities for training that could be developed from the expertise that exists already in the consortium and that is likely to develop as the project progresses. The training platforms that are currently available within the possibilities and constraints of the HILAS project are described in chapter 6. These are lectures series, workshops and the Knowledge Management System. These activities can actually be implemented to acquire knowledge, skills and competencies; in other words to train. It is necessary to extent the use of the available training platforms to the outside world. The development of on-line training via KMS2 and the use of tailored courses are two great examples of this. In addition, lecture series and workshops can be (re-)designed for external stakeholders. The dissemination and integration of knowledge – using these training platforms – is vital to the success of HILAS products beyond the project

ARC: A Bottom-Up Approach to Negotiated QoS

Mobile systems operate in a resource-scarce environment and thus must adapt to external conditions; all layers must make cost-based decisions about what mode of operation to use in response to performance feedback. This paper focuses on the generic interface between adjacent layers (client and server) in a multi-level hierarchy. The Adaptive Research Contracts (ARC) framework uses a bottom-up approach in which the server exposes a range of quality/cost modes to the client above. This allows the client to trade off various algorithms generating different workloads for multiple resources. A case study shows that control can be distributed effectively over multiple layers with ARC; global cost-effective solutions can be obtained by exchanging a small fraction of all possible control settings

Classical and Bayesian aspects of robust unit root inference

This paper has two themes. First, we classify some effects which outliers in the data have on unit root inference. We show that, both in a classical and a Bayesian framework, the presence of additive outliers moves ‘standard’ inference towards stationarity. Second, we base inference on an independent Student-t instead of a Gaussian likelihood. This yields results that are less sensitive to the presence of outliers. Application to several time series with outliers reveals a negative correlation between the unit root and degrees of freedom parameter of the Student-t distribution. Therefore, imposing normality may incorrectly provide evidence against the unit root

Terugblik en Vooruitblik

College gehouden ter gelegenheid van het afscheid als hoogleraar aan de Faculteit der Historische en Kunstwetenschappen, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, op 9 februari 2007Verstedelijking is een van de belangrijkste veranderingsprocessen die zich momenteel in de wereld voordoet. In Europa en Amerika woont al een zeer groot gedeelte van de bevolking in steden en deze ontwikkeling zet zich versneld ook door in andere werelddelen. Binnen korte tijd zal een groot gedeelte van de wereldbevolking in steden leven. In dit college wordt vanuit een vergelijkend historisch perspectief ingegaan op een aantal problemen die samenhangen met deze ontwikkelingen. In het bijzonder wordt aandacht besteed aan de huisvesting, watervoorziening en de sociaal-ruimtelijke verdeling van steden. Tevens wordt een pleidooi gehouden voor een structurele benadering van historisch onderzoek