Measurement of the Rate of Technical Progress

In the beginning of 1985 IIASA started jointly with the University of Bonn a study on the World Economic Model under the leadership of Prof. Wilhelm Krelle. The structure of the model was developed by Prof. Krelle and discussed at the IIASA Conference on the Analysis and Forecasting of Economic Structural Change in May 1984. Since then a team of scholars from both East and West has been collecting the necessary data and estimating the parameters of submodels to be linked, at a later date, within the framework of the global model. The first quantitative results of this effort were discussed in the Workshop on Economic Growth and Structural Change, held in Lodz, Poland, December 9-10, 1985. This paper presents the results of the estimations of production functions for OECD countries and was written in summer 1985, during the visit of Dr. O. Eismont, USSR, to the University of Bonn

What May Statistics Tell Us About Null Subjects in Russian?

The article highlights the linguistic phenomenon of abandoning the expletively presented syntactic subject (the Null Subject Phenomenon) in different languages and focuses on its exemplification by the Russian language. It is shown that despite the existing number of studies on this issue, there is lack of precisely formulated criteria that determine the choice of linguistic means to represent a syntactic subject in the languages, which allow both options (partial null subject languages). Based on the discussion of literature on the topic and on the statistical analysis of 16,718 sentence samples from the spoken language, print journalism, and fiction subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus, the article argues that the choice between null and overt subjects in Russian sentences depends on factors such as tense, person, and style, but that this dependency is rather weak, owing to the fact that the Russian language system is now in the process of change. Null-subjectness is not an exclusive syntactic parameter and should be studied along with other aspects like semantics and pragmatics. The statistical data from this study support previously discussed diachronic and acquisition data, and confirm that languages do not nicely distribute themselves into distinct groups, but inhabit a constantly changing continuum

Noble gases from the interstellar medium trapped on the MIR space station and analyzed by in vacuo etching

Introduction: The composition of the present interstellar medium (ISM) provides an important benchmark in cosmochemistry. It serves as a reference for galactic chemical evolution (GCE) models, solar mixing predictions and provides information for understanding Big Bang nucleosynthesis. The present-day ISM 3He abundance allows, combined with the protosolar 3He, deduced from the Jovian atmosphere or meteorites [1,2], tracing the GCE over the past 4.56 Ga. 3He/4He = (2.5 0.6) x 10-4 has been determined for the local ISM [3]. However, the uncertainty is too large to better constrain GCE models and - in combination with the present-day solar wind value - the protosolar D/H [4]

Registration of the First Thermonuclear X-ray Burst from AX J1754.2-2754

During the analysis of the INTEGRAL observatory archival data we found a powerful X-ray burst, registered by JEM-X and IBIS/ISGRI telescopes on April 16, 2005 from a weak and poorly known source AX J1754.2-2754. Analysis of the burst profiles and spectrum shows, that it was a type I burst, which result from thermonuclear explosion on the surface of nutron star. It means that we can consider AX J1754.2-2754 as an X-ray burster. Certain features of burst profile at its initial stage witness of a radiation presure driven strong expansion and a corresponding cooling of the nutron star photosphere. Assuming, that the luminosity of the source at this phase was close to the Eddington limit, we estimated the distance to the burst source d=6.6+/-0.3 kpc (for hidrogen atmosphere of the neutron star) and d=9.2+/-0.4 kpc (for helium atmosphere).Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Radiogenic helium in Baffin Bay bottom water

3He-4He ratios, dissolved He and Ne, and tritium have been measured in 87 seawater samples collected at 14 stations in Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and in the sounds through which Arctic water flows into Baffin Bay…