The Research Data Centre of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW-FDZ)

Das Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW) in Mannheim stellt eine Reihe seiner Forschungsdatensätze externen Wissenschaftlern zur Verfügung. Das ZEW folgt damit den Empfehlungen der „Kommission zur Verbesserung der informationellen Infrastruktur zwischen Wissenschaft und Statistik“ und unterstützt so die Weiterentwicklung der empirischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialforschung. Im November 2012 ist das ZEW-FDZ vom Rat für Sozial und Wirtschaftsdaten (RatSWD) akkreditiert worden. Bei den im ZEW-FDZ angebotenen ZEW Forschungsdaten handelt es sich um Mikrodaten von ZEW Unternehmensbefragungen, ZEW Expertenbefragungen oder ZEW Personenbefragungen. Die Daten einiger ZEW-Befragungen werden externen Wissenschaftlern in einer faktisch anonymisierten Form als Scientific-Use-Files zur Verfügung gestellt. Neben der Nutzung der Scientific-Use-Files können externe Forscher einen Antrag auf Nutzung von formal anonymisierten ZEW-Daten stellen, mit denen sie in den FDZ-Räumen des ZEW arbeiten dürfen. Formal anonymisiert bedeutet, dass die Datensätze weder Namen noch Adressen, aber ansonsten alle Originalangaben der Befragten enthalten. Die formal anonymisierten Daten befinden sich dazu auf einem Stand-alone-Rechner ohne Netzwerkanbindung, von dem keine Daten heruntergeladen werden können. Für das Mannheimer Innovationspanel (MIP) wurden zudem absolut anonymisierte Education-Use-Files für die Nutzung in der Lehre erstellt. Das ZEW-FDZ schließt an die bisherige Praxis des ZEW an, eigene Erhebungsdaten an externe Wissenschaftler weiterzugeben. Vor dem Start des ZEW-FDZ im Januar 2013, stellte das ZEW etwa 280 Wissenschaftlern vom ZEW erhobene Forschungsdaten zur Verfügung; die meisten sind Nutzer des Mannheimer Innovationspanels (250). Das ZEW wird sein Datenangebot für externe Wissenschaftler laufend erweitern. Dies gilt auch für Daten zukünftiger Erhebunge

Will Japan increase aid and improve its allocation to help the poorer countries achieve the millennium development goals?

Developed countries have pledged to increase financial assistance to poor countries in order to help them achieve the Millennium Development Goals. A few donors such as the US and the UK have been increasing their financial assistance in the recent past, but this trend has yet to be generalised across the donor community. Japan is among the largest aid donors, but has as yet not followed the US and the UK in increasing her aid budget. This paper sets the task of examining the prospects of Japanese aid to increase significantly in the coming years, and its allocation to be re-directed towards the most aid needy countries. To this end, we turn to the past to investigate how Japanese aid policies have changed over time and also identify empirically the major determinants of aid allocation. Our study shows that whilst Japan’s aid has increased in the past, in response to the broadening of its aid policy to include humanitarian and development objectives, the empirical analysis on aid allocation shows that geo-economic interests have played a crucial role. Given the historical trend one can conclude that the same determinant factors may keep on playing vital roles in aid allocation decision-making at least for some years to come, even though there has been an increased call for more assistance to poor regions

Microbial light-activatable proton pumps as neuronal inhibitors to functionally dissect neuronal networks in C. elegans

Essentially any behavior in simple and complex animals depends on neuronal network function. Currently, the best-defined system to study neuronal circuits is the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, as the connectivity of its 302 neurons is exactly known. Individual neurons can be activated by photostimulation of Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) using blue light, allowing to directly probe the importance of a particular neuron for the respective behavioral output of the network under study. In analogy, other excitable cells can be inhibited by expressing Halorhodopsin from Natronomonas pharaonis (NpHR) and subsequent illumination with yellow light. However, inhibiting C. elegans neurons using NpHR is difficult. Recently, proton pumps from various sources were established as valuable alternative hyperpolarizers. Here we show that archaerhodopsin-3 (Arch) from Halorubrum sodomense and a proton pump from the fungus Leptosphaeria maculans (Mac) can be utilized to effectively inhibit excitable cells in C. elegans. Arch is the most powerful hyperpolarizer when illuminated with yellow or green light while the action spectrum of Mac is more blue-shifted, as analyzed by light-evoked behaviors and electrophysiology. This allows these tools to be combined in various ways with ChR2 to analyze different subsets of neurons within a circuit. We exemplify this by means of the polymodal aversive sensory ASH neurons, and the downstream command interneurons to which ASH neurons signal to trigger a reversal followed by a directional turn. Photostimulating ASH and subsequently inhibiting command interneurons using two-color illumination of different body segments, allows investigating temporal aspects of signaling downstream of ASH

Beyond Control-Flow: Extending Business Process Configuration to Roles and Objects

A configurable process model is an integrated representation of multiple variants of a business process. It is designed to be individualized to meet a particular set of requirements. As such, configurable process models promote systematic reuse of proven or common practices. Existing notations for configurable process modeling focus on capturing tasks and control-flow dependencies, neglecting equally important aspects of business processes such as data flow, material flow and resource management. This paper fills this gap by proposing an integrated meta-model for configurable processes with advanced features for capturing resources involved in the performance of tasks (through task-role associations) as well as flow of data and physical artifacts (through task-object associations). Although embodied as an extension of a popular process modeling notation, namely EPC, the meta-model is defined in an abstract and formal manner to make it applicable to other notations

Spiral waves in a surface reaction: Model calculations

A systematic study of spiral waves in a realistic reaction‐diffusion model describing the isothermal CO oxidation on Pt(110) is carried out. Spirals exist under oscillatory, excitable, and bistable (doubly metastable) conditions. In the excitable region, two separate meandering transitions occur, both when the time scales become strongly different and when they become comparable. By the assumption of surface defects of the order of 10 μm, to which the spirals can be pinned, the continuous distribution of wavelengths observed experimentally can be explained. An external periodic perturbation generally causes a meandering motion of a free spiral, while a straight drift results, if the period of the perturbation divided by the rotation period is a natural number

Measurement of the running b-quark mass using e+e−→bbˉge^+e^- \to b\bar{b}g events

We have studied the determination of the running b-quark mass, $m_b(M_Z)$, using $Z^0$ decays into 3 or more hadronic jets. We calculated the ratio of $\geq3$-jet fractions in $e^+e^-\to b\bar{b}$ vs. $e^+e^-\to q_l\bar{q_l}$ ($q_l$ = u or d or s) events at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD using six different infra-red- and collinear-safe jet-finding algorithms. We compared with corresponding measurements from the SLD Collaboration and found a significant algorithm-dependence of the fitted $m_b(M_Z)$ value. Our best estimate, taking correlations into account, is $m_b(M_Z) = 2.56 \pm 0.27 (stat.) ^{+0.28}_{-0.38} (syst.) ^{+0.49}_{-1.48} (theor.) GeV/c^2$.Comment: 22 pages (LaTeX), 1 Postscript figure. Version to appear in Phys. Lett. B. Several clarifying remarks added in the text, typos corrected, and theoretical results for very small masses added in the figur

Chemical Waves in Media with State-Dependent Anisotropy

In the reduction of NO with H2 on a Rh(110) surface rectangularly shaped target patterns and spirals with sharp corners have been observed. These patterns can be reproduced with a simple model assuming that the (anisotropic) diffusion is state dependent. Such a dependence is realized in the system Rh(110)/NO + H2 by the presence of different adsorbate-induced reconstructions with varying substrate geometries