Capital transnacional ¿el fin de los acuerdos sociales nacionales? La evolución reciente en Suecia.

The paper challenges the per vasive view that economic inter nationalisation necessarily undermines national political * Skope, Oxford University, UK. ** School of HRM, Kingston University, UK. Artículo traducido por Beth Gelb. 149 Guy Vernon y Chris Rees Capital transnacional ¿el fin de los acuerdos sociales nacionales?... economies and renders unworkable state action in support of social protection and the social regulation of employment. Whilst it is commonly assumed that globalisation must erase the particularities of the so-called «Swedish model», a careful marshalling of the available evidence finds little support for the hollowing out or erosion of national regimes. On the contrar y, the paper presents a wide range of data (concerning employment, skill formation, earnings and inequality, bargaining activity, and corporate strategy) which shows evidence of continued specificity.Este texto pone en entredicho el punto de vista generalizado de que la internacionalización económica necesariamente socava las políticas económicas nacionales, haciendo inviable la acción estatal en apoyo a la protección social y la reglamentación social del empleo. Aunque sea común suponer que la globalización debe borrar las particularidades del llamado «modelo sueco», cuando se manejan cuidadosamente los datos disponibles se encuentra poca base para pensar que los regímenes nacionales hayan perdido sentido ni se hayan erosionado. Al contrario, la ponencia presenta una amplia gama de información (sobre el empleo, la formación, la remuneración y la desigualdad, la negociación colectiva, y la estrategia empresarial) que demuestra la persistencia de las especificidades

Validity of a visual impairment questionnaire in measuring cataract surgery outcomes [post print]

PURPOSE: To test the validity of the Impact of Visual Impairment (IVI) questionnaire in a cataract population. SETTING: Flinders Eye Centre, Flinders Medical Centre, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. METHODS: Cataract patients recruited from a hospital waiting list completed the IVI questionnaire. The scale was assessed for fit to the Rasch model. Unidimensionality, item and person fit to the model, response category performance, differential item functioning (whether different subgroups responded differently), and targeting of item difficulty to patient ability were assessed. RESULTS: Overall, the IVI questionnaire performed well; there were ordered thresholds, person separation reliability was 0.97, and it was free from differential item functioning. One item (worry about eyesight getting worse) misfit the model and was removed. There was evidence of multidimensionality, indicating that the overall IVI score should be discarded; however, the 3 subscales (reading and accessing information, mobility and independence, and emotional well-being) functioned well. Several items calibrated differently in cataract patients compared with low-vision patients, indicating different issues are important to each population and that there is a need for population-specific conversion algorithms. Targeting of the IVI items was biased toward more impaired patients. CONCLUSIONS: The 3 subscales of the IVI questionnaire functioned well in a cataract population. However, additional items targeting the less impaired patients, especially second-eye cataract patients, would improve measurement

Використання словникових технологій у процесі вивчення іноземних мов

Методичні рекомендації щодо використання словникових технологій складаються з теоретичної і прикладної частин. Теоретична частина подає характеристики основних типів словників і рекомендації щодо користування ними. Прикладна частина містить добірку завдань з основних видів робіт з урахуванням тем навчальних програм для студентів різних спеціальностей денної та заочної форми навчання, які володіють основами граматики, необхідним лексичним запасом для розуміння запропонованого матеріалу й навичками усного мовлення. Рекомендуються для використання на практичних заняттях, а також для самостійної роботи студентів із залученням словників різних типів. Ці методичні рекомендації розроблені з метою надання методичної допомоги викладачам і студентам у процесі роботи зі словником під час вивчення іноземних мов. Книга включає безліч пропозицій для формування вмінь і навичок роботи зі словником на заняттях і під час самостійної роботи. Теоретична частина написана українською мовою та подає роз’яснення особливостей словників різних типів, способів їх використання й умови оптимального вибору словника. Прикладна частина на матеріалі англійської мови пропонує основні види роботи зі словником, спрямовані на формування вмінь і навичок правильної вимови, читання, письма, граматики, перекдау, а також збагаченя власного словникового запасу. Для кожного виду роботи зі словником підібрано п’ять завдань по темах робочих програм з навчальної дисципліни “Англійська мова” для студентів вищих навчальних закладів. Крім того, запропоновані матеріали розкривають такі теми, як сполученя слів, фразові дієслова, ідіоми та словотворення. Види роботи зі словником спрямовані на використання не тільки традиційних паперових, а й електронних та інших нестандартних спеціалізованих словників. Матеріал цих рекомендацій може бути використаний як джерело навчальної та практичної інформації для викладачів і студентів різних спеціальностей. Автор сподівається, що методичні рекомендації будуть цінними для будь-якого користувача, який хоче поліпшити своє особисте знання словника

Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US

Input-Output Analytics for Urban Systems: Explorations in Policy and Planning

We develop an inter-region input-output economic model of future challenges and appropriate policies. We initially focus on the UK—developing an analytic tool for the ‘levelling up’ agenda: to examine the characteristics of economically ‘good’ versus ‘poor’ cities and to explore policies aimed to shift cities from poor to good. Our method has potential application to equivalent challenges at varying scales and in other countries. The analysis is distinctive: estimate 48 city input-output accounts and the trading relationships between them via a novel incorporation of travel costs. Temporal extensions facilitate a scalable method to model future scenarios of policy outcomes

On the origin of highest energy gamma-rays from Mkn 501

The spectra of very high energy gamma-radiation from distant extragalactic objects suffer significant deformations during the passage of primary gamma-rays through the intergalactic medium. The recently reported fluxes of diffuse infrared background radiation indicate that we detect, most probably, heavily absorbed TeV radiation from Mkn 421 and Mkn 501. This implies that the absorption-corrected spectrum of Mkn 501 may contain a sharp pile-up which contradicts to the predictions of the conventional models of TeV blazars, and thus may leads to the so-called "IR background-TeV gamma-ray crisis". To overcome this difficulty, in this paper we propose two independent hypotheses assuming that (i) the TeV radiation from Mkn 501 has a secondary origin, i.e. it is formed during the development of electron-photon cascades in the intergalactic medium initiated by primary gamma-rays; (ii) the pile-up in the source spectrum is a result of comptonization (in deep Klein-Nishina regime) of ambient optical radiation by an ultrarelativistic conical cold outflow (jet) with bulk motion Lorentz factor Gamma_0 >= 3 10^7. Within the uncertainties caused by the limited energy resolution of spectral measurements, the observed TeV radiation of Mkn 501 formally can be explained by the intergalactic cascade gamma-rays, assuming however an extremely low intergalactic magnetic field in the direction to the source at the level of < 10^{-18} G. We also demonstrate that the "bulk motion comptonization" scenario can quite naturally reproduce the unusual spectral features in the absorption-corrected TeV spectrum of Mkn 501, and briefly discuss the astrophysical implications of this hypothesis.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics (revised version; conceptual changes concerning interpretation of the observed spectrum of Mkn 501 as a spectrum of the electron-positron cascade in the intergalactic medium initiated by primary gamma-rays

Opacity effects and shock-in-jet modelling of low-level activity in Cygnus X-3

We present simultaneous dual-frequency radio observations of Cygnus X-3 during a phase of low-level activity. We constrain the minimum variability timescale to be 20 minutes at 43 GHz and 30 minutes at 15 GHz, implying source sizes of 2 to 4 AU. We detect polarized emission at a level of a few per cent at 43 GHz which varies with the total intensity. The delay of approximately 10 minutes between the peaks of the flares at the two frequencies is seen to decrease with time, and we find that synchrotron self-absorption and free-free absorption by entrained thermal material play a larger role in determining the opacity than absorption in the stellar wind of the companion. A shock-in-jet model gives a good fit to the lightcurves at all frequencies, demonstrating that this mechanism, which has previously been used to explain the brighter, longer-lived giant outbursts in this source, is also applicable to these low-level flaring events. Assembling the data from outbursts spanning over two orders of magnitude in flux density shows evidence for a strong correlation between the peak brightness of an event, and the timescale and frequency at which this is attained. Brighter flares evolve on longer timescales and peak at lower frequencies. Analysis of the fitted model parameters suggests that brighter outbursts are due to shocks forming further downstream in the jet, with an increased electron normalisation and magnetic field strength both playing a role in setting the strength of the outburst.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 15 pages, 9 figure

Follow-up observations at 16 and 33 GHz of extragalactic sources from WMAP 3-year data: I - Spectral properties

We present follow-up observations of 97 point sources from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-year data, contained within the New Extragalactic WMAP Point Source (NEWPS) catalogue between declinations of -4 and +60 degrees; the sources form a flux-density-limited sample complete to 1.1 Jy (approximately 5 sigma) at 33 GHz. Our observations were made at 16 GHz using the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI) and at 33 GHz with the Very Small Array (VSA). 94 of the sources have reliable, simultaneous -- typically a few minutes apart -- observations with both telescopes. The spectra between 13.9 and 33.75 GHz are very different from those of bright sources at low frequency: 44 per cent have rising spectra (alpha < 0.0), where flux density is proportional to frequency^-alpha, and 93 per cent have spectra with alpha < 0.5; the median spectral index is 0.04. For the brighter sources, the agreement between VSA and WMAP 33-GHz flux densities averaged over sources is very good. However, for the fainter sources, the VSA tends to measure lower values for the flux densities than WMAP. We suggest that the main cause of this effect is Eddington bias arising from variability.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures, submitted to MNRA

Rare Copy Number Variants in \u3cem\u3eNRXN1\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eCNTN6\u3c/em\u3e Increase Risk for Tourette Syndrome

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a model neuropsychiatric disorder thought to arise from abnormal development and/or maintenance of cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuits. TS is highly heritable, but its underlying genetic causes are still elusive, and no genome-wide significant loci have been discovered to date. We analyzed a European ancestry sample of 2,434 TS cases and 4,093 ancestry-matched controls for rare (\u3c 1% frequency) copy-number variants (CNVs) using SNP microarray data. We observed an enrichment of global CNV burden that was prominent for large (\u3e 1 Mb), singleton events (OR = 2.28, 95% CI [1.39–3.79], p = 1.2 × 10−3) and known, pathogenic CNVs (OR = 3.03 [1.85–5.07], p = 1.5 × 10−5). We also identified two individual, genome-wide significant loci, each conferring a substantial increase in TS risk (NRXN1 deletions, OR = 20.3, 95% CI [2.6–156.2]; CNTN6 duplications, OR = 10.1, 95% CI [2.3–45.4]). Approximately 1% of TS cases carry one of these CNVs, indicating that rare structural variation contributes significantly to the genetic architecture of TS