Europe: So Many Languages, So Many Cultures

The number of different languages in Europe by far exceeds the number of countries. All European countries have national languages, and in nearly all of them there are minority languages as well, whereas all major languages have dialects. National borders rarely coincide with linguistic borders, but the latter (including dialect borders) mark by their nature also more or less distinct cultural areas. This paper presents a survey of the different language families represented in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and the four Caucasian language families, each with their sub-branches and individual languages. Some information is given on characteristic structural phenomena and on the status and history of these languages or language families and on some of their extinct predecessors. The paper ends with a short discussion on the language policy and practices of the institutions of the European Union. Europe lacks a language with the status and power comparable to Indonesian in Indonesia. The policy is therefore based on equal status of all national languages and on respect for all languages, including national minority ones. The practice, however, is unavoidably practical: “the more languages, the more English”

Entanglement properties of multipartite entangled states under the influence of decoherence

We investigate entanglement properties of multipartite states under the influence of decoherence. We show that the lifetime of (distillable) entanglement for GHZ-type superposition states decreases with the size of the system, while for a class of other states -namely all graph states with constant degree- the lifetime is independent of the system size. We show that these results are largely independent of the specific decoherence model and are in particular valid for all models which deal with individual couplings of particles to independent environments, described by some quantum optical master equation of Lindblad form. For GHZ states, we derive analytic expressions for the lifetime of distillable entanglement and determine when the state becomes fully separable. For all graph states, we derive lower and upper bounds on the lifetime of entanglement. To this aim, we establish a method to calculate the spectrum of the partial transposition for all mixed states which are diagonal in a graph state basis. We also consider entanglement between different groups of particles and determine the corresponding lifetimes as well as the change of the kind of entanglement with time. This enables us to investigate the behavior of entanglement under re-scaling and in the limit of large (infinite) number of particles. Finally we investigate the lifetime of encoded quantum superposition states and show that one can define an effective time in the encoded system which can be orders of magnitude smaller than the physical time. This provides an alternative view on quantum error correction and examples of states whose lifetime of entanglement (between groups of particles) in fact increases with the size of the system.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figure

Constructing an alternative measure of changes in reserve requirement ratios

Bank reserves

Evidence on the two monetary base measures and economic activity

Monetary policy ; Economic indicators

Measuring the policy effects of changes in reserve requirement ratios

The monetary base is the sum of high-powered money and an adjustment factor that measures changes in reserve requirement ratios. This adjustment factor is calculated so that it responds to changes in deposit levels in addition to changes in reserve requirements. Consequently, researchers and policymakers using the monetary base are seeing a mixture of changes implemented through open market operations, discount window borrowings, and reserve requirements, together with nonpolicy actions acting on deposit flows. ; Joseph Haslag and Scott Hein calculate the reserve step index (RSI) to separate changes in one of the available adjustment factors-the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank's Reserve Adjustment Measure (RAM)-into pure reserve-requirement effects and deposit-flow effects. RSI would give analysts a measure that responds only to changes in reserve requirement ratios. Haslag and Hein also provide statistical evidence suggesting that combining RSI and the deposit-flow effect, as RAM does, is not justifiable in simple reduced-form models of nominal GNP growth, output growth, or inflation.Bank reserves

Nominal GNP growth and adjusted reserve growth: nonnested tests of the St. Louis and Board measures

Gross national product ; Monetary policy

Does it matter how monetary policy is implemented?

Monetary policy

Federal Reserve System reserve requirements: 1959-88--a note

Federal Reserve System ; Bank reserves