The rift over Germany’s trade surplus

At first it was just the US administration that criticised Germany harshly for running high external surpluses. Now even the European Commission is starting an investigation in the context of the eurozone’s imbalances procedure, as Commissioner Olli Rehn said at a press conference in Brussels on November 13

Danish bare singular count nouns in subject position

This paper aims at investigating under which conditions Danish Bare Singular Count Nouns (BSCNs) can function as subjects in standard categorical statements, i.e. outside special discourse types such as proverbs, newspaper headlines, titles of paintings, etc. Taking as a point of departure a brief discussion of the distributional differences between, on the one hand, Bare Plural count nouns (BPs) and mass nouns and, on the other, BSCNs, it is shown that, contrary to BP- and mass noun subjects, BSCNs in subject position are non-referential and do not imply existential presupposition. On these grounds, and on the basis of analyses of phenomena such as agreement features, genericity and pseudo-incorporation, it is argued that the BSCN-subjects of categorical statements are objects which, owing to the lack of realisation of nominal functional categories, act as property-denoting modifiers restricting the denotation of a covert predicate. Consequently, it is concluded that BSCNs in subject position do not function as arguments in themselves, but are instead pseudo-incorporated into the covert predicate as modifiers

Complementarity and division of labor between endo and exocentric languages. The case of Danish and Spanish

This paper is based on comparative data on Danish and Spanish, and argues that systematic variations between the word formation (Müller 2013) and syntactic pat terns dominating these two languages correlate with deep rooted lexical differences between endocentric (Germanic) and exocentric (Romance) languages. The paper follows the lexical typological assumption that endo and exocentric languages complementarily distributesemantic information on the two major word classes, nouns and verbs (e.g. Baron & Herslund 2005; Baron et al . 2019; Korzen 2016). Whereas the former concentrate information in the main verb and leave the nominal arguments underspecified, the latter act oppositely, that is, they tend to use general verbs (e.g. Herslund 2014; Müller 2014, 2019) and specific nouns. With respect to word formation, a consequence of the vagueness of endocentric nouns, and, thus, their hyperonymic level lexicalization, is that in order to designate entities at a hyponymic level, the Germanic languages tend to use the composition system. In contrast, exocentric nouns are already semantically saturated, so presumably the Romance languages have not developed a completesystem of morphological composition to tackle the task of creating lexical hierarchies. In these languages, either the sema ntic components are already encapsulated in the simple noun, or they use an alternative strategy, namely, derivation. Therefore, composition in the Romance languages has not generally been routinized as part of a morphological system, but has the status of a syntactic device, prototypically following the formative pattern [N prep. N]. As regards syntactic patterns, the high level of specificity of Danish verbs correlates with a structural flexibility that allows inherently intransitive, manner expressing ac tivity predicates of this language to be constructed telically. In contrast, the possibility of constructing telic variations of such predicates isgenerally considered a rather marginal phenomenon in the Romance languages (e.g. Korzen 2003: 85 89 and refe rences therein)

Annotation of morphology and NP structure in the Copenhagen Dependency Treebanks (CDT)

Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 151-162. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891

Organizational Change Perspectives on Software Process Improvement

Many software organizations have engaged in Software Process Improvement (SPI) and experienced the challenges related to managing such complex organizational change efforts. As a result, there is an increasing body of research investigating change management in SPI. To provide an overview of what we know and don’t know about SPI as organizational change, this paper addresses the following question: What are the dominant perspectives on SPI as organizational change in the literature and how is this knowledge presented and published? All journals on the AIS ranking list were screened to identify relevant articles and Gareth Morgan’s organizational metaphors (1996) were used to analyze this literature considering the following dimensions of each article: organizational perspective (metaphor), knowledge orientation (normative versus descriptive), theoretical emphasis (high versus low), main audience (practitioner versus academic), geographical origin (Scandinavia, the Americas, Europe, or the Asia-Pacific), and publication level (high versus low ranked journal). The review demonstrates that the literature on SPI as organizational change is firmly grounded in both theory and practice, and Scandinavia and the Americas are the main contributors to this research. The distribution of articles across Morgan’s metaphors is uneven and reveals knowledge gaps that present new avenues for research. The current literature offers important insights into organizational change in SPI from machine, organism, and brain perspectives. Practitioners may use these articles as a guide to SPI insights relevant to their improvement initiatives. In contrast, the impact of culture, dominance, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and politics in SPI have only received scant attention. We argue that these perspectives offer important insights into the challenges involved in managing change in SPI. Researchers are therefore advised to engage in new SPI research based on one or more of these perspectives. Overall, the paper provides a roadmap to help identify insights and specific articles related to SPI as organizational change.Software Process Improvement; Organizational Change; Organizational Metaphors; Images of Organization; Literature Review

Hat der Euro eine Zukunft?

Der Euro als Währung hat Vor- und Nachteile. Dieses Diskussionspapier stellt beide aus Sicht der deutschen Wirtschaft gegenüber; es will nicht nur Diskussionen anregen, sondern ist selbst das Ergebnis einer Diskussion. Neben zwei Bestandsaufnahmen stellt es auch mögliche Szenarien für die Zukunft vor

"I heard the News today, oh Boy"

News-based indicators are in vogue in economics. But they tend to be applied with little consideration for the properties of news itself. In this paper, we try to shed light on the nature of this type of data. Drawing from established findings in communication science and journalism studies we argue that news-based indicators should be taken with a pinch of salt, since news is a somewhat biased representation of political and social reality. Contrary to economics and other social sciences, journalism tends to be driven by outliers, the outrageous, and the outraged. This structural dissonance between journalism and other disciplines needs to be born in mind when dealing with news content as data, and it is of particular concern in the context of economic developments. While economics and statistics are inherently backward looking, trying to make sense of the (immediate) past using models and probability distributions derived from bygone observations, journalism is about the present, and sometimes about the future. What’s going on right now? And where does it lead us? Seeking answers to these questions makes news a valuable data input, as a measure of what drives society at a given point in time. We show how taking the properties of news into consideration influences the entire process of large-scale news analysis. As an example, we update our Uncertainty Perception Indicator (Müller and Hornig 2020), setting it on a firmer footing by enlarging the newspaper corpus considerably. The new version of the UPI for Germany yields some remarkable results. At the trough of the Covid-19-induced economic crisis in Q2 of 2020, the overall indicator already decreased considerably, although it stayed at elevated levels. Deconstructing the UPI by applying the topic modelling approach Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), shows that the coverage of the pandemic has merged with the issue of climate change and its mitigation. In the past decade or so incalculable politics was the main driver of economic uncertainty perception. Now truly exogenous developments, neither elicited by the economy nor by politics, come to the fore, adding to the sense of an inherently unstable world

Die Stellung des Euro im Weltwährungssystem

Die Europäische Union schreitet auf ihrem Weg zur Europäischen Währungsunion weiter planmäßig voran. Zum 1.1.1999 werden elf EU-Länder den Euro als Buchgeld einführen und ihre Währungspolitik auf das Europäische System der Zentralbanken übertragen. Zum 1.1.2002 wird der Euro, auch Bargeld, und spätestens am 30. 6. 2002 werden die Teilnehmerländer ihre nationalen Währungen aufgeben. Welche Rolle wird der Euro im Weltwährungssystem spielen? Welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich daraus? --

Magnetic skyrmions and skyrmion clusters in the helical phase of Cu2_2OSeO3_3

Skyrmions are nanometric spin whirls that can be stabilized in magnets lacking inversion symmetry. The properties of isolated skyrmions embedded in a ferromagnetic background have been intensively studied. We show that single skyrmions and clusters of skyrmions can also form in the helical phase and investigate theoretically their energetics and dynamics. The helical background provides natural one-dimensional channels along which a skyrmion can move rapidly. In contrast to skyrmions in ferromagnets, the skymion-skyrmion interaction has a strong attractive component and thus skyrmions tend to form clusters with characteristic shapes. These clusters are directly observed in transmission electron microscopy measurements in thin films of Cu$_2$OSeO$_3$. Topological quantization, high mobility and the confinement of skyrmions in channels provided by the helical background may be useful for future spintronics devices.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 4 pages supplemen