Regulation and competition in German banking: an assessment

In Germany a public discussion on the "power of banks" has been going on for decades now with power having at least two meanings. On the one hand it is the power of banks to control public corporations through direct shareholdings or the exercise of proxy votes - this is the power of banks in corporate control. On the other hand it is market power - due to imperfect competition in markets for financial services - that banks exercise vis-à-vis their loan and deposit customers. In the past, bank regulation has often been blamed to undermine competition and the working of market forces in the financial industry for the sake of soundness and stability of financial services firms. This chapter tries to shed some light on the historical development and current state of bank regulation in Germany. In so doing it tries to embed the analysis of bank regulation into a more general industrial organisation framework. For every regulated industry, competition and regulation are deeply interrelated as most regulatory institutions - even if they do not explicitly address the competitiveness of the market - either affect market structure or conduct. This paper tries to uncover some of the specific relationships between monetary policy, government interference and bank regulation on the one hand and bank market structure and economic performance on the other. In so doing we hope to point to several areas for fruitful research in the future. While our focus is on Germany, some of the questions that we raise and some of our insights might also be applicable to banking systems elsewhere. Revised version forthcoming in "The German Financial System", edited by Jan P. Krahnen and Reinhard H. Schmidt, Oxford University Press

Decision Support in Cooperative QoS Management

Cooperative QoS management is a new quality of service management scheme which is based on QoS agents distributed within a system and cooperating with each other to provide the QoS negotiated with users, thereby ameliorating the overail system's resource usage and decreasing the communication costs. During their operations, agents have to take decisions in order to react on QoS violations, initiate QoS renegotiation processes or react on renegotiation requests from other QoS agents. In this paper, we present two tools which support cooperating QoS agents in their decision processes: a model called Quality of Operation, based on a mathematical formula, and an approach based on a new variant of Stochastic Petri Nets, so-called Controlled Stochastic Petri Nets

Teaching ethics through the back door? Employing ideas from assemblage theory to foster a responsible innovation mindset

Adding ethics courses to engineering curricula seeks to equip students with the critical mindset that enables careers committed to serving humanity. Yet, the knowledge of ethical theories is neither a necessary, let alone sufficient condition for being good [1]. There is no automatism that translates ethical knowledge into action, overriding attitudes that were developed during the enculturation of a student. However, we deem teaching assemblage theory a promising means to achieve a sustained commitment to responsible innovation practice. We base our argument on assemblage theory’s (cf. [2, 3]) capacity to conceptualize the interplay of human actors and technological artefacts in terms of dynamic evolutionary systems. The notion of an assemblage as a collection of potentially heterogeneous elements that—despite displaying consistency—remains malleable through reorganization, interconnection and, (re- )attribution forms the ontological basis that guides a conceptual approach to thinking in-between the extremes of technological determinism and social constructivism. Information algorithms, e.g., can be regarded as having the power to facilitate ethical action as part of a larger assemblage [4] and artificial intelligence can arguably only be understood as “trustworthy” within sociotechnological systems in which a shared responsibility realizes both epistemic and moral conditions for trust [5]. Ultimately, we intend engineering students to realize the extent of their influence on the world and, therefore, their responsibility for contributing to a prosperous community. Thus, ethics is not only taught by conveying its classical normative theories but rather explored by discovering the entangledness of technology and society

Measuring Beta-Functions with K-Modulation

The precise measurement of the local value of the beta-function at the place of a beam size monitor is necessary for the precise determination of the beam emittance. We developed a new method for the measurement of the beta-function by using of continuous square-wave modulation of the force of the quadrupole and by continuous tune tracking. Measurements were performed at LEP in order to evaluate the precision that can be achieved with this method in the LHC. The paper describes the method and discusses in details the results obtained at LEP for colliding and non-colliding beams

Using System Virtualization to Create Virtualized Networks

The method of system virtualization is very popular for the use in data centers and desktop virtualization today. In this work, system virtualization is applied to core network elements (routers and links) in order to create a virtualized network. The selection of this virtualization method crucially determines the emerging network model. The network model consists of virtual networks, virtual routers, and virtual links that form overlays on top of the physical network. The properties, features, and limitations of this network model are analyzed and described in this paper. Additionally, a proof of concept implementation using currently available technology and infrastructure is presented. Finally the dynamic configurability of virtual resources in such a system virtualization based virtualized network is evaluated

Om svenskarna från Kõrgessaare och deras öden 1779-1782

Digiteeritud Euroopa Regionaalarengu Fondi rahastusel, projekti "Eesti teadus- ja õppekirjandus" (2014-2020.12.03.21-0848) raames.https://www.ester.ee/record=b4227005*es

Chemie mit solaren Grundstoffen

Wer die Biosphäre als Vorbild sieht, steht schnell unter Verklärungsverdacht. Ihre Leistungen gering zu schätzen ist jedoch kaum rationaler. Zukunftschemie liegt in kluger Anwendung bester wissenschaftlich-technischer Methoden auf Gewinnung, Verarbeitung und minimalinvasive Modifikation solarer Grundstoffe