A new era in the dynamics of European integration?

In the previous decades, the European Union (EU) has succeeded in integrating new member countries, in economic and in political respects. Three main reasons lie behind this successful integration process: First, the solidarity of richer EU members with their poorer counterparts, second, the effectiveness of the integration policies conducted by the EU, and third, the willingness of new member countries to arouse and accomplish an economic catch-up process towards EU average levels. With the enlargement by ten new members in May 2004, the EU is facing the biggest challenge in its history. Thereby, the population of the Union will rise by 25%, while its overall GDP will increase by merely 5%. Apart from the economic problems that may emerge because of this discrepancy, further difficulties may arise because some of the new entrants are former centrally planned economies that have not yet completed their transformation processes towards free market-economies. In this paper, we want to investigate whether the Union may be moving towards a new era in the dynamics of integration. In doing so, we will analyze some of the main challenges the EU will be confronted with in the near future. In detail, we have identified two types of challenges. On the one hand, these are internal challenges, being closely related to the structural adjustments of the Union. We will further differentiate these internal challenges into economic and political ones. On the other hand, there exist external challenges that predominantly concern the competitiveness of European countries in a global context. With regard to these external challenges, we will only deal with economic aspects. One of the main findings of our analysis is that the EU will have to manage a highly difficult trade-off between the stimulation of Union-wide economic convergence and international competitiveness of its member countries. In the short-run, the process of European integration can well be deepened, given that the current controversies with regard to the financing of European support programs for poorer members and with regard to the implementation of a new constitution for the EU will be resolved. In the long-run, even if these controversies can be remedied, it appears likely that the dynamic process of European integration will not proceed as smoothly and as successfully as it did in the past. That is because the economic disparities across EU member countries have never been larger, and because the "development funds" now need to be distributed among a larger number of countries than in the past. Apart from these difficulties, it can be expected that the concentration on intra-European integration processes will be harmful to the international competitive strength of the entire Union, especially when this colossus confederation fails to take account of the economic desires of its strongest members. Certainly, the strongest nations within the Union are exposed to the pressures of international competition among highly developed nations on the basis of innovation and productivity. This kind of competition can be described as a Schumpeterian competition. In the light of all these aspects, there are indications that a European Union of "two velocities" will emerge, whereby a core of countries will mainly pursue the objective to strengthen their international competitiveness, while the remaining members will be struggling to accomplish an economic catch-up process to intra-European standards.economic integration, macroeconomic development, technological change

Recent Trends in the Research on National Innovation Systems

In this paper, we give an overview on recent developments in the research on national innovation systems (NIS). Essentially, we identify three development lines of the concept. These are policy-oriented studies that frequently combine the NIS approach with the terminology of corporate benchmarking, contributions to formalize the concept of NIS through descriptive or analytical models, and NIS studies of countries beyond the group of highly industrialized economies. It follows from the analysis of these research trends that the concept has developed in distinctive directions. In international comparisons of innovation systems, heterogeneity in the structure of the systems is only marginally taken into account, an aspect that may reduce the explanatory power of such system-level comparisons. Contrary to this, historically grown organizational and institutional structures are extensively described and considered in NIS studies of industrializing countries, a characteristic which ties up with early studies of national innovation systems.innovation, national innovation systems, comparative studies

Using Self-Contradiction to Learn Confidence Measures in Stereo Vision

Learned confidence measures gain increasing importance for outlier removal and quality improvement in stereo vision. However, acquiring the necessary training data is typically a tedious and time consuming task that involves manual interaction, active sensing devices and/or synthetic scenes. To overcome this problem, we propose a new, flexible, and scalable way for generating training data that only requires a set of stereo images as input. The key idea of our approach is to use different view points for reasoning about contradictions and consistencies between multiple depth maps generated with the same stereo algorithm. This enables us to generate a huge amount of training data in a fully automated manner. Among other experiments, we demonstrate the potential of our approach by boosting the performance of three learned confidence measures on the KITTI2012 dataset by simply training them on a vast amount of automatically generated training data rather than a limited amount of laser ground truth data.Comment: This paper was accepted to the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016. The copyright was transfered to IEEE (https://www.ieee.org). The official version of the paper will be made available on IEEE Xplore (R) (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org). This version of the paper also contains the supplementary material, which will not appear IEEE Xplore (R

A new era in the dynamics of European integration?

In the previous decades, the European Union (EU) has succeeded in integrating new member countries, in economic and in political respects. Three main reasons lie behind this successful integration process: First, the solidarity of richer EU members with their poorer counterparts, second, the effectiveness of the integration policies conducted by the EU, and third, the willingness of new member countries to arouse and accomplish an economic catchup process towards EU average levels. With the enlargement by ten new members in May 2004, the EU is facing the biggest challenge in its history. Thereby, the population of the Union will rise by 25%, while its overall GDP will increase by merely 5%. Apart from the economic problems that may emerge because of this discrepancy, further difficulties may arise because some of the new entrants are former centrally planned economies that have not yet completed their transformation processes towards free market-economies. In this paper, we want to investigate whether the Union may be moving towards a new era in the dynamics of integration. In doing so, we will analyze some of the main challenges the EU will be confronted with in the near future. In detail, we have identified two types of challenges. On the one hand, these are internal challenges, being closely related to the structural adjustments of the Union. We will further differentiate these internal challenges into economic and political ones. On the other hand, there exist external challenges that predominantly concern the competitiveness of European countries in a global context. With regard to these external challenges, we will only deal with economic aspects. One of the main findings of our analysis is that the EU will have to manage a highly difficult trade-off between the stimulation of Union-wide economic convergence and international competitiveness of its member countries. In the short-run, the process of European integration can well be deepened, given that the current controversies with regard to the financing of European support programs for poorer members and with regard to the implementation of a new constitution for the EU will be resolved. In the long-run, even if these controversies can be remedied, it appears likely that the dynamic process of European integration will not proceed as smoothly and as successfully as it did in the past. That is because the economic disparities across EU member countries have never been larger, and because the "development funds" now need to be distributed among a larger number of countries than in the past. Apart from these difficulties, it can be expected that the concentration on intra-European integration processes will be harmful to the international competitive strength of the entire Union, especially when this colossus confederation fails to take account of the economic desires of its strongest members. Certainly, the strongest nations within the Union are exposed to the pressures of international competition among highly developed nations on the basis of innovation and productivity. This kind of competition can be described as a Schumpeterian competition. In the light of all these aspects, there are indications that a European Union of "two velocities" will emerge, whereby a core of countries will mainly pursue the objective to strengthen their international competitiveness, while the remaining members will be struggling to accomplish an economic catch-up process to intra-European standards

The effects of King John's scutages on East-Anglian subjects

In this paper, we give an overview on recent developments in the research on national innovation systems (NIS). Essentially, we identify three development lines of the concept. These are policy-oriented studies that frequently combine the NIS approach with the terminology of corporate benchmarking, contributions to formalize the concept of NIS through descriptive or analytical models, and NIS studies of countries beyond the group of highly industrialized economies. It follows from the analysis of these research trends that the concept has developed in distinctive directions. In international comparisons of innovation systems, heterogeneity in the structure of the systems is only marginally taken into account, an aspect that may reduce the explanatory power of such system-level comparisons. Contrary to this, historically grown organizational and institutional structures are extensively described and considered in NIS studies of industrializing countries, a characteristic which ties up with early studies of national innovation systems

A Stopped delta-matter source in heavy ion collisions at 10-GeV/N?

We predict the formation of highly dense baryon-rich resonance matter in Au+Au collisions at AGS energies. The final pion yields show observable signs for resonance matter. The Delta1232 resonance is predicted to be the dominant source for pions of small transverse momenta. Rescattering e ects consecutive excitation and deexcitation of Delta's lead to a long apparent life- time (> 10 fm/c) and rather large volumina (several 100 fm3) of the Delta-matter state. Heavier baryon resonances prove to be crucial for reaction dynamics and particle production at AGS

A new era in the dynamics of European integration?

In the previous decades, the European Union (EU) has succeeded in integrating new member countries, in economic and in political respects. Three main reasons lie behind this successful integration process: First, the solidarity ofricher EU members with their poorer counterparts, second, the effectiveness of the integration policies conducted by the EU, and third, the willingness of new member countries to arouse and accomplish an economic catch-up process towards EU average leveis. With the enlargement by ten new members in May 2004, the EU is facing the biggest challenge in its history. Thereby, the population of the Union will rise by 25%, while its overall GDP will increase by merely 5%. Apart from the economic problems that may emerge because ofthis discrepancy, further difficulties may arise because some ofthe new entrants are former centrally planned economies that have not yet completed their transformation processes towards free market-economies. In this paper, we want to investigate whether the Union may be moving towards a new era in the dynamics of integration. In doing so, we will analyze some of the main challenges the EU will be confronted with in the near future. In detail, we have identified two types of challenges. On the one hand, these are internai challenges, being closely related to the structural adjustments of the Union. We will further differentiate these internai challenges into economic and political ones. On the other hand, there exist externai challenges that predominantly concem the competitiveness of European countries in a global context. With regard to these externai challenges, we will only deal with economic aspects.One ofthe main findings of our analysis is that the EU will have to manage a highly difficult trade-offbetween the stimulation ofUnion-wide economic convergence and intemational competitiveness ofits membercountries. In the short-run, the process of European integration can well be deepened, given that the current controversies with regard to the financing of European support programs for poorer members and with regard to the implementation of a new constitution for the EU will be resolved. In the long-run, even ifthese controversies can be remedied, it appears likely that the dynamic process of European integration will not proceed as smoothly and as successfully as it did in the past. That is because the economic disparities across EU member countries have never been larger, and because the “development funds” now need to be distributed among a larger number ofcountries than in the past. Apart from these difficulties, it can be expected that the concentration on intra-European integration processes will be harmful to the intemational competitive strength ofthe entire Union, especially when this colossus confederation fails to take account of the economic desires ofits strongest members. Certainly, the strongest nations within the Union are exposed to the pressures ofintemational competition among highly developed nations on the basis ofinnovation and productivity. This kind ofcompetition can be described as a Schumpeterian competition. In the light of all these aspects, there are indications that a European Union of “two velocities” will emerge, whereby a core of countries will mainly pursue the objective to strengthen their intemational competitiveness, while the remaining members will be struggling to accomplish an economic catch-up process to intra European standards

HF oder UHF – Welche Frequenz darf es sein? : Vor- und Nachteile der gängigen RFID-Technologien

Die Frage nach der Funkfrequenz eines Radio-Frequency-Identification-Systems (RFIDSystems) ist in etwa wie die Frage nach der PS-Zahl eines Autos: Eigentlich keine primäre Kennzahl für den Anwender wie Höchstgeschwindigkeit oder Beschleunigungsverhalten, aber aufgrund ihrer technischen Bedeutung trotzdem maßgeblich. Ähnlich verhält es sich bei RFID: Zwar stehen eigentlich Eckdaten wie Reichweite, Speicherkapazität oder auch Kosten im Vordergrund. Doch die verwendete Frequenz ist so bedeutend für die Eigenschaften eines RFID-Systems, dass man auch als reiner Anwender kaum an der Frage »HF oder UHF?« vorbei kommt

Microscopic colored quark dynamics in the soft nonperturbative regime : description of hadron formation in relativistic S+Au collisions at CERN

The quark-molecular-dynamics model is used to study microscopically the dynamics of the coloured quark phase and the subsequent hadron formation in relativistic S+Au collisions at the CERN-SPS. Particle spectra and hadron ratios are compared to both data and the results of hadronic transport calculations. The non-equilibrium dynamics of hadronization and the loss of correlation among quarks are studied