Amending the Wagner Act: The Problem From the Manufacturer’s Viewpoint

Till följd av den globala finanskrisen år 2008 ställdes det europeiska samarbetet på prov. I och med detta presenterade EU ett förslag till ett direktiv angående en finansiell transaktionsskatt för samtliga länder inom EU. Elva av EU:s 28 medlemsländer har valt att ställa sig bakom förslaget om en finansiell transaktionsskatt, vilket innebär att dessa länder avser införa en finansiell transaktionsskatt. Tidigare empiriska erfarenheter har dock visat att en finansiell transaktionsskatt är mindre effektiv än vad förespråkarna gör gällande, varken påverkan på skatteintäkter eller marknadens volatilitet har i dessa fall levt upp till de önskvärda effekterna. Denna uppsats syfte är att analysera vad som ligger till grund för ländernas ställningstagande och uppsatsens hypotes ger vid handen att det föreligger ett positivt samband mellan finanskrisens påverkan på respektive EU land, inhemsk opinion och ett positivt ställningstagande till en finansiell transaktionsskatt inom EU. För att testa hypotesen används en induktiv metod vilken är uppbyggd på vetenskapliga artiklar och ekonomisk litteratur. Vidare genomförs flera regressionsanalyser i syfte att påvisa de positiva samband som hypotesen antar föreligger. I de uppvisade resultaten framgår att det går att stödja uppsatsens hypotes. Uppsatsen kommer därför fram till att det föreligger ett positivt samband mellan finanskrisens påverkan på respektive EU-land, inhemsk opinion och ett positivt ställningstagande till en finansiell transaktionsskatt.In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis the European Union was put to the test. As a result, the EU submitted a proposal for a directive regarding a financial transactions tax levied throughout every nation in the European Union. Eleven of the 28 EU member states decided to support the proposal for a financial transactions tax. The eleven member states adopted the stance to support the proposal in spite of the historical empirical evidence indicating a financial transactions tax to not be as effective as the advocators claim. This paper aims to analyse the basis of the EU member states adopted stance towards a financial transactions tax. The thesis statement suggest that there is a positive correlation between the impact of the financial crisis on each respective EU country, domestic public opinion and a positive stance towards a financial transactions tax in the EU. To test the thesis statement an inductive method, based on academic articles and economic literature, is applied. Furthermore a regression analysis is used to prove the appearance of the expected positive relationships in the thesis statement. The results of the paper indicate the thesis statement to be probable. Therefore, this paper concludes that there is a positive relationship between the impact of the financial crisis in the EU states, domestic opinion and a positive stance to a financial transactions tax

"We are GREAT Britain": British newspaper narratives during the London 2012 Olympic Games

British newspaper narratives were examined during the 2012 London Olympic Games to discern how the British press promoted specific “narratives of the nation.” For the London-based British press, the home Olympics became the ideal medium not only to sell newspapers and electronic format subscriptions, but also to (re)present their views on Britain and what it stood for. Using a qualitative textual analysis methodology, this study drew on Anderson’s theory of the “imagined community” and Edmunds and Turner’s concepts of benign and malign nationalism to provide insights about how Britishness was framed. For a country struggling to shake off the economic recession, early narratives about the Games were imbued with concerns about the escalating costs of hosting the Games and fears of terrorism. However, the critical early tone of British newspaper narratives was supplanted with uplifting, inspirational stories about the unprecedented success of Team GB athletes. This provided British journalists with an opportunity to reengineer Britishness to reinforce some traditional values and inject some new inclusive ones. Although at times, complex, contested and contradictory, the narratives generally linked the internationalism of the Olympics with a progressive, benign version of Britishness that emphasized inclusion, tolerance, and creativity and, at least temporarily, redefined how Britain regarded itself and was viewed.</jats:p

Mathematical Modeling of Product Rating: Sufficiency, Misbehavior and Aggregation Rules

Many web services like eBay, Tripadvisor, Epinions, etc, provide historical product ratings so that users can evaluate the quality of products. Product ratings are important since they affect how well a product will be adopted by the market. The challenge is that we only have {\em "partial information"} on these ratings: Each user provides ratings to only a "{\em small subset of products}". Under this partial information setting, we explore a number of fundamental questions: What is the "{\em minimum number of ratings}" a product needs so one can make a reliable evaluation of its quality? How users' {\em misbehavior} (such as {\em cheating}) in product rating may affect the evaluation result? To answer these questions, we present a formal mathematical model of product evaluation based on partial information. We derive theoretical bounds on the minimum number of ratings needed to produce a reliable indicator of a product's quality. We also extend our model to accommodate users' misbehavior in product rating. We carry out experiments using both synthetic and real-world data (from TripAdvisor, Amazon and eBay) to validate our model, and also show that using the "majority rating rule" to aggregate product ratings, it produces more reliable and robust product evaluation results than the "average rating rule".Comment: 33 page

Relative Entropy in Biological Systems

In this paper we review various information-theoretic characterizations of the approach to equilibrium in biological systems. The replicator equation, evolutionary game theory, Markov processes and chemical reaction networks all describe the dynamics of a population or probability distribution. Under suitable assumptions, the distribution will approach an equilibrium with the passage of time. Relative entropy - that is, the Kullback--Leibler divergence, or various generalizations of this - provides a quantitative measure of how far from equilibrium the system is. We explain various theorems that give conditions under which relative entropy is nonincreasing. In biochemical applications these results can be seen as versions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stating that free energy can never increase with the passage of time. In ecological applications, they make precise the notion that a population gains information from its environment as it approaches equilibrium.Comment: 20 page

Paraxial ray optics cloaking

Despite much interest and progress in optical spatial cloaking, a three-dimensional (3D), transmitting, continuously multidirectional cloak in the visible regime has not yet been demonstrated. Here we experimentally demonstrate such a cloak using ray optics, albeit with some edge effects. Our device requires no new materials, uses isotropic off-the-shelf optics, scales easily to cloak arbitrarily large objects, and is as broadband as the choice of optical material, all of which have been challenges for current cloaking schemes. In addition, we provide a concise formalism that quantifies and produces perfect optical cloaks in the small-angle (`paraxial') limit