The impact of labour market reforms and economic performance on the matching of short-term and long-term unemployed

As a reaction on high and persistent unemployment in Germany, the largest labour market reforms in post-war history were implemented between 2003 and 2005. We analyse the impact of the reform and its coincidence with an economic expansion on the efficiency of matching out of unemployment. Especially focussing on searcher heterogeneity, we estimate a system of simultaneous stock-flow matching functions for short-term and long-term unemployment (3SLS) on the basis of administrative data. In sum, matching efficiency accelerated for the short-term and particularly the long-term unemployed although we cannot rule out a slight negative effect of the reformation of the unemployment benefit system for the short-term unemployed. A tighten relationship between the business cycle and the matching efficiency during the latest economic expansion could not be proven.Als Reaktion auf die hohe und persistente Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland wurde zwischen 2003 und 2005 die umfangreichste Reform des Arbeitsmarktes und der Sozialordnung seit Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland umgesetzt. In der Studie analysieren wir, ob die Reformen und ihr Zusammenwirken mit dem konjunkturellen Aufschwung der Jahre 2005 bis 2008 die Matchingeffizienz beeinflusst haben. Um die Heterogenität der Arbeitslosen zu berücksichtigen, schätzen wir ein System simultaner Matchingfunktionen für Kurz- und Langzeitarbeitslose (3SLS) auf Basis administrativer Daten. Den Ergebnissen zufolge hat sich die Matchingeffizienz für Kurz- und besonders für Langzeitarbeitslose erhöht. Einen kleineren negativen Effekt der Hartz-IV-Reform auf die Beschäftigungschancen der Kurzzeitarbeitslosen können wir jedoch nicht ausschließen. Ein engerer Zusammenhang zwischen Konjunktur und Arbeitsmarkt in der vergangenen Aufschwungphase lässt sich nicht nachweisen

Dimensions of urban mobility cultures – a comparison of German cities

In the context of the immense economic and social challenges urban transport faces in the near future, the analysis of city-specific differences in supply and usage of urban transport systems is a promising approach for identifying potential strategies for establishing more sustainable transport systems and mobility patterns. This study aims to address such differences by a comparative approach and is, to our best knowledge, the first one capturing the subjective dimension of urban mobility by integrating satisfaction and perception-related indicators at a city-level. Drawing on the socio-technical concept of urban mobility cultures, which combines socio-economic and urban form characteristics, mode-specific infrastructure supply, as well as the travel behaviour and underlying attitudes of a city’s inhabitants, we collected a set of 23 indicators from several sources, mainly from the early 2000s. These data have been applied to a sample of 44 German cities. As a result of a factor and cluster analysis we identified six groups of cities ranging from relatively mature and homogenous socio-technical settings, referred to as ‘cycling cities’ or ‘transit metropolises’, to rather less well-defined urban mobility cultures such as ‘transit cities with multimodal potential’, whose forthcoming development is not yet directed towards a specific future and, therefore, is open for political debate. The mismatch between objective and subjective indicators of urban mobility culture that has been shown for some city groups is another starting-point for changing urban mobility cultures in terms of taking people’s perceptions and evaluations of the local transport system more seriously

A Characteristic Curve Remote Laboratory for School and University

Remote laboratories play a pivotal role in facilitating teaching and learning experiences, offering unique opportunities beyond traditional classroom settings. The project OnLabEdu (Online Laboratories for School Education) aims the development of remote laboratories for both, schools and university-level students, complete with the development of appropriate accompanying educational resources. This paper introduces a characteristic curve remote laboratory with a first-developed learning arrangement on RGB LEDs and the interplay of energy, forward voltage, and wavelength of light. Drawing from the model of educational reconstruction, the learning arrangement is based on a profound clarification of the scientific content and considering students’ perspectives. Against the background of a design-based research approach, the learning arrangement was already evaluated with high school students through probing acceptance interviews. Now we are interested if the learning arrangement also fits to tertiary level students. Therefore, we conducted six probing acceptance interviews with pre-service teacher students, hailing from physics (n=3) and non-physics (n=3) backgrounds. The primary objective of the evaluation was to identify potential barriers to learning and elements that promote a stimulating learning environment along with the operation of the remote laboratory for the tertiary level. The findings revealed similar challenges of tertiary-level students and high school students. We detected students’ challenges with technical terminology as well as explaining the term forward voltage and its connection to the concept of energy. These results give initial ideas for a re-design of the learning arrangement to address the identified issues and make the learning arrangement suitable for tertiary level students

Future development of soil chemical parameters on formerly emission affected forest sites

Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt Prognosen zur Entwicklung verschiedener bodenchemischer Parameter (pH-Wert, Nährelementvorräte und Schwermetallgehalte) für flugaschebeeinflusste Waldböden der Dübener Heide vor. Untersucht wurden dazu zwölf Waldstandorte mit unterschiedlicher Entfernung vom Hauptemittenten und damit entlang eines Depositionsgradienten basischer, schwermetallhaltiger Flugasche. Aus der Kombination von vorhandenen Altdaten, dem gemessenen Ist-Zustand und den Ergebnissen von Freisetzungsversuchen wurden Modelle für zukünftig zu erwartende pH-Werte und Elementgehalte der Auflagen abgeleitet. Entsprechend dieser Modelle wird der am stärksten beeinflusste Standort Burgkemnitz voraussichtlich noch mindestens 100 Jahre über aufgebaste Auflagen verfügen, die sich durch überdurchschnittlich hohe Calcium- und Magnesiumvorräte auszeichnen, was als positiv für die Pflanzenernährung zu bewerten ist. Die Schwermetallgesamtgehalte von Cadmium, Kupfer, Nickel und Zink in den Auflagen dieses Standortes überschreiten zwar heute schon die Vorsorgewerte der BBodSchV. Aufgrund des hohen pH-Wertes sind zur Zeit die mobilen Gehalte aber noch so gering, dass sich daraus keine Gefährdung für Pflanzen und Mikroorganismen ergibt. Die mobilen Schwermetallgehalte von Nickel und Zink werden zwar aufgrund stetiger Wiederversauerung in den nächsten Jahrzehnten die Prüfwerte von Prüess (1994) überschreiten. Mit einem hohen Schädigungspotenzial ist allerdings nicht zu rechnen. Das durch die Flugasche verbesserte Nährstoffangebot könnte hier also noch langfristig waldbaulich genutzt werden. Schlüsselwörter: Flugasche, Waldboden, Dübener Heide, Freisetzung, Schwermetalle, Calcium, MagnesiumThis paper presents scenarios for the future development of selected soilchemical parameters (pH-value, nutrient stocks and heavy metal contents) on fly ash affected forest soils of the Dübener Heide. Twelve forest sites were examined, having different distances from the main emitter and thus lying along a deposition gradient of basic fly ash containing heavy metals. Models were developed for the future development of pH-values and element contents using literature data and actual measurements as well as leaching experiments. According to these model results the most affected site Burgkemnitz will be characterized by superior stocks of calcium and magnesium for duration of the next 100 years. In the organic horizons of this site the contents of cadmium, copper, nickel and zinc exceed the threshold values of the BBodSchV (German Federal Soil Protection and Contaminated Sites Ordinance) presently. But due to high pH-values the mobile contents of these heavy metals are low enough so that currently a risk of damage to plants or microorganisms can not be deduced. Because of continuous acidification the mobile contents of nickel and zinc will exceed the trigger values (Prüess 1994) in the next decades. But a high damage is not to be expected. Thus forest management could make use of the improved nutrition conditions at this site on a long-term time scale. Keywords: fly ash, forest soil, Dübener Heide, leaching, heavy metal, calcium, magnesiu

First result on a laser-heated emissive probe

The floating potential of a probe, emitting a sufficiently high electron current, yields a fairly accurate approximation of the plasma potential. This is an advantage in comparison to the conventional Langmuir probe where, after determination of the electron temperature Te, the plasma potential can only be derived indirectly from the formula Vpl = Vfl + aTe, where a is a function of the ratio of the electron to the ion saturation currents (a is around 2.4 in a magnetised hydrogen plasma). In addition, an emissive probe also works if there are electron drifts or beams in the plasma. Emissive probes are usually realised by small directly heated loops of W-wire. Drawbacks of this design are the limited lifetime, the low electron emissivity of W and the voltage drop across the wire. We have developed a new type of emissive probe, which is heated by an infrared high-power diode laser with a maximum output power of 50 W. The probe consists of a small cylinder of LaB6. The probe was inserted into the edge region of the VINETA helicon discharge plasma. Basic features of emissive probes were verified.Comment: 12th International Congress on Plasma Physics, 25-29 October 2004, Nice (France

Learning to Extract Protein-Protein Interactions using Distant Supervision

Most relation extraction methods, especially in the domain of biology, rely on machine learning methods to classify a cooccurring pair of entities in a sentence to be related or not. Such an approach requires a training corpus, which involves expert annotation and is tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. We overcome this problem by the use of existing knowledge in structured databases to automatically generate a training corpus for protein-protein interactions. An extensive evaluation of different instance selection strategies is performed to maximize robustness on this presumably noisy resource. Successful strategies to consistently improve performance include a majority voting ensemble of classifiers trained on subsets of the training corpus and the use of knowledge bases consisting of proven non-interactions. Our best configured model built without manually annotated data shows very competitive results on several publicly available benchmark corpor