From nationally bounded to pan-European inequalities? On the importance of foreign countries as reference groups

In sociology, the appropriateness of national approaches for understanding social inequality in todays societies is being increasingly questioned, and EU-wide approaches are advocated instead. In this paper, we link the growing debate about national or EU-wide approaches to reference group theory, investigating whether comparisons with foreign countries influence levels of individual life satisfaction. Our results indicate that, on the one hand, more people can be assumed to have a national frame of reference than a broader international one; on the other hand, among those who do have an idea of how average people in other countries live, cross-border comparisons certainly influence peoples satisfaction with life. Upward comparisons in particular are important: The more people feel personally deprived, relative to other countries, the less satisfied they are with their lives. In contrast, the feeling of relative gratification has a much smaller impact on life satisfaction, and often no impact at all. This leads us to conclude that EU-wide approaches to inequality do make sense, but that there is also no need to jettison national approaches completely. --

Readdressing the trade effect of the Euro: Allowing for currency misalignment

We know that euro-area member countries have absorbed asymmetric shocks in ways that are inconsistent with a common nominal anchor. Based on a reformulation of the gravity model that allows for such bilateral misalignment, we disentangle the conventional trade cost channel and trade effects deriving from 'implicit currency misalignment'. Econometric estimation reveals that the currency misalignment channel exerts a significant trade effect on bilateral exports. We retrieve country specific estimates of the euro effect on trade based on misalignment. This reveals asymmetric trade effects and heterogeneous outlooks across countries for the costs and benefits from adopting the euro. --Euro,gravity model,exchange rates,purchasing power parity,trade imbalances

From nationally bounded to pan-European inequalities? On the importance of foreign countries as reference groups

"In sociology, the appropriateness of national approaches for understanding social inequality in today's societies is being increasingly questioned, and EU-wide approaches are advocated instead. In this paper, we link the growing debate about national or EU-wide approaches to reference group theory, investigating whether comparisons with foreign countries influence levels of individual life satisfaction. Our results indicate that, on the one hand, more people can be assumed to have a national frame of reference than a broader international one, on the other hand, among those who do have an idea of how average people in other countries live, cross-border comparisons certainly influence people's satisfaction with life. Upward comparisons in particular are important: The more people feel personally deprived, relative to other countries, the less satisfied they are with their lives. In contrast, the feeling of relative gratification has a much smaller impact on life satisfaction, and often no impact at all. This leads us to conclude that EU-wide approaches to inequality do make sense, but that there is also no need to jettison national approaches completely." (author's abstract

Insufficient sterilisation procedures and transmission of pathogens in developing countries

No Abstract

Steady-State Coherent Transfer by Adiabatic Passage

We propose steady-state electron transport based on coherent transfer by adiabatic passage (CTAP) in a linearly arranged triple quantum dot with leads attached to the outer dots. Its main feature is repeated steering of single electrons from the first dot to the last dot without relevant occupation of the middle dot. The coupling to leads enables a steady-state current, whose shot noise is significantly suppressed provided that the CTAP protocol performs properly. This represents an indication for the direct transfer between spatially separated dots and, thus, may resolve the problem of finding experimental evidence for the non-occupation of the middle dot.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Readdressing the trade effect of the Euro : allowing for currency misalignment

We know that euro-area member countries have absorbed asymmetric shocks in ways that are inconsistent with a common nominal anchor. Based on a reformulation of the gravity model that allows for such bilateral misalignment, we disentangle the conventional trade cost channel and trade effects deriving from “implicit currency misalignment”. Econometric estimation reveals that the currency misalignment channel exerts a significant trade effect on bilateral exports. We retrieve country specific estimates of the euro effect on trade based on misalignment. This reveals asymmetric trade effects and heterogeneous outlooks across countries for the costs and benefits from adopting the euro

Plant community structure determines primary productivity in shallow, eutrophic lakes

Regime shifts are commonly associated with the loss of submerged macrophytes in shallow lakes; yet, the effects of this on whole-lake primary productivity remain poorly understood. This study compares the annual gross primary production (GPP) of two shallow, eutrophic lakes with different plant community structures but similar nutrient concentrations. Daily GPP rates were substantially higher in the lake containing submerged macrophytes (586 ± 23 g C m−2 year−1) than in the lake featuring only phytoplankton and periphyton (408 ± 23 g C m−2 year−1; P \u3c 0.0001). Comparing lake-centre diel oxygen curves to compartmental estimates of GPP confirmed that single-site oxygen curves may provide unreliable estimates of whole-lake GPP. The discrepancy between approaches was greatest in the macrophyte-dominated lake during the summer, with a high proportion of GPP occurring in the littoral zone. Our empirical results were used to construct a simple conceptual model relating GPP to nutrient availability for these alternative ecological regimes. This model predicted that lakes featuring submerged macrophytes may commonly support higher rates of GPP than phytoplankton-dominated lakes, but only within a moderate range of nutrient availability (total phosphorus ranging from 30 to 100 μg L−1) and with mean lake depths shallower than 3 or 4 m. We conclude that shallow lakes with a submerged macrophyte–epiphyton complex may frequently support a higher annual primary production than comparable lakes that contain only phytoplankton and periphyton. We thus suggest that a regime shift involving the loss of submerged macrophytes may decrease the primary productivity of many lakes, with potential consequences for the entire food webs of these ecosystems

Complex networks of interacting stochastic tipping elements: cooperativity of phase separation in the large-system limit

Tipping elements in the Earth System receive increased scientific attention over the recent years due to their nonlinear behavior and the risks of abrupt state changes. While being stable over a large range of parameters, a tipping element undergoes a drastic shift in its state upon an additional small parameter change when close to its tipping point. Recently, the focus of research broadened towards emergent behavior in networks of tipping elements, like global tipping cascades triggered by local perturbations. Here, we analyze the response to the perturbation of a single node in a system that initially resides in an unstable equilibrium. The evolution is described in terms of coupled nonlinear equations for the cumulants of the distribution of the elements. We show that drift terms acting on individual elements and offsets in the coupling strength are sub-dominant in the limit of large networks, and we derive an analytical prediction for the evolution of the expectation (i.e., the first cumulant). It behaves like a single aggregated tipping element characterized by a dimensionless parameter that accounts for the network size, its overall connectivity, and the average coupling strength. The resulting predictions are in excellent agreement with numerical data for Erd\"os-R\'enyi, Barab\'asi-Albert and Watts-Strogatz networks of different size and with different coupling parameters

Convective mixing and high littoral primary production can establish systematic errors in lake diel oxygen curves in shallow, eutrophic lakes

The diel (24-h) oxygen (O2) curves approach has become a popular method for analyzing gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER) rates in aquatic systems. Despite the simplicity of this approach, there remain aspects of the calculation and interpretation of diel O2 curves which may skew results, with potentially large implications for estimates of metabolic rates. One common problem in lakes is the occurrence of unexpected changes in O2concentrations (for instance, increasing overnight O2 concentrations). Such changes have typically been ascribed to the random mixing of pockets of O2. It has thus been suggested that negative GPP or positive ER values should be included in calculations, on the assumption that under- and overestimates should occur with equal frequency, and thus cancel each other out. Our data from a shallow, eutrophic lake provided a high share of negative GPP values. We argue that these may have been the result of elevated littoral productivity coupled with convective currents produced by consistent differences in the heating or cooling of littoral and offshore waters. Such phenomena might be common in small, sheltered lakes where the role of mixing by wind is diminished. We conclude that a failure to account for consistent metabolic gradients and periodic convective mixing may lead to a chronic underestimation of metabolic rates in lakes when using the diel O2 curves method