ANDREJ HLINKA IN THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF SLOVAK PROTESTANTS

The present paper maps the portrayal of Andrej Hlinka within the Protestant milieu during his lifetime. It also tries to answer the question of Hlinka’s position in the hierarchy of symbols which were and are relevant for the formation of the Slovak Protestants’ identity. Nowadays, ambivalent or expressly negative att itudes towards Hlinka prevail within the Lutheran community, however, similar att itudes prevailed also during the interwar and aft er-war periods.In 1902 at the regional forum, A. Hlinka did not support the rights of the Slovak language which represented a major att ribute of the national identity of Slovaks. Hlinka’s att itude was then reminded in the Lutheran milieu in the situations when an idealized and mythologized portrayal of Hlinka as an uncompromising fi ghter for the national rights spread in particular via offi cial propaganda. In fact, it served as a de-legitimizing instrument of Hlinka cult. During the existence of the Slovak State (1938/1939 – 1945) Slovak Protestants were massively confronted with the phenomenon of Hlinka and denied this historical fi gure in the position of the most signifi cant national symbol. At the religious celebration of the national hero General Milan Rastislav Štefánik in May 1939, General Bishop of the Protestant Church Vladimír Pavel Čobrda compared both personages – Hlinka and Štefánik – and refused the symbolic governmental policy and propaganda which tried to make believe the whole society including Lutherans that Hlinka was a positive social example. He called Štefánik the greatest Slovak who became the symbol of antifascist resistance.

Environmental Regulation: Choice of Instruments under Imperfect Compliance

Compliance is an important issue in environmental regulation. In this paper, we discuss some of the key elements of the problem and analyze a situation where emissions are not random and firms are risk-neutral. We study the firm's decision on emissions and compliance when the environmental regulation is based on standards and the enforcement agency audits the firm with a certain probability. We then compare total emissions when environmental regulation is based on different instruments: standards, taxes, and tradable permits. We show that when compliance is an issue, environmental taxes are superior to the other instruments. We also analyze the (static) efficiency of the solution.environmental regulation, audits and compliance, environmental standards, other instruments.

Extracting Build Changes with BUILDDIFF

Build systems are an essential part of modern software engineering projects. As software projects change continuously, it is crucial to understand how the build system changes because neglecting its maintenance can lead to expensive build breakage. Recent studies have investigated the (co-)evolution of build configurations and reasons for build breakage, but they did this only on a coarse grained level. In this paper, we present BUILDDIFF, an approach to extract detailed build changes from MAVEN build files and classify them into 95 change types. In a manual evaluation of 400 build changing commits, we show that BUILDDIFF can extract and classify build changes with an average precision and recall of 0.96 and 0.98, respectively. We then present two studies using the build changes extracted from 30 open source Java projects to study the frequency and time of build changes. The results show that the top 10 most frequent change types account for 73% of the build changes. Among them, changes to version numbers and changes to dependencies of the projects occur most frequently. Furthermore, our results show that build changes occur frequently around releases. With these results, we provide the basis for further research, such as for analyzing the (co-)evolution of build files with other artifacts or improving effort estimation approaches. Furthermore, our detailed change information enables improvements of refactoring approaches for build configurations and improvements of models to identify error-prone build files.Comment: Accepted at the International Conference of Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 201

Stochastic Surface Models for Commodity Futures: A 2D Kalman Filter Approach

We propose a two-dimensional Kalman filter approach that, additional to the information contained in futures prices evolution over time, makes use of information contained in the term structure of commodity futures along a second dimension of maturities. This time-maturity surface reflects a complete realization of the stochastic process as an alternative to standard Kalman filtering of a limited vector of futures prices along the one-dimensional time line. Thus, the proposed methodology may use the full information from the entire surface dynamics, including links from all available maturities per period, which eventually should lead to more accurate model parameter estimates. The technique is illustrated using coal futures prices.commodity prices, spatial analysis, two-dimensional Kalman filter, energy markets, futures markets, stochastic dynamic model

On the joint production of research and training

Universities and research institutions have the responsibility to produce science and to provide training to new generations of researchers. In this paper, we propose a model to analyze the determinants of a senior scientist's decisions about allocating time between these tasks. The results of this decision depend upon the characteristics of the research project, the senior scientist's concern for training and the expected innate ability of the junior scientist involved. We analyze the role that a regulator can play in defining both the value of scientific projects and the future population of independent scientists.Allocation of time between tasks; research and training; senior and junior scientists

Commercial Incentives in Academia

This paper investigates the effects of monetary rewards from commercialisation on the pattern of research. We build a simple repeated model of a researcher capable to obtain innovative ideas. We analyse how academic and market incentives affect the allocation of the researcher’s time between research and development. We argue, however, that technology transfer objectives also affect the choice of research projects. Although commercialisation incentives reduce the time spent in research, they might also induce researchers to conduct research that is more basic in nature, contrary to what the “skewing problem” would presage. Monetary rewards induce a more intensive search for (ex-post) path-breaking innovations, which are more likely to be generated through (ex-ante) basic research programs. These results are shown to hold even if development delays publication

A Theoretical Approach to Dual Practice Regulations in the Health Sector

Internationally, there is wide cross-country heterogeneity in government responses to dual practice in the health sector. This paper provides a uniform theoretical framework to analyze and compare some of the most common regulations. We focus on three interventions: banning dual practice, offering rewarding contracts to public physicians, and limiting dual practice (including both limits to private earnings of dual providers and limits to involvement in private activities). An ancillary objective of the paper is to investigate whether regulations that are optimal for developed countries are adequate for developing countries as well. Our results offer theoretical support for the desirability of different regulations in different economic environments.Dual practice, optimal contracts, physicians' incentives, regulations.

Incentives in University Technology Transfers

There are two main ways in which the knowledge created in universities has been transferred to firms: licensing agreements and the creation of spin-offs. In this paper, we describe the main steps in the transfer of university innovations, the main incentive issues that appear in this process, and the contractual solutions proposed to address them.

Financial Incentives in Academia: Research versus Development

This paper investigates the effects of monetary rewards on the pattern of research. We build a simple repeated model of a researcher capable to obtain innovative ideas. We analyse how the legal environment affects the allocation of researcher?s time between research and development. Although technology transfer objectives reduce the time spent in research, they might also induce  researchers to conduct research that is more basic in nature, contrary to what the ?skewing problem? would presage. We also show that our results hold even if development delays publication.Faculty behaviour, basic vs. applied research