Developmentalism, socialism, and free market reform : three decades of income distribution in Chile

After relatively stable income distribution in the 1960s, and a redistribution toward low income groups under Allende, income shares declined for the 40 percent of the population (low and lower middle income groups) under Pinochet. The top 20 percent benefited most from the income shift away from low income groups. Under Aylwin, the income share of the bottom 40 percent returned to previous levels, but the share of the top 20 percent remained above its pre-1973 historical average. The authors show that in the first years of market oriented reform income for the poor deteriorated, chiefly because of persistent unemployment and a squeeze on the real minimum wage and other wage categories. The share of the middle class (the third and fourth quintiles) in national income declined by an average 3 percentage points during 1974-89 - because of cutbacks in public sector employment and steadily decling public sector wages. Recession with high unemployment especially hurts the poor, and growth does not equalize conditions until it strengthens labor markets. Only when Chile's economy approached full capacity, when wages rose and unemployment dropped to a historic low in the early 1990s, did income distribution for the poor improve. If growth continues and investment grows even faster, as in the past two years, the labor market will remain tighter than in any period in the past 30 years and distribution may improve significantly. Is a liberalized economy compatible with social equity? The authors show that initially income distribution deteriorated under reform, chiefly because of macroeconomic crises and subsequent higher unemployment and depressed real wages. However, it is not clear that trade liberalization and deregulation are socially regressive, though the market outcomes that dominate in a liberalized economy may generate a failure in the labor market that social policy should correct. There is more potential for improving the quality of social services today than in the past, but targeting of social services should be designed to prevent the"poverty trap". Targeting and social policies should be designed to encourage personal efforts to escape poverty and to avoid alienating middle income groups.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Inequality,Governance Indicators,Poverty Impact Evaluation

Combining Bluetooth Mesh and KNX : the best of both worlds

Bluetooth Mesh (BT Mesh) is a promising wireless technology for building automation. At the same time, KNX is a well-established building automation system that has a vast installed base. Specifically, the strength of KNX lies in its proven semantic models. These models are the foundation for interoperability and the implementation of larger systems. The presented project demonstrates how a user can easily connect a new BT Mesh system to a well-established, wired KNX building automation system. Notably, the project achieves this through a self-developed stateless gateway, which allows controlling BT Mesh devices from the KNX network and vice versa. As a result, it is possible to leverage existing management systems from KNX building automation systems in BT Mesh networks. Furthermore, the project validates this concept using Home Assistant, a well- known open-source home automation platform and demonstrates, that heterogeneous KNX and BT Mesh systems are feasible

Multiple State Representation Scheme for Organic Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells: A Novel Analysis Perspective

The physics of organic bulk heterojunction solar cells is studied within a six state model, which is used to analyze the factors that affect current-voltage characteristics, power-voltage properties and efficiency, and their dependence on nonradiative losses, reorganization of the nuclear environment, and environmental polarization. Both environmental reorganization and polarity is explicitly taken into account by incorporating Marcus heterogeneous and homogeneous electron transfer rates. The environmental polarity is found to have a nonnegligible influence both on the stationary current and on the overall solar cell performance. For our organic bulk heterojunction solar cell operating under steady-state open circuit condition, we also find that the open circuit voltage logarithmically decreases with increasing nonradiative electron-hole recombination processes.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Powering long range wireless nodes with harvested energy

LPWAN systems are important elements in IoT networks. They allow small amount of data to be efficiently transferred over long distances, reducing the number of gateways. Long range (or improved robustness) often comes at the cost of data rate, meaning that frames require more time and thus more energy to be sent or received. This increase in energy affects the ability of using cost-competitive energy harvesting techniques for LPWAN systems, compared to WPAN systems. In this work, we present a design that uses energy harvested from a relatively small indoor solar panel to power a sensor node and enable data transmission with LoRa. Results from first measurements show that using the module near a window will provide enough energy to measure and transmit hundreds of messages per day.  This is more than the amount of messages that can actually be sent per day per node on the public LPWAN network of some telecom operators

Evaluating the performance of smartphones scanning for low energy beacons

Smartphones are now regularly used to scan for the presence of beacons. The information received by the scanner can be displayed or used to start other processes. It happens that smartphones fail to find beacons, although they are advertising. There are several reasons for that failure. A major one is the scanning behaviour of the smartphone. We designed and implemented ways of testing the performance of smartphones while they scan for Bluetooth Smart beacons or for low-power sensors. We used the tests to determine important tuning parameters. We also used the tests to compare a number of popular smartphones and verify the effect of parameter adjustments on their performances

Linear Tetraphenylmethane-Based Thioether Oligomers Stabilising an Entire Gold Nanoparticle by Enwrapping

The design and synthesis of a novel linear thioether-based ligand subunit with a tetraphenylmethane core used in the stabilisation of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are presented. Mono-, tri, penta- and heptamers of the ligand have been synthesised and used to stabilise AuNPs by enwrapping. With the exception of the monomer, all ligands provide reliable long-term stability and redispersibility for the coated nanoparticles in common organic solvents. Despite variation of the oligomer length, all stable particles were of the same size within error tolerance (1.16±0.32 nm for the trimer, 1.15±0.30 nm for the pentamer, 1.17±0.34 nm for the heptamer), as investigated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). These findings suggest that not only the number of sulfur atoms in the ligand, but also its bulkiness play a crucial role in stabilising the AuNPs. These findings are supported by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), showing that AuNPs stabilised by the penta- or heptamer are passivated by a single ligand. Thermal stability measurements suggest a correlation between ligand coverage and thermal stability, further supporting these findings