The Globalisation and its Implications for the Economic Development of Latin America

The process of globalisation has in several ways an impact on the Latin American Economies. The recent developments give a carefully optimistic view on the economic consequences for these countries. While all of the Latin American nations still lag behind the industrialised countries with respect to their integration into global information networks, the digital divide seems to be narrowing in the near future. Concerning the trade and production structure most countries of the region are moving towards a higher degree of diversity while industrialisation and modernisation are progressing. While capital inflows into the region have spurred growth, the experience of the financial crisis in the emerging markets during the second half of the 90s showed the necessity of creating sound financial institutions. In addition other institutions e.g. in the field of education, administration and jurisdiction have to be built up for ensuring the possible benefits of a globalised world.globalisation, Latin America, information technology, trade, investment, institutions

Impact of vibrational entropy on the stability of unsolvated peptide helices with increasing length

Helices are a key folding motif in protein structure. The question which factors determine helix stability for a given polypeptide or protein is an ongoing challenge. Here we use van der Waals corrected density-functional theory to address a part of this question in a bottom-up approach. We show how intrinsic helical structure is stabilized with length and temperature for a series of experimentally well studied unsolvated alanine based polypeptides, Ac-Alan-LysH+. By exploring extensively the conformational space of these molecules, we find that helices emerge as the preferred structure in the length range n=4-8 not just due to enthalpic factors (hydrogen bonds and their cooperativity, van der Waals dispersion interactions, electrostatics), but importantly also by a vibrational entropic stabilization over competing conformers at room temperature. The stabilization is shown to be due to softer low-frequency vibrational modes in helical conformers than in more compact ones. This observation is corroborated by including anharmonic effects explicitly through \emph{ab initio} molecular dynamics, and generalized by testing different terminations and considering larger helical peptide models

Thermodynamic equilibrium conditions of graphene films on SiC

First-principles surface phase diagrams reveal that epitaxial monolayer graphene films on the Si side of 3C-SiC(111) can exist as thermodynamically stable phases in a narrow range of experimentally controllable conditions, defining a path to the highest-quality graphene films. Our calculations are based on a van der Waals corrected density functional. The full, experimentally observed (6 sqrt(3)x 6 sqrt(3))-R30 supercells for zero- to trilayer graphene are essential to describe the correct interface geometries and the relative stability of surface phases and possible defects

Length Dependence of Ionization Potentials of Trans-Acetylenes: Internally-Consistent DFT/GW Approach

We follow the evolution of the Ionization Potential (IP) for the paradigmatic quasi-one-dimensional trans-acetylene family of conjugated molecules, from short to long oligomers and to the infinite polymer trans-poly-acetylene (TPA). Our results for short oligomers are very close to experimental available data. We find that the IP varies with oligomer length and converges to the given value for TPA with a smooth, coupled inverse-length-exponential behavior. Our prediction is based on an "internally-consistent" scheme to adjust the exchange mixing parameter $\alpha$ of the PBEh hybrid density functional, so as to obtain a description of the electronic structure consistent with the quasiparticle approximation for the IP. This is achieved by demanding that the corresponding quasiparticle correction, in the GW@PBEh approximation, vanishes for the IP when evaluated at PBEh($\alpha^{ic}$). We find that $\alpha^{ic}$ is also system-dependent and converges with increasing oligomer length, allowing to capture the dependence of IP and other electronic properties.Comment: 22 pages with 9 figures, submitted to Physical Review

Self-Learning Production Control using Algorithms of Artificial Intelligence

Manufacturing companies are facing an increasingly turbulent market - a market defined by products growing in complexity and shrinking product life cycles. This leads to a boost in planning complexity accompanied by higher error sensitivity. In practice, IT systems and sensors integrated into the shop floor in the context of Industry 4.0 are used to deal with these challenges. However, while existing research provides solutions in the field of pattern recognition or recommended actions, a combination of the two approaches is neglected. This leads to an overwhelming amount of data without contributing to an improvement of processes. To address this problem, this study presents a new platform-based concept to collect and analyze the high-resolution data with the use of self-learning algorithms. Herby, patterns can be identified and reproduced, allowing an exact prediction of the future system behavior. Artificial intelligence maximizes the automation of the reduction and compensation of disruptive factors

Genuine savings and future well-being in Germany, 1850-2000

Genuine Savings (GS), also known as ‘net adjusted savings', is a composite indicator of the sustainability of economic development. Genuine Savings reflects year-on-year changes in the total wealth or capital of a country, including net investment in produced capita, investment in human capital, depletion of natural resources, and damage caused by pollution. A negative Genuine Savings rate suggests that the stock of national wealth is declining and that future utility must be less than current utility, indicating that economic development is non-sustainable (Hamilton and Clemens, 1999). We make use of data over a 150 year period to examine the relationship between Genuine Savings and a number of indicators of well-being over time, and compare the relative changes in human, produced, and components of natural capital over the period. Overall, we find that the magnitude of genuine savings is positively related to changes in future consumption, with some evidence of a cointegrating relationship. However, the relationships between genuine savings and infant mortality or average heights are less clear

miRmap web: comprehensive microRNA target prediction online

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) posttranscriptionally repress the expression of protein-coding genes. Based on the partial complementarity between miRNA and messenger RNA pairs with a mandatory so-called ‘seed' sequence, many thousands of potential targets can be identified. Our open-source software library, miRmap, ranks these potential targets with a biologically meaningful criterion, the repression strength. MiRmap combines thermodynamic, evolutionary, probabilistic and sequence-based features, which cover features from TargetScan, PITA, PACMIT and miRanda. Our miRmap web application offers a user-friendly and feature-rich resource for browsing precomputed miRNA target predictions for model organisms, as well as for predicting and ranking targets for user-submitted sequences. MiRmap web integrates sorting, filtering and exporting of results from multiple queries, as well as providing programmatic access, and is available at http://mirmap.ezlab.or