Germany’s Current Account and Trade Surpluses A Technical Debate Enters the Geopolitical Limelight. Bertelsmann Stiftung GED Study April 2018

During the past decade, macroeconomic imbalances – typified by countries’ surplus or deficit of exports, currency, or capital – have moved to the fore of international economic policy debates. Global events and developments, such as China’s integration into the world economy, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Eurozone crisis, have created, and in some cases, compounded longstanding trade and investment asymmetries around the world. These imbalances have no single cause, but are fostered and magnified by the competitiveness of a country’s industries, domestic demand, corporate investment decisions, and tax and monetary policy, among other factors. In recent years, the widening gaps in countries’ trade relationships have become highly politicized, prompting policymakers to respond with measures ranging from formalized monitoring to punitive tariffs

Structuring music collections by exploiting peers' processing

Music collections are structured in very different ways by different useres. There is not one general taxonomy, but individual, user-specific structures exist. Most users appreciate some support in structering their collection. A large variety of methods has been developed for textual collections. However, audio data are completely different. In this paper, we present a peer to peer scenario where a music collection is enhanced a set of audio data in a node of the user's taxonomy by retrieving (partial) taxonomies of peers. In order to classify audio data into a taxonomy features need to be extracted. Adopting feature extraction to a particular set of classes is effective but not efficient. Hence, we propose again to exploit what has allready been done. Wellsuited feature extraction for one classification task is transferred to similar tasks using a new distance measures. --

Let's talk about Europe': explaining vertical and horizontal Europeanization in the quality press

This paper contributes to the ongoing quest for a European public sphere understood as a structural transformation of national media debates. The process of Europeanization has a vertical and a horizontal dimension: an increased focus on the EU as well as more attention for other European countries. A content analysis of quality newspapers in five EU member states covering a period of 20 years reveals common trends across different countries but no convergence over time. Four different patterns of Europeanization can be identified: comprehensive Europeanization, segmented Europeanization, Europeanization aloof from the EU, a parochial public sphere. This paper pushes research in this area ahead by identifying and testing factors which explain these differences in newspaper coverage. In-depth case analysis as well as regression analysis show that the editorial mission of a newspaper and the size of a country have a significant effect on patterns of Europeanization. Contrary to common expectations, the number of correspondents in Brussels and the degree of popular identification with Europe did not significantly affect patterns of Europeanization. --

Cryptic species in tropic sands--interactive 3D anatomy, molecular phylogeny and evolution of meiofaunal Pseudunelidae (Gastropoda, Acochlidia)

Towards realistic estimations of the diversity of marine animals, tiny meiofaunal species usually are underrepresented. Since the biological species concept is hardly applicable on exotic and elusive animals, it is even more important to apply a morphospecies concept on the best level of information possible, using accurate and efficient methodology such as 3D modelling from histological sections. Molecular approaches such as sequence analyses may reveal further, cryptic species. This is the first case study on meiofaunal gastropods to test diversity estimations from traditional taxonomy against results from modern microanatomical methodology and molecular systematics

GEMPIC: Geometric ElectroMagnetic Particle-In-Cell Methods

We present a novel framework for Finite Element Particle-in-Cell methods based on the discretization of the underlying Hamiltonian structure of the Vlasov-Maxwell system. We derive a semi-discrete Poisson bracket, which retains the defining properties of a bracket, anti-symmetry and the Jacobi identity, as well as conservation of its Casimir invariants, implying that the semi-discrete system is still a Hamiltonian system. In order to obtain a fully discrete Poisson integrator, the semi-discrete bracket is used in conjunction with Hamiltonian splitting methods for integration in time. Techniques from Finite Element Exterior Calculus ensure conservation of the divergence of the magnetic field and Gauss' law as well as stability of the field solver. The resulting methods are gauge invariant, feature exact charge conservation and show excellent long-time energy and momentum behaviour. Due to the generality of our framework, these conservation properties are guaranteed independently of a particular choice of the Finite Element basis, as long as the corresponding Finite Element spaces satisfy certain compatibility conditions.Comment: 57 Page