Regional monetary integration in the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plans to introduce a single currency by 2010 in its six member states, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This paper focuses on selected macroeconomic and institutional issues and key policy choices which are likely to arise during the process of monetary integration. The main findings are that (i) a supranational GCC monetary institution is required to conduct a single monetary and exchange rate policy geared to economic, monetary and financial conditions in the monetary union as a whole; (ii) GCC member states have already achieved a remarkable degree of monetary convergence, but fiscal convergence remains a challenge and needs to be supported by an appropriate fiscal policy framework; and (iii) there is currently a high degree of structural convergence, although this is expected to diminish in view of the process of diversification in GCC economies, which calls for adequate policy responses.

Организация строительного контроля при реализации инвестиционных проектов ПАО «Газпром» на примере магистрального газопровода «Сила Сибири»

Объектом исследования является строительство магистрального газопровода «Сила Сибири». Цель работы – разработать процесс организации строительного контроля на основе реализованных проектов ПАО «Газпром» и осуществить проведение строительного контроля при строительстве магистрального газопровода «Сила Сибири». В процессе исследования проводились анализ литературных источников, рассмотрение и анализ различных схем организации строительного контроля. В результате исследования была разработана модель и схема организации строительного контроля, рассчитаны оптимальные параметры проведения строительного контроля, разработаны мероприятия по охране труда и промышленной безопасности, охране окружающей среды. Степень внедрения: внедрена с 2015 года. Область применения: объекты ПАО «Газпром».The object of study is the construction of the gas pipeline "Power of Siberia". Purpose – to develop a process of organization building control on the basis of the completed projects of PJSC "Gazprom" and carry out the construction control during the construction of the gas pipeline "Power of Siberia". In the process of investigation the analysis of literature sources, review and analysis of various schemes of the organization of building control. In the result of the study a model was developed and diagram of building control, the calculated optimal parameters for building control, measures on labor protection and industrial safety, environmental protection. Level of implementation: implemented in 2015. Scope: the objects of PJSC "Gazprom"

Standardisation and optimisation techniques in gut microbiome community analysis

With the emergence of high throughput next-generation sequencing the importance of the human gut microbiota as regulators, modulators and maintainers of human health and disease became more and more imminent. Advances in sequencing in the last two decades enabled the analysis of the composition and dynamics of the gut microbiome in unprecedented resolution and complexity. Investigations of this complex community by marker gene studies allowed assertions on presence, absence and ecological dynamics of gut bacteria. Several studies discovered strong relationships between the gut microbiota and human health. Some of these bacteria are shown to be essential for daily life processes like digestion, nutrition uptake, pathogen resistance and immune maturation. Likewise, disturbances of this close relationship, called dysbiosis, have been found to be associated with diseases like diabetes, obesity, colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease. All this renders the gut microbiome as a highly relevant target of research in medical diagnostics and microbiome community analysis a valid hypothesis building tool. Nevertheless, the vast amount of different methodologies and lack of broadly accepted standards to create and handle gut microbiome abundance data complicates reproducible or replicable findings across studies. Especially in settings, where samples diverge significantly in their total biomass or microbial load, the analysis of the microbiome is hampered. Several efforts to allow accurate inter sample comparisons have been undertaken, including the use of relative abundances or random feature sub-sampling (rarefaction). While these methodologies are the most frequently used, they are not fully capable to correct for these sample-wide differences. To increase comparability between samples the use of exogenous spike-in bacteria is proposed to correct for sample specific differences in microbial load. The methodology is tested on a dilution experiment with known differences between samples and successfully applied on a clinical microbiome data set. These experiments suggest that current analysis methods lack a pivotal angle on the data, that is comparability between samples differing in microbial load. Meanwhile, the proposed spike-in based calibration to microbial load (SCML) allows for accurate estimation of ratios of absolute endogenous bacteria abundances. Furthermore, microbiome community analysis is heavily dependent on the resolution of the underlying read count data. While resolutions such as operational taxonomic units (OTUs) generally overestimate diversity and create highly redundant and sparse datasets, agglomerations to common taxonomy can obfuscate distinct read count patterns of possible sub-populations inside the given taxonomy. Even though the ladder agglomeration strategy might be valid for taxonomy with low phenotypical divergence, plenty taxonomic lineages in fact contain highly diverse sub-species. Thus, a more appropriate taxonomic unit would adapt its resolution for those densely populated branches, allowing for different count resolutions inside the same community. Here the concept of adaptive taxonomic units (ATUs) is introduced and applied on a perturbation experiment including mice receiving antibiotics. For this data set the different classical count resolutions (i.e. collapsed to order, family or genus etc.) produce highly contradictory results. Meanwhile, adaptive taxonomic units (ATUs) derived by hierarchical affinity merging (HAM) adapt the granularity of taxonomy to the underlying sequencing data. Branches of bacterial phylogeny that are highly covered in the data set receive a higher resolution than those that were infrequently observed. The algorithm hereby merges operational taxonomic units (OTUs) guided not only by sequence dissimilarity, but also by count distribution and OTU size. Due to the agglomeration the number of features is reduced significantly, lowering the complexity of the data, while preserving distributional patterns only observable at OTU level. Consequently, the sparsity of the count data is reduced significantly such that every ATU accumulates reasonable count number and can thus be reliably analysed. The algorithm is provided in the form of the R-Package dOTUClust

Agricultural Productivity Across Prussia During the Industrial Revolution: A Thünen Perspective

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the “Little Divergence” between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping it. In the spirit of Johann von Thünen and Ernst Engel, we develop a theoretical model to test how access to urban demand affected agricultural development. We show that the effect of urban demand is causal and that it is in line with recent findings on a limited degree of interregional market integration in nineteenth-century Prussia.Peer Reviewe

Elastic anisotropies of deformed crustal rocks in the Alps

The crust within collisional orogens is very heterogeneous, in composition as well as in type and intensity of deformation, leading to highly variable physical properties at small scales. This causes difficulties for seismic investigations of tectonic structures at depth since the diverse and partially strong upper crustal anisotropy might overprint the signal of deeper anisotropic structures in the mantle. We characterized the range of elastic anisotropies of deformed crustal rocks in the Alps according to the crystallographic preferred orientation (CPO) of their constituent mineral phases. In the Lago di Cignana area of the Italian Western Alps, we sampled eclogites, blueschists and greenschists of oceanic origin (Zermatt-Saas-Zone). From the lower crustal and mantle rocks of the Ivrea Zone near Finero metagabbros and marbles were collected. The Adula Nappe in the central Alps, which was intensely deformed during the Alpine orogeny, was sampled for rocks from a typical deformed upper continental crust within the Alps. The two major rock types, orthogneisses and paragneisses and small lenses of eclogites, amphibolites and marbles were sampled. CPOs of minerals in the samples were measured using time-of-flight neutron diffraction. Combined with single crystal elastic anisotropies these were used to model seismic properties of the rocks. Similarities can be found within the mafic samples. The eclogite and amphibolite lenses within the continental crust, the eclogites and blueschists of oceanic origin, as well as the metagabbros of the lower crust exhibit highest P-wave velocity (VP) in lineation direction. An exception within the mafic samples is the greenschist, which shows a distribution of high VP within the foliation plane. P-wave anisotropy (AVP) of the metagabbros and eclogites is generally low with about 1.5%. The greenschist, blueschist and amphibolite samples show higher AVP of 2-4.5%. Marble also yields highest VP in lineation direction and high AVP of 8%. It can be distinguished from all other samples in the set by its high VP/VS ratio of 1.8. The felsic rocks of the continental crust show high variability. Those with high mica contents also show VP maxima in the foliation plane. They can be distinguished from greenschists, which show an average VP of 7.30 km/s, by their generally lower average VP of 6.18 - 6.81 km/s. To approximate an average for upper crustal rocks units, we picked common CPO types of rock forming minerals within gneiss samples of the Adula Nappe representing the most common lithology. These data were used to determine an average elastic anisotropy of a typical crustal rock within the Alps yielding 4 %. This value is an approximation, which can be used for seismic models at a lithospheric scale. At a crustal or smaller scale, however, local variations in lithology and deformation as displayed by the range of elastic anisotropies within the sample set need to be considered. In addition, larger-scale structural anisotropies such as layering, intrusions and brittle faults have to be included in any crustal or smaller scale seismic model