The Impact of Government Policy on Technology Transfer: An Aircraft Industry Case Study

This case study explores the interaction between domestic and foreign governmental policy on technology transfer with the goal of exploring the long-term impacts of technology transfer. Specifically, the impact of successive licensing of fighter aircraft manufacturing and design to Japan in the development of Japan’s aircraft industry is reviewed. Results indicate Japan has built a domestic aircraft industry through sequential learning with foreign technology transfers from the United States, and design and production on domestic fighter aircraft. This process was facilitated by governmental policies in both Japan and the United States

Determination of jet fuel thermal deposit rate using a modified JFTOT

Three fuels having different breakpoint temperatures were studied in the modified jet fuel thermal oxidation tester. The lower stability fuel with a breakpoint of 240 C was first stressed at a constant temperature. After repeating this procedure at several different temperatures, an Arrehenius plot was drawn from the data. The correlation coefficient and the energy of activation were calculated to be 0.97 and 8 kcal/mole respectively. Two other fuels having breakpoint temperatures of 271 C and 285 C were also studied in a similar manner. A straight line was drawn through the data at a slope equivalent to the slope of the lower stability fuel. The deposit formation rates for the three fuels were determined at 260 C, and a relative deposit formation rate at this temperature was calculated and plotted as a function of the individual fuel's breakpoint temperatures

Break junctions of the heavy-fermion superconductors

Mechanical-controllable break junctions of the heavy-fermion superconductors can show Josephson-like superconducting anomalies. But a systematic study on the contact size demonstrates that these anomalies are mainly due to Maxwell's resistance being suppressed in the superconducting heavy-fermion phase. Up to day, we could not find any superconducting features by vacuum-tunnelling spectroscopy, providing further evidence for the pair-breaking effect of the heavy-fermion interfaces.Comment: 5 pages, EPS figures included, REVTeX, to be published in Physica B 9

Managing strategies for organochlorine contaminated soils for a safe food production

Background: Organochlorine pesticides such as dieldrin, DDT and others are highly persistant pesticides, which were applied world wide against pests in horticulture, fruit and arable crops. Although they are forbidden since more than thirty years in the European Union (EU), the compounds remain still in soil. Several crops are known to accumulate these pesticides in eatable parts up to critical levels. For instance dieldrin is detected in high economic value crops such as cucumbers (Cucurbitaceae) and in tomatoes (Solanaceae). Besides plant type and climatic conditions, soil properties, e.g. pH and soil organic carbon content influence the pesticide uptake. In particular in labelled food and feed stuff production, such as organic farming according to EU Regulation (EEC) No. 2092/91, consumer expectations in safe, high quality food are extremely high. Since organic farming is prospering – more than 10% of vegetable production is certified organic in Switzerland – the organochlorine residues in organic food stuff have become a major issue for food control authorities. Enquires showed that imported food from EU countries was partly highly contaminated with organochlorine pesticides such as pumpkin seed and oil. Hence, the organochlorine problem in food stuff is expected to occur EU wide

Causal networks for climate model evaluation and constrained projections

Global climate models are central tools for understanding past and future climate change. The assessment of model skill, in turn, can benefit from modern data science approaches. Here we apply causal discovery algorithms to sea level pressure data from a large set of climate model simulations and, as a proxy for observations, meteorological reanalyses. We demonstrate how the resulting causal networks (fingerprints) offer an objective pathway for process-oriented model evaluation. Models with fingerprints closer to observations better reproduce important precipitation patterns over highly populated areas such as the Indian subcontinent, Africa, East Asia, Europe and North America. We further identify expected model interdependencies due to shared development backgrounds. Finally, our network metrics provide stronger relationships for constraining precipitation projections under climate change as compared to traditional evaluation metrics for storm tracks or precipitation itself. Such emergent relationships highlight the potential of causal networks to constrain longstanding uncertainties in climate change projections. Algorithms to assess causal relationships in data sets have seen increasing applications in climate science in recent years. Here, the authors show that these techniques can help to systematically evaluate the performance of climate models and, as a result, to constrain uncertainties in future climate change projections

Detecting and quantifying causal associations in large nonlinear time series datasets

Identifying causal relationships and quantifying their strength from observational time series data are key problems in disciplines dealing with complex dynamical systems such as the Earth system or the human body. Data-driven causal inference in such systems is challenging since datasets are often high dimensional and nonlinear with limited sample sizes. Here, we introduce a novel method that flexibly combines linear or nonlinear conditional independence tests with a causal discovery algorithm to estimate causal networks from large-scale time series datasets. We validate the method on time series of well-understood physical mechanisms in the climate system and the human heart and using large-scale synthetic datasets mimicking the typical properties of real-world data. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in detection power, which opens up entirely new possibilities to discover and quantify causal networks from time series across a range of research fields

Democracy promotion and presidential term limits

The end of the Cold War saw an unprecedented diffusion of democracy. This diffusion went hand in hand with the emergence of international democracy promotion. Through democracy promotion, democratic states attempt to support and protect democratic institutions around the world by means of bilateral and multilateral international cooperation as well as development cooperation. Yet, the 'wave of democratization' has ebbed away since the Cold War. Rather than an anabated spread of democracy, many countries that seemed on a transition-path to democracy are now stuck in a political state between autocracy and democracy, where democratic institutions formally exist but are compromised by authoritarian practices. Moreover, populist movements, illiberalism, and non-democratic institutional changes seem to challenge democracy as a political system even in countries where it was long since regarded as historically and socially consolidated. This as well as the increasing confidence of authoritarian regimes threaten to jeopardize the strides that worldwide democratization has made in the past three decades. Against this setting, the present thesis investigates the effectiveness of international democracy promotion in supporting and guarding the democratic institutionalization of political power. The research presented here zooms in on presidential term limits, a political institution meant to prevent the personalization of political power and ensure rotation in presidential office. While it was characteristic for countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, that began transitioning to democracy at the end of the Cold War to introduce presidential term limits in their newly designed constitutions, many of these provisions have since been challenged by incumbent presidents. Research shows that the evasion of term limits is associated with a worsening of the general state of democracy in a country. Evasion of presidential term limits is thus seen as an important manifestation for the weak institutionalization and further de-institutionalization of democracy. Although presidential term limits and in particular their circumvention have hence become a subject matter of interest to political scientists, many scholars do not focus in this regard explicitly on the role of international democracy support. I address this gap by studying the influence that international democracy promotion has on the evasion and introduction of presidential term limits. The first chapter provides a conceptual and theoretical introduction to presidential term limits and their relation to the weak institutionalization of democracy. Democracy promotion and the different forms it may take is also introduced before a brief outlook on the thesis is presented. In chapter two my co-author and I present a broad perspective on how democracy aid, which is the implementation of democracy promotion as foreign aid in development cooperation, is associated with the risk that presidents attempt to evade term limits as well as that they actually succeed in doing so. In chapter three, my co-author and I undertake a qualitative paired comparison of two cases where incumbent presidents attempted to circumvent a term limit but failed at different stages during the process. We compare the role that different means, or 'instruments' of democracy promotion played in both cases and how their effectiveness was predicated on favourable domestic conditions, particularly popular pro-democratic attitudes. In chapter four, I provide an 'in-depth' description of one of the two cases. The chapter employs a qualitative methodology designed to trace closely the influence of different factors for an outcome. I make use of this by systematically assessing how different democracy promotion instruments acted alone and in conjunction with domestic factors on the case's outcome. Finally, chapter five shifts the focus from the evasion of term limits to the introduction of term limits. Interested in the 'on-the-ground' practice of democracy promotion during ad hoc emerging reform episodes, I study the interactions between on the one hand domestic civil society and political opposition parties and on the other hand external embassies and international organizations. The research results show that international democracy promotion often has a limited, conditional influence on preventing the de-institutionalization of democracy. While it is evident according to a presented statistical analysis that democracy promotion through foreign aid is associated with lower risks of term limit evasions, this relation is substantial in effect size only for medium to high \emph{per capita}-amounts of democracy aid. Furthermore, results of the qualitative case studies show that democracy promotion operates through largely two mechanisms, a 'hard power' mechanism functioning according to a logic of consequentiality, conditionality, and leverage; and a 'soft power' mechanism functioning according to a logic of appropriateness and linkage. However, both work best in tandem, and are predicated on domestic conditions, particularly on favourable popular (pro-)democratic attitudes and a civil society that is free to mobilize. Finally, the research presented here also emphasizes the quandaries to which democracy promoters themselves are subject, especially when they need to respond ad hoc to a push for political liberalization in an hitherto (semi-)authoritarian country context. The thesis contributes to two interescting research fields, one on the evasion of presidential term limits, and the other on the role that international democracy support can play in preserving and promoting democratic institutions. Its results suggest policy implications particularly for the practice and implementation of democracy promotion. Foremost among these are that the level of spending of democracy aid in development cooperation as well as its temporal continuation can have substantial effects on guarding democratic institutions (chapter two); that 'hard power' and 'soft power' approaches of democracy promotion need to be used wisely in complementarity to one another (chapter three and four); that foreign states and international organizations need to react decisively against the curbing of the civic space, and also need to defend institutions integral to 'democracy as democracy' against transgressions and violations (chapters three to five); and finally, that democracy supporters, particularly foreign governments as democracy supporters, need to critically reflect on self-imposed internal restraints besides encountered external constraints in the practice of international democracy promotion

Fine-grain memory object representation in symbolic execution

Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) has seen risingpopularity as it allows to check applications for behaviours suchas error patterns automatically. One of its biggest challenges is thestate space explosion problem: DSE tries to evaluate all possibleexecution paths of an application. For every path, it needs torepresent the allocated memory and its accesses. Even thoughdifferent approaches have been proposed to mitigate the statespace explosion problem, DSE still needs to represent a multitudeof states in parallel to analyse them. If too many states arepresent, they cannot fit into memory, and DSE needs to terminatethem prematurely or store them on disc intermediately. Witha more efficient representation of allocated memory, DSE canhandle more states simultaneously, improving its performance.In this work, we introduce an enhanced, fine-grain and efficientrepresentation of memory that mimics the allocations of testedapplications. We tested GNU Coreutils using three differentsearch strategies with our implementation on top of the symbolicexecution engine KLEE. We achieve a significant reduction ofthe memory consumption of states by up to 99.06% (mean DFS:2%, BFS: 51%, Cov.: 49%), allowing to represent more states inmemory more efficiently. The total execution time is reduced byup to 97.81% (mean DFS: 9%, BFS: 7%, Cov.:4%)—a speedupof 49x in comparison to baseline KLEE