Accounting for inequality in the EU: Income disparities between and within member states and overall income inequality

In fighting inequality and poverty in the EU emphasis has been placed in reducing differences between countries and/or regions regarding certain macroeconomic indicators, such as the GDP per capita. However, from a policy perspective it is important to know the extent to which overall inequality in the EU is attributed to inequality between the individual countries and the extent to which it is attributed to inequality within them. In addition, it is important to know the extent to which income disparities in each individual member state contribute to overall EU inequality. Following certain assumptions, hypotheses and alternative scenarios, this paper investigates the above questions, employing a decomposition analysis of inequality by population subgroup and utilizing data and information provided by the CHER programme. A number of alternative inequality indices were used to capture the different aspects of inequality and test the robustness of the estimates. The suggested typologies of welfare state regimes were also examined to explain the differences in income inequality between countries and their contribution to overall EU inequality. Policy analysts and policy makers could benefit greatly from such information in evaluating, designing and implementing interventions to deal with inequality and poverty in the EU.Income inequality; decomposition analysis; welfare state regimes; EU

Designing interoperable museum information systems

Museum collections are characterized by heterogeneity, since they usually host a plethora of objects of categories, while each of them requires different description policies and metadata standards. Moreover the museum records, which keep the history and evolution of the hosted collections, request proactive curation in order to preserve this rich and diverse information. In this paper, the architecture of an innovative museum information system, as well as its implementation details is presented. In particular the requirements and the system architecture are presented along with the problems that were encountered. The main directions of the system design are (a) to increase interoperability levels and therefore assist proactive curation and (b) to enhance navigation by the usage of handheld devices. The first direction is satisfied by the design of a rich metadata schema based on the CIDOC/CRM standard. The second direction is fulfilled by the implementation of a module, which integrates the museum database with a subsystem appropriate to support user navigation into the museum floors and rooms. The module is expressed as a navigation functionality, which is accessed through handheld devices and peripherals, such as PDAs and RFID tags. The proposed system is functional and operates into the Solomos Museum, situated in Zakynthos island, Greece

Intermodal passenger transport and destination competitiveness in Greece

Effective transport is impeded by a number of caveats, including problems of accessibility to the destination, poor infrastructure, social, and environmental issues. In this context, the implementation of intermodal solutions is essential to meet customer demand, resolve problems of transport supply, and enhance destination competitiveness. Based on a suitable theoretical framework, this paper examines the attitude of Greek passengers towards intermodal transport and their willingness-to-pay more to be provided with such a seamless service to allow for (partial at least) cost recovery of the related transport infrastructure. The findings suggest that there are many respondents who would actually pay more to be provided with a door-to-door intermodal travel experience; answers are highly dependent on their place of residence

Airline Deregulation, Competitive Environment and Safety

Air traffic has substantially increased since the introduction of deregulation in both the USA and the European Union. Moreover, aircraft accidents involving fatalities have exhibited a downward trend over time. Still, a series of recently publicized accidents has raised again a serious issue, namely whether cost reduction in a deregulated aviation environment is achieved at the expense of safety standards. To address this question, the paper proposes a mathematical model, which highlights the relationship between competitive behaviour and tort liability. The model has important policy implications suggesting that the level of airline penalisation should be reduced when market rivalry is relaxed and conversely.

Developing a Formal Model for Mind Maps

Mind map is a graphical technique, which is used to represent words, concepts, tasks or other connected items or arranged around central topic or idea. Mind maps are widely used, therefore exist plenty of software programs to create or edit them, while there is none format for the model representation, neither a standard format. This paper presents and effort to propose a formal mind map model aiming to describe the structure, content, semantics and social connections. The structure describes the basic mind map graph consisted of a node set, an edge set, a cloud set and a graphical connections set. The content includes the set of the texts and objects linked to the nodes. The social connections are the mind maps of other users, which form the neighborhood of the mind map owner in a social networking system. Finally, the mind map semantics is any true logic connection between mind map textual parts and a concept. Each of these elements of the model is formally described building the suggested mind map model. Its establishment will support the application of algorithms and methods towards their information extraction

Economic Recession, Job Vulnerability, and Tourism Decision Making: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Occupational uncertainty has a considerable effect upon consumer decisions during a recession, especially with respect to discretionary products and services such as tourism. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the study examines the complex relations among job vulnerability, disposable income for tourism, marketing activities, and price and quality issues for Greek holiday makers returning from their vacations. The article also compares QCA with the two dominant linear methods of analysis (i.e. correlation and regression) and highlights the suitability of QCA when dealing with complexity in tourism. The results reveal four configurations explaining the attributes of Greek residents’ tourism decisions, characterized by value-for-money orientation, achievement of best available purchase, psychological strengthening, and price sensitivity. The study also employs predictive validity for the presented models. The findings are valid from both a methodological and managerial perspective suggesting new research insights

Evolving airline and airport business models

Document type: Part of book or chapter of boo

Soliton Cellular Automata Associated With Crystal Bases

We introduce a class of cellular automata associated with crystals of irreducible finite dimensional representations of quantum affine algebras U'_q(\hat{\geh}_n). They have solitons labeled by crystals of the smaller algebra U'_q(\hat{\geh}_{n-1}). We prove stable propagation of one soliton for \hat{\geh}_n = A^{(2)}_{2n-1}, A^{(2)}_{2n}, B^{(1)}_n, C^{(1)}_n, D^{(1)}_n and D^{(2)}_{n+1}. For \gh_n = C^{(1)}_n, we also prove that the scattering matrices of two solitons coincide with the combinatorial R matrices of U'_q(C^{(1)}_{n-1})-crystals.Comment: 29 pages, 1 figure, LaTeX2

Digital Repositories and the Semantic Web: Semantic Search and Navigation for DSpace

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : DSpace User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-21 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMIn many digital repository implementations, resources are often described against some flavor of metadata schema, popularly the Dublin Core Element Set (DCMES), as is the case with the DSpace system. However, such an approach cannot capture richer semantic relations that exist or may be implied, in the sense of a Semantic Web ontology. Therefore we first suggest a method in order to semantically intensify the underlying data model and develop an automatic translation of the flatly organized metadata information to this new ontology. Then we propose an implementation that provides for inference-based knowledge discovery, retrieval and navigation on top of digital repositories, based on this ontology. We apply this technique to real information stored in the University of Patras Institutional Repository that is based on DSpace, and confirm that more powerful, inference-based queries can indeed be performed