Coargumenthood and the processing of pronouns

We report three eye-movement experiments and an offline task investigating structural constraints on pronoun resolution in different contexts. This included ‘coargument’ contexts in which a pronoun was the direct object of a verb (‘The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had noticed him’), so-called picture noun phrases (‘The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had a picture of him’) and picture noun phrases with a possessor (‘The surgeon remembered about Jonathan’s picture of him’). In each eye-movement experiment, we observed longer reading times when the nonlocal antecedent (‘the surgeon’) mismatched in stereotypical gender with the pronoun, but little evidence of the gender of the local antecedent (‘Jonathan’) influencing reading times. The offline task suggested readers occasionally interpret pronouns as referring to local antecedents, especially in non-coargument contexts. These results suggest that structural constraints constitute more highly weighted cues to antecedent retrieval than gender congruency during the initial stages of memory retrieval during pronoun resolution

Some Curvature Problems in Semi-Riemannian Geometry

In this survey article we review several results on the curvature of semi-Riemannian metrics which are motivated by the positive mass theorem. The main themes are estimates of the Riemann tensor of an asymptotically flat manifold and the construction of Lorentzian metrics which satisfy the dominant energy condition.Comment: 25 pages, LaTeX, 4 figure

Political institutions and debt crises

This paper shows that political institutions matter in explaining defaults on external and domestic debt obligations. We explore a large number of political and macroeconomic variables using a non-parametric technique to predict safety from default. The advantage of this technique is that it is able to identify patterns in the data that are not captured in standard probit analysis. We find that political factors matter, and do so in different ways for democratic and non-democratic regimes, and for domestic and external debt. In democracies, a parliamentary system or sufficient checks and balances almost guarantee the absence of default on external debt when economic fundamentals or liquidity are sufficiently strong. In dictatorships, high stability and tenure play a similar role for default on domestic debt

Lean buildings: energy efficient commercial buildings in Germany

The paper presents the description and initial evaluation of a number of commercial large scale buildings (>1000m2) situated across Germany. The study has been carried out within the framework of the evaluation program, SolarBau, which has been initiated and funded by the German Ministry of Economy and Technology. The program funds up to 25 demonstration buildings and their collective evaluation. Funding is only provided at the design stage of the buildings for additional investigations and simulations of variants, which feature elements of passive cooling, and after construction for a thorough monitoring of the finished buildings. The absence of investment subsidies ensured that all design solutions were realized under representative economic conditions. The technical requirements for admittance of a building to the program were an anticipated total primary energy use (heating, cooling and lighting) below 100 kWh/(m2a) [31,700 Btu/(ft2a)] combined with excellent vis ual and thermal comfort conditions. These ambitious goals can only be reached by a lean building featuring increased thermal insulation, intensive use of daylight and a strategy for passive cooling. The reduced HVAC-system relies heavily on a building whose design carefully considers the given climatic boundary conditions. In the moderate German climate, the focus usually lies on the avoidance of unwanted solar gains in the summer. The remaining internal loads can often be counterbalanced by controlled ventilation, additional nocturnal ventilation or by earth-to-air heat exchangers