Air quality management systems in urban regions: The case of the emission trading programme reclaim in Los Angeles and its transferability to Vienna

Clean air constitutes an essential element of the quality of living in urban regions. The discussion of how to manage air-quality in an era of shrinking public budgets and the trend towards deregulation has led to a rethinking of the present system in the urban region of Vienna. This paper is an attempt to contribute to these considerations by a comparative study of the "command&control" type of system operative in Austria (as regulated in the Austrian "Clean Air Act") and the new tradeable emission permit approach introduced in the urban region of Los Angeles (L.A.), California (the so called RECLAIM program) to reduce SOx and NOx emissions from stationary sources. The study utilized a survey of companies included in the respective pollution control programs in L.A. and Vienna, experts as well as administrators active in air quality management as a data base for the analysis. The survey is based on a mix of written responses to a questionnaire as well as personal interviews (conducted in 1996 and 97). Three main issues constituted the core of the analysis investigating the pros and cons of the approaches in practice: ? How much flexibility and discretionary latitude do the different policy systems grant the decision makers in the companies in the program to adopt the most efficient response to the request to reduce emissions? ? Which cost implications do the different systems have for the companies and the public management bodies? ? Which stimuli are provided in the long-run to innovate and promote emission reducing technical progress? Additionally the question was adressed which institutional changes were considered to have been the most troublesome in phasing out the old "command&control" type of system in L.A. and introducing the new RECLAIM program in 1994. Some basic propositions are developed how to introduce a tradeable permit system in the Vienna urban region. The results of the study do partly confirm some of the theses found in the theoretical literature, but offer additional insights on the institutional as well as political problems of intoducing a tradable emissions` permit scheme.

Translation of Time-Reversal Violation in the Neutral K-Meson System into a Table-Top Mechanical System

Weak interactions break time-reversal (T) symmetry in the two-state system of neutral K mesons. We present and discuss a two-state mechanical system, a Foucault-type pendulum on a rotating table, for a full representation of K0 K0bar transitions by the pendulum motions including T violation. The pendulum moves with two different oscillation frequencies and two different magnetic dampings. Its equation of motion is identical with the differential equation for the real part of the CPT-symmetric K-meson wave function. The pendulum is able to represent microscopic CP and T violation with CPT symmetry owing to the macroscopic Coriolis force which breaks the symmetry under reversal-of-motion. Video clips of the pendulum motions are shown as supplementary material.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 1 external url with video clip

Eine Untersuchung der Konvergenz der zehn mittel- und osteuropäischen EU-Mitgliedsstaaten mithilfe geeigneter Wirtschaftsindikatoren

Mit Blick auf die Bedeutung Osteuropas als Handelspartner ostdeutscher Unternehmen ist die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der seit 2004 zur EU gehörenden zehn mittel- und osteuropäischen Staaten (MOEStaaten) von großem Interesse. Der vorliegende Artikel analysiert deren Entwicklung relativ zu jener der EU-15-Staaten, wobei das Pro-Kopf-Einkommen als Indikator im Mittelpunkt steht. Nachdem zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre in den betrachteten Ländern eine tiefe Rezession einen deutlichen Rückgang der Wirtschaftsleistung verursachte, zeigte sich in den anschließenden anderthalb Jahrzehnten ein zum Teil beachtliches Wachstum. Zuletzt führte jedoch die globale Wirtschaftskrise auch in den MOE-Staaten zu einem deutlichen Einbruch der Wirtschaftskraft. Damit schwächten sich für Ostdeutschland auch die Wachstumsimpulse der Ausfuhren in die MOE-Staaten ab.

Einsatz der Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/ionisation-Time of Flight Massenspektrometrie (MALDI-TOF MS) in der mikrobiologischen Routinediagnostik

Very recently a novel method for differentiation of bacteria and fungi has been developed, that is, identification by means of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). This differentiation relies on the exact measurement of species-specific protein spectra of ribosomal proteins. It is at least as accurate as conventional biochemical differentiation methods, but provides results within minutes. In addition to differentiation of bacteria and yeasts grown on agar plates, direct identification is feasible from positive blood cultures as well as from urine samples of patients suffering from urinary tract infections. Future developments of MALDI-TOF MS for clinical microbiological purposes include the detection of beta-lactamase and carbapenemase activity as well as genotyping of bacteria below the species level

Data Aggregation for Hierarchical Clustering

Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) is likely the earliest and most flexible clustering method, because it can be used with many distances, similarities, and various linkage strategies. It is often used when the number of clusters the data set forms is unknown and some sort of hierarchy in the data is plausible. Most algorithms for HAC operate on a full distance matrix, and therefore require quadratic memory. The standard algorithm also has cubic runtime to produce a full hierarchy. Both memory and runtime are especially problematic in the context of embedded or otherwise very resource-constrained systems. In this section, we present how data aggregation with BETULA, a numerically stable version of the well known BIRCH data aggregation algorithm, can be used to make HAC viable on systems with constrained resources with only small losses on clustering quality, and hence allow exploratory data analysis of very large data sets

Bildung und subjektives Wohlbefinden im Zeitverlauf, 1984-2002: Eine Mehrebenenanalyse

Zusammenfassung: Diese Analyse des subjektiven Wohlbefindens verfolgt zwei Ziele. Zum einen wird die Entwicklung des subjektiven Wohlbefindens über die Periode zwischen 1984 und 2002 untersucht. Dabei werden Alters-, Perioden- und Kohorteneffekte simultan betrachtet. Als soziale Mechanismen hinter den Wandlungsprozessen, das heißt als Prädiktoren für das subjektive Wohlbefinden und die Variation im Zeitverlauf, werden Bildung und Bildungsexpansion thematisiert und in die Analysemodelle eingeführt. Um die Lebenszufriedenheit unabhängig von gesundheitlichen Aspekten zu untersuchen, wird die Gesundheitszufriedenheit kontrolliert. Methodisch folgt der Beitrag einem Mehrebenenansatz. Zur Datenanalyse werden Hierarchisch Lineare Modelle (HLM) herangezogen. Detailliert wird auf die benötigte Datenstruktur, die Anwendbarkeit und die Parameter-Schätzungen von HLM eingegangen. Die Datengrundlage bildet das Sozio-Ökonomische Panel (SOEP), wobei nur die Teil-Stichprobe der Westdeutschen in die Analyse einbezogen wird. In den Resultaten zeigen sich - neben einem starken Einfluss der Gesundheitszufriedenheit - u.a. robuste Bildungseffekte, ein substanzieller Alterseffekt und ein schwacher negativer Kohorteneffekt auf die Lebenszufriedenhei