Discussion Report: Restructuring Insolvent Companies in the UK and in the US

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.Peer Reviewe

Anthropometry of love: Height and gender asymmetries in interethnic marriages

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Economics and Human Biology. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for the husband to be taller than the wife, can help explain these ethnic-specific gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Millennium Cohort Study. Specifically, we find that ethnic differences in propensity to intermarry with Whites shrink when we control for the proportion of suitable partners with respect to height. © 2010 Elsevier B.V

Evaluation of Central Auditory Discrimination Abilities in Older Adults

The present study focuses on auditory discrimination abilities in older adults aged 65-89 years. We applied the ‘Leipzig Inventory for Patient Psychoacoustic’ (LIPP), a psychoacoustic test battery specifically designed to identify deficits in central auditory processing. These tests quantify the just noticeable differences (JND) for the three basic acoustic parameters (i.e. frequency, intensity, and signal duration). Three different test modes (monaural, dichotic signal/noise [s/n] and interaural) were used, stimulus level was 35dB sensation level. The tests are designed as three-alternative forced-choice procedure with a maximum-likelihood procedure estimating p=0,5 correct response value. These procedures have proven to be highly efficient and provide a reliable outcome. The measurements yielded significant age-dependent deteriorations in the ability to discriminate single acoustic features pointing to progressive impairments in central auditory processing. The degree of deterioration was correlated to the different acoustic features and to the test modes. Most prominent, interaural frequency and signal duration discrimination at low test frequencies was elevated which indicates a deterioration of time- and phase-dependent processing at brain stem and cortical levels. LIPP proves to be an effective tool to identify basic pathophysiological mechanisms and the source of a specific impairment in auditory processing of the elderly

Modelling the atmospheric dispersion of radiotracers in small-scale, controlled detonations: validation of dispersion models using field test data

A series of modelling exercises, based on field tests conducted in the Czech Republic, were carried out by the ‘Urban’ Working Groups as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Environmental Modelling for Radiation Safety II, Modelling and Data for Radiological Impact Assessment (MODARIA) I and MODARIA II international data compilation and model validation programmes. In the first two of these programmes, data from a series of field tests involving dispersion of a radiotracer, 99mTc, from small-scale, controlled detonations were used in a comparison of model predictions with field measurements of deposition. In the third programme, data from a similar field test, involving dispersion of 140La instead of 99mTc, were used. Use of longer-lived 140La as a radiotracer allowed a greater number of measurements to be made over a greater distance from the dispersion point and in more directions than was possible for the earlier tests involving shorter-lived 99mTc. The modelling exercises included both intercomparison of model predictions from several participants and comparison of model predictions with the measured data. Several models (HotSpot, LASAIR, ADDAM/CSA-ERM, plus some research models) were used in the comparisons, which demonstrated the challenges of modelling dispersion of radionuclides from detonations and the need for appropriate meteorological measurements