Technologie, Innovation und Entrepreneurship in der Schweiz: Eine Standortbestimmung

Technologie, Innovation und Entrepreneurship haben in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung für das Wirtschaftswachstum gewonnen. Vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Wachstumsschwäche der schweizerischen Volkswirtschaft wird in dieser Arbeit die Schweiz bezüglich der genannten Faktoren untersucht.Ein internationaler Vergleich führt zu uneinheitlichen Ergebnissen. Bei vielen der betrachteten Indikatoren wird Stagnation auf hohem Niveau festgestellt. Gleichzeitig kann beobachtet werden, dass die Schweiz wenig aufgeschlossen gegenüber neuen Technologien ist. Die Gründe hierfür werden im (noch) hohen Wohlstandsniveau der Schweiz vermutet

An Investigation Into the Relationship Between Figurative Language and Biblical Typology

Excerpt: Because of those who have taken an extreme position concerning typology, the subject has been either distorted or discarded. In both cases it has been very unfortunate. If it can be established that typology is a valid tool to use in studying the Bible, then a great door and effectual is opened to the Bible student . The problem is, has been, and always will be : there are many adversaries . The preliminary assumption of the writer was that typology is not unscriptual or dangerous ; rather the misuser of typology is the one that needs to be feared. Biblical laws or guidelines need to be formed that will harmonize the study of typology with typology itself; then the scholar will have freedom of the entire pasture without jumping the fence . The need was thus seen to encourage the informed scholar, educate the uninformed, and edify the misinformed in the field of Biblical typology. It was the objective, therefore, of this writer to accomplish this purpose

Survey of Human Mitochondrial Diseases Using New Genomic/Proteomic Tools

BACKGROUND. We have constructed Bayesian prior-based, amino-acid sequence profiles for the complete yeast mitochondrial proteome and used them to develop methods for identifying and characterizing the context of protein mutations that give rise to human mitochondrial diseases. (Bayesian priors are conditional probabilities that allow the estimation of the likelihood of an event - such as an amino-acid substitution - on the basis of prior occurrences of similar events.) Because these profiles can assemble sets of taxonomically very diverse homologs, they enable identification of the structurally and/or functionally most critical sites in the proteins on the basis of the degree of sequence conservation. These profiles can also find distant homologs with determined three-dimensional structures that aid in the interpretation of effects of missense mutations. RESULTS. This survey reports such an analysis for 15 missense mutations one insertion and three deletions involved in Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, Leigh syndrome, mitochondrial neurogastrointestinal encephalomyopathy, Mohr-Tranebjaerg syndrome, iron-storage disorders related to Friedreich's ataxia, and hereditary spastic paraplegia. We present structural correlations for seven of the mutations. CONCLUSIONS. Of the 19 mutations analyzed, 14 involved changes in very highly conserved parts of the affected proteins. Five out of seven structural correlations provided reasonable explanations for the malfunctions. As additional genetic and structural data become available, this methodology can be extended. It has the potential for assisting in identifying new disease-related genes. Furthermore, profiles with structural homologs can generate mechanistic hypotheses concerning the underlying biochemical processes - and why they break down as a result of the mutations.United States Department of Energy (DE-FG02-98ER62558); National Science Foundation (DBI-9807993

Broad levels in 17^{17}O and their relevance for the astrophysical s-process

Levels in $^{17}$O affect the astrophysical s-process in two opposite ways. The neutron production is enhanced by resonances in the $^{13}$C($\alpha$,$n$)$^{16}$O reaction at excitation energies around 7 MeV in $^{17}$O, and the number of available neutrons is reduced by low-lying resonances in the $^{16}$O($n$,$\gamma$)$^{17}$O reaction corresponding to levels in $^{17}$O with excitation energies of $4-5$ MeV. The present work uses the $^{19}$F($d$,$\alpha$)$^{17}$O reaction to determine absolute widths of the relevant levels in $^{17}$O. The results improve the uncertainties of the previously adopted values and resolve a discrepancy between recent studies for the $1/2^+$ level close to the threshold of the $^{13}$C($\alpha$,$n$)$^{16}$O reaction. In addition, improved excitation energies and widths are provided for several states in $^{17}$O up to excitation energies close to 8 MeV.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. C (in press

Enantioselective Reactions of Palladium Enolates

Synthetic efforts directed at preparing certain target molecules highlight deficiencies in the synthetic technology currently available to chemists. Enolates are among the most important synthetic intermediates for synthesis, but general means for enolate functionalizations are not available for many transformations. In order to address these limitations in synthetic technology, novel enantioselective transformations are developed and applied to total syntheses of biologically active natural products. First, to address the challenge of generating all-carbon quaternary stereocenters, a palladium-catalyzed allylic alkylation reaction is discovered and optimized for allyl enol carbonate and silyl enol ether substrate classes. Certain enolate precursors are not accessible using these substrates, and therefore a method employing racemic allyl β-ketoester substrates is developed. In addition to solving the problem of regiospecific enolate generation, these transformations are conceptually interesting due to the stereoablative enantioconvergent mechanism. Studies of the mechanism of the above transformation suggest the intermediacy of a chiral palladium enolate. Since enolate functionalization reactions are valuable to synthetic chemistry and general protocols are rare, different electrophiles are explored in addition to the allyl electrophiles used in quaternary center formation. These studies lead to the discovery of enantioselective protonation reactions generating tertiary stereocenters. To demonstrate the importance of enantioselective enolate functionalization reactions in synthesis, the allylic alkylation reaction is applied in the total synthesis of cassiol and the formal synthesis of platencin.</p

A Massively Parallel Algorithm for the Approximate Calculation of Inverse p-th Roots of Large Sparse Matrices

We present the submatrix method, a highly parallelizable method for the approximate calculation of inverse p-th roots of large sparse symmetric matrices which are required in different scientific applications. We follow the idea of Approximate Computing, allowing imprecision in the final result in order to be able to utilize the sparsity of the input matrix and to allow massively parallel execution. For an n x n matrix, the proposed algorithm allows to distribute the calculations over n nodes with only little communication overhead. The approximate result matrix exhibits the same sparsity pattern as the input matrix, allowing for efficient reuse of allocated data structures. We evaluate the algorithm with respect to the error that it introduces into calculated results, as well as its performance and scalability. We demonstrate that the error is relatively limited for well-conditioned matrices and that results are still valuable for error-resilient applications like preconditioning even for ill-conditioned matrices. We discuss the execution time and scaling of the algorithm on a theoretical level and present a distributed implementation of the algorithm using MPI and OpenMP. We demonstrate the scalability of this implementation by running it on a high-performance compute cluster comprised of 1024 CPU cores, showing a speedup of 665x compared to single-threaded execution

Pooling sovereignty risks: The case of environmental treaties and international debt

A model is analysed in which a sovereign country has independent obligations to repay a creditor bank and to keep an environmental treaty. It is shown that the linkage of both obligations through a cross-default contract may reduce the sovereign risk attached to both the debt and the environmental contracts. Moreover, such a linkage will create an incentive for the sovereign and the bank to engage in a debt-for-natureswap, the anticipation of which increases the initial incentive for a cross-default contract to be entered into

Arc and path consistency revisited

Journal ArticleMackworth and Freuder have analyzed the time complexity of several constraint satisfaction algorithms [4]. We present here new algorithms for arc and path consistency and show that the arc consistency algorithm is optimal in time complexity and of the same order space complexity as the earlier algorithms. A refined solution for the path consistency problem is proposed. However, the space complexity of the path consistency algorithm makes it practicable only for small problems. These algorithms are the result of the synthesis techniques used in ALICE (a general constraint satisfaction system) and local consistency methods

Accommodating User-Group Characteristics to Improve the Acceptance of Executive Information Systems— State of the Art and User-Interface Components for Up Close and Personalized Configuration

In executive information systems (EIS) design, where idiosyncratic users must often be considered, understanding users andtheir preferences is important. Since user interfaces are a highly visible EIS component, they are an important lever for theiracceptance. To accommodate executives\u27 growing range of user preferences, this article develops building blocks for theuser-interface to make up close and personalized EIS possible. As this work represents a first step in a larger researchproject, we conduct a multidisciplinary literature review on how the EIS design process can accommodate user preferences,thus improving EIS acceptance with the right user interface. Based on three findings regarding their design, we proposebuilding blocks for user-interface design covering three clusters of components: information presentation, dialog control, andpredefined functions. Finally, we incorporate their components in an EIS prototype to start evaluating our proposal\u27s utility