A Solution for Europe's Banking Problem

The European Union's aggressive response to the global financial crisis has prevented financial meltdown, but the continent's banking industry remains very fragile. Experts estimate coming losses in excess of $500 billion, with very little written down so far. These losses plus the problems in Eastern Europe portend widespread cross-border bank insolvencies. Traditional banking (in corporate finance and household savings) remains predominant in the European economies, so healing the banking system is crucial for sustained recovery in Europe. Lingering banking fragility would result in constant disruption or misallocation of bank credit and hinder returns to savers, thus depressing investment and consumption. Ongoing fragility will also harm European trend productivity growth by skipping some investment and R&D cycles, misallocating capital to lower-return projects, and wasting human capital by consigning some workers to long-term unemployment. It will take time and political will to create an EU banking supervisory architecture, but Europe cannot afford to wait. Posen and Véron recommend that Europe engage in system-wide "triage" of major banks on the continent by capital position, leading to public restructuring of the weakest ones. They propose that relevant countries jointly create a temporary supranational agency or Treuhand to implement the triage process, catalyze recapitalizations, and manage any distressed assets that would fall into public ownership. Such a trustee would avoid both harmful races to the bottom within Europe by national supervisors and fiscal transfers between European states for bailouts.

Empirical Uncertainty Estimators for Astrometry from Digital Databases

In order to understand the positional uncertainties of arbitrary objects in several of the current major databases containing astrometric information, a sample of extragalactic radio sources with precise positions in the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) is compared with the available positions of their optical counterparts. The discrepancies between the radio and various optical positions are used to derive empirical uncertainty estimators for the USNO-A2.0, USNO-A1.0, Guide Star Selection System (GSSS) images, and the first and second Digitized Sky Surveys (DSS-I and DSS-II). In addition, an estimate of the uncertainty when the USNO-A2.0 catalog is transferred to different image data is provided. These optical astrometric frame uncertainties can in some cases be the dominant error term when cross-identifying sources at different wavelengths.Comment: 12 pages including 2 figures and 1 table. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, October 1999. Values in Table 1 for DSS I corrected 99-07-1

The assessment of the relationship between information technology (IT) and airport performance

The evolution of the airport business is demonstrated by airports that are adopting new business strategies and commercial models, which allow them to be, for example, service providers instead of real-estate managers, with the focus on cost reduction and increasing non-aeronautical (commercial) revenues. Information technology (IT) can be used by airports to achieve their business goals, such as enhancing performance by delivering cost reductions and generating additional revenue streams. Airports operate in an increasingly competitive and dynamic market, with the aim of attracting a larger share of hub traffic from neighbouring airports. Therefore, financial and operational performance will be key elements for airlines when choosing a new airport destination. The research shows that airports are more focused on passenger satisfaction, resulting in airport performance indicators that have the passenger at its operational core and performance targets (e.g. Airport Service Quality passenger satisfaction survey). IT plays an important role in increasing airport performance through the automation of processes such as the deployment of common-use check-in desks and self-service check-in kiosks. Studies of other industries have shown evidence that IT impacts firm performance, but there have been few studies related to the airport industry. Thus, the aim of this research is to assess the relationship between IT and airport performance, and it proposes a conceptual framework to assess the relationship between IT and airport performance by drawing from studies in other industries. Two methodologies were used in this research, the first one was the case study, and the second one was the online survey. The case studies consisted of 16 faceto- face interviews with senior staff representing two airports in Asia, one airport in Australia, and one airport in Europe. The case studies result show that there is a relationship between IT and airport performance ... [cont.]

Host Galaxies of low z Radio-loud Quasars: A search of HST archives

We searched the HST archives for unpublished WFPC2 images of low redshift (z<0.5) radio loud quasars (RLQ). This led to the identification of 11 objects. We present here the results of the analysis of these images from which we derive the properties of their host galaxies. All objects are clearly resolved and their surrounding nebulosity is consistent with an elliptical galaxy model. These new data, together with previous published HST observations, form a sample of 34 sources which significantly expands all previous studies of low redshift RLQ based on HST data. For this full sample we derive the average absolute magnitude of the host galaxies =-24.01+/-0.48, and the effective radius =10.5+/-3.7kpc. No significant correlation is found between the nucleus and the host galaxy luminosity. Using the relationship between black hole mass (M_BH) and bulge luminosity we investigate the relation between M_BH and total radio power for RLQ and compare with other classes of radio sources. The overall distribution of AGN in the plane M_BH-P(radio) exhibits a trend for increasing M_BH with increasing P(radio) but with a substantial spread. RLQ occupy the region of most powerful sources and most massive BH. The quasars appear to emit over a wide range of power with respect to their Eddington luminosity as deduced by the estimated M_BH.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, ApJ in pres

Quasars in the 2MASS Second Incremental Data Release

Using the 2MASS Second Incremental Data Release, we have searched for near infrared counterparts to 13214 quasars from the Veron-Cetty & Veron(2000) catalog. We have detected counterparts within 4 arcsec for 2277 of the approximately 6320 quasars within the area covered by the 2MASS Second Incremental Data Release. Only 1.6% of these are expected to be chance coincidences. Though this sample is heterogeneous, we find that known radio-loud quasars are more likely to have large near-infrared-to-optical luminosity ratios than radio-quiet quasars are, at a statistically significant level. This is consistent with dust-reddened quasars being more common in radio-selected samples than in optically-selected samples, due to stronger selection effects against dust-reddened quasars in the latter. We also find a statistically significant dearth of optically luminous quasars with large near-infrared-to-optical luminosity ratios. This can be explained in a dust obscuration model but not in a model where synchrotron emission extends from the radio into the near-infrared and creates such large ratios. We also find that selection of quasar candidates from the B-J/J-K color-color diagram, modelled on the V-J/J-K selection method of Warren, Hewett & Foltz (2000), is likely to be more sensitive to dust-obscured quasars than selection using only infrared-infrared colors.Comment: To be published in May issue of Astronomical Journal (26 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables) Replaced Figure 6 and

Comment on "Correlation of the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays with Nearby Extragalactic Objects"

We argue that the data published by the Pierre Auger Collaboration (arXiv:0711.2256) disfavor at 99% confidence level their hypothesis that most of the highest-energy cosmic rays are protons from nearby astrophysical sources, either Active Galactic Nuclei or other objects with a similar spatial distribution.Comment: 1000 words, 2 figures, scicite.st

Spectroscopy and 3D imaging of the Crab nebula

Spectroscopy of the Crab nebula along different slit directions reveals the 3 dimensional structure of the optical nebula. On the basis of the linear radial expansion result first discovered by Trimble (1968), we make a 3D model of the optical emission. Results from a limited number of slit directions suggest that optical lines originate from a complicated array of wisps that are located in a rather thin shell, pierced by a jet. The jet is certainly not prominent in optical emission lines, but the direction of the piercing is consistent with the direction of the X-ray and radio jet. The shell's effective radius is ~ 79 seconds of arc, its thickness about a third of the radius and it is moving out with an average velocity 1160 km/s.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, submitted to ApJ, 3D movie of the Crab nebula available at http://www.fiz.uni-lj.si/~vidrih

Probing the Ionizing Continuum of Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies. I.Observational Results

We present optical spectra and emission-line ratios of 12 Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) galaxies that we observed to study the ionizing EUV continuum. A common feature in the EUV continuum of active galactic nuclei is the big blue bump (BBB), generally associated with thermal accretion disk emission. While Galactic absorption prevents direct access to the EUV range, it can be mapped by measuring the strength of a variety of forbidden optical emission lines that respond to different EUV continuum regions. We find that narrow emission-line ratios involving [OII]3727, Hbeta, [OIII]5007, [OI]6300, Halpha,[NII]6583, and [SII]6716,6731 indicate no significant difference between NLS1s and Broad-Line Seyfert 1 (BLS1) galaxies, which suggests that the spectral energy distributions of their ionizing EUV - soft X-ray continua are similar. The relative strength of important forbidden high ionization lines like [NeV]3426 compared to HeII4686 and the relative strength of [FeX]6374 appear to show the same range as in BLS1 galaxies. However, a trend of weaker F([OI]6300)/F(Halpha) emission-line ratios is indicated for NLS1s compared to BLS1s. To recover the broad emission-line profiles we used Gaussian components. This approach indicates that the broad Hbeta profile can be well described with a broad component (FWHM = 3275 +- 800 km/s) and an intermediate broad component (FWHM = 1200 +- 300 km/s). The width of the broad component is in the typical range of normal BLS1s. The emission-line flux that is associated with the broad component in these NLS1s amounts to at least 60% of the total flux. Thus it dominates the total line flux, similar to BLS1 galaxies.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figures. accepted for publication in the Astrophys.Journa

Classification of Static Charged Black Holes in Higher Dimensions

The uniqueness theorem for static charged higher dimensional black hole containing an asymptotically flat spacelike hypersurface with compact interior and with both degenerate and non-degenerate components of event horizon is proposed. By studies of the near-horizon geometry of degenerate horizons one was able to eliminate the previous restriction concerning the inequality fulfilled by the charges of the adequate components of the aforementioned horizons.Comment: 9 pages, RevTex, to be published in Phys.Rev. D1