The globalization of U.S. business investment

This paper documents some key facts about foreign direct investment flows by U.S. businesses overseas and foreign businesses in the United States. We show how the pattern of flows has evolved, examine the sources and destination of these flows, document associated employment and productivity gains, and show how investment-related sales compare with traditional exports. While the United States is a net debtor to the rest of the world, direct investment overseas by U.S. businesses exceeds direct investment in the U.S. by foreign businesses. Furthermore, U.S. businesses seem to earn more on their foreign investments than foreign firms earn on their U.S. investments. The globalization of business investment is a long-standing phenomenon, but it has accelerated in recent years and become a source of concern for some, as it is intimately related to the debate on offshore outsourcing. Yet contrary to what some think, the bulk of U.S. investment overseas is in other high-income countries. And foreign investment in the U.S. has been an important source of employment growth in recent years.Investments, Foreign - United States

Openness and inflation

This paper reviews the evidence on the relationship between openness and inflation. There is a robust negative relationship across countries, first documented by Romer (1993), between a country's openness to trade and its long-run inflation rate. However, a key part of the standard explanation for this relationship—that central banks have a smaller incentive to engineer surprise inflations in more-open economies because the Phillips curve is steeper—seems at odds with the facts. While the United States is still not a very open economy by conventional measures, there are channels through which global developments may influence the nation's inflation. We document evidence that global resource utilization may play a role in U.S. inflation and suggest avenues for future research.Inflation (Finance) ; Trade ; Phillips curve

CLARIN: Common language resources and technology infrastructure

This paper gives an overview of the CLARIN project [1], which aims to create a research infrastructure that makes language resources and technology (LRT) available and readily usable to scholars of all disciplines, in particular the humanities and social sciences (HSS)

Miss Havisham’s dress: Materialising Dickens in film adaptations of Great Expectations

This article was published in Neo-Victorian Studies© 2012.This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens’s vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel’s portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham’s clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud

Extended brief intervention to address alcohol misuse in people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities living in the community (EBI-ID): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

There is some evidence that people with intellectual disabilities who live in the community are exposed to the same risks of alcohol use as the rest of the population. Various interventions have been evaluated in the general population to tackle hazardous or harmful drinking and alcohol dependence, but the literature evaluating interventions is very limited regarding intellectual disabilities. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommends that brief and extended brief interventions be used to help young persons and adults who have screened as positive for hazardous and harmful drinking. The objective of this trial is to investigate the feasibility of adapting and delivering an extended brief intervention (EBI) to persons with mild/moderate intellectual disability who live in the community and whose level of drinking is harmful or hazardous

Investigating adherence and quality of life in relation to group based exercise among individuals with multiple sclerosis: a systematic review.

Adherence to exercise and maintaining quality of life are primary concerns among patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This study sought to determine the effects of group-based exercise on adherence and quality of life (QOL) among individuals with MS of all ages and ability levels. The review included a variety of group exercise designs, settings, and instructors in order to identify particular components leading to positive or negative effects

Is Hot IT a False Economy? An Analysis of Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency as Temperatures Rise

As demand for digital services grows, there is need to improve efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of data centers. The largest energy consumer in any data center is the IT, followed by the systems dedicated to cooling. Aiming to improve efficiency, and driven by metrics like PUE, there is a trend towards running data centers hotter to reduce the cooling energy. There is little research investigating the effect this will have on the IT beyond failure rates. To ensure overall efficiency is improving, we must view the data center as a system of systems, taking a holistic view rather than focusing on individual sub-systems. In this paper we use industry standard benchmarks and a wind-tunnel to profile typical enterprise IT. We analyze the effect of environmental conditions on IT efficiency, showing minor increases in temperature or pressure impact the efficiency of servers. Using an idealized, simulated data center case study we show that the interaction between cooling systems, server behaviour and local climate are non-trivial and increasing temperatures has potential to worsen efficiency