The Study of International Regimes

Hundreds or even thousands of international legal instruments on "the environment" are in existence. What happens to international environmental agreements once they are signed, and how does the process of implementing such agreements influence their effectiveness? These are the questions that motivate the IIASA project "Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments (IEC)". Research teams are examining these questions from many angles and with different methods. In this paper, the authors survey the literature on international "regimes". Regimes are social institutions that influence the behavior of states and their subjects. They consist of informal and formalized principles and norms, as well as specific rules and procedures. The term is explicitly broad and captures the unwritten understandings and relationships, as well as the formal legal agreements, that influence how states and individuals behave in any given issue-area. Scholarship over the last decade has elaborated how regimes are formed; this paper surveys that work and focuses on more recent scholarship that has turned from the formation of regimes to the question of what makes regimes "effective". The paper is one foundation for IEC's effort to build a database about the characteristics of international regimes. The database will consist of key variables related to the formation and implementation of international agreements and will allow systematic use of historical evidence from a large number of cases. The goal is to make possible the testing of hypotheses and the drawing of general conclusions about which variables are causally linked to "effectiveness". Existing research has led to hypotheses and tests based on single case studies or small samples of cases, but conclusions have been difficult to generalize to other cases because variables are left uncontrolled and the social processes are complex. In contrast, the IEC effort will include all the major variables related to effectiveness. The team will employ experts in each case to perform the coding, thus allowing for assessments (including subjective evaluations) of a wide range of data. The team is now preparing and testing a data protocol, as well as a manual that describes the major questions in the data protocol and how they should be answered. The protocol and manual will refine the variables we are coding and their relationship to major hypotheses

Heart Rate Turbulence as Risk-Predictor after Myocardial Infarction

Heart rate turbulence (HRT) is the baroreflex-mediated short-term oscillation of cardiac cycle lengths after spontaneous ventricular premature complexes. HRT is composed of a brief heart rate acceleration followed by a gradual heart rate deceleration. In high risk patients after myocardial infarction (MI) HRT is blunted or diminished. Since its first description in 1999 HRT emerged as one of the most potent risk factors after MI. Predictive power of HRT has been studied in more than 10,000 post-infarction patients. This review is intended to provide an overview of HRT as risk-predictor after MI

Enhancement of the Curie temperature in GaMnAs/InGaMnAs superlattices

We report on an enhancement of the Curie temperature in GaMnAs/InGaMnAs superlattices grown by low-temperature molecular beam epitaxy, which is due to thin InGaMnAs or InGaAs films embedded into the GaMnAs layers. The pronounced increase of the Curie temperature is strongly correlated to the In concentration in the embedded layers. Curie temperatures up to 110 K are observed in such structures compared to 60 K in GaMnAs single layers grown under the same conditions. A further increase in T$_C$ up to 130 K can be achieved using post-growth annealing at temperatures near the growth temperature. Pronounced thickness fringes in the high resolution X-ray diffraction spectra indicate good crystalline quality and sharp interfaces in the structures.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Appl. Phys. Let

What role does Fintech play in the banking industry today and how do banks have to adjust to it?

A clear definition of the term "FinTechs" does not yet exist. The combination of the words "Financial Services" and "Technology" generally refers to young companies providing technology-based systems with specialized and customer-focused financial services. FinTechs are following the trend towards digitization and personalization while driving digital progress in the financial market. In particular, they rely on customer-friendly, fast and convenient applications for user. FinTechs, however, are in the process of becoming a great challenge to traditional financial service providers such as banks, insurers and investment services, and moreover, are a great opportunity for banks to complement their services. The exact number of FinTech´s in the United Kingdom is difficult to quantify, which is partly due to the dynamics of the market. As digital progress keeps evolving, more and more companies are founded whose business models can be seen as FinTech. However, some of these companies have already ceased their activities. These new FinTech companies offer a very wide range of different business models. Many of these companies provide banking-like services, such as loan brokerage or automated financial advice. Others supplement these classic offerings with additional services, in particular in the area of payments and financial management. It is well known today that the new FinTech innovations have an enormous force on the financial sector. This progress also brings risks with it that have to be taken into consideration, prevented and managed in traditional banks business models. The UK plays a major role in the evolvement of FinTech as it is known as the world´s leading global financial services center. No other city in the world has had as many new FinTech start-ups as London, which puts a lot of pressure on regulators. The aim of this dissertation is to define the role that FinTechs play in todays banking industry and how banks have do adjust their business models to stay competitive

Electronic and magnetic properties of GaMnAs: Annealing effects

The effect of short-time and long-time annealing at 250C on the conductivity, hole density, and Curie temperature of GaMnAs single layers and GaMnAs/InGaMnAs heterostructures is studied by in-situ conductivity measurements as well as Raman and SQUID measurements before and after annealing. Whereas the conductivity monotonously increases with increasing annealing time, the hole density and the Curie temperature show a saturation after annealing for 30 minutes. The incorporation of thin InGaMnAs layers drastically enhances the Curie temperature of the GaMnAs layers.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Physica

Precise characterization of Li-6 Feshbach resonances using trap-sideband-resolved RF spectroscopy of weakly bound molecules

We perform radio-frequency dissociation spectroscopy of weakly bound 6Li2 Feshbach molecules using low-density samples of about 30 molecules in an optical dipole trap. Combined with a high magnetic field stability, this allows us to resolve the discrete trap levels in the radio-frequency dissociation spectra. This novel technique allows the binding energy of Feshbach molecules to be determined with unprecedented precision. We use these measurements as an input for a fit to the 6Li scattering potential using coupled-channel calculations. From this new potential, we determine the pole positions of the broad 6Li Feshbach resonances with an accuracy better than 7×10-4 of the resonance widths. This eliminates the dominant uncertainty for current precision measurements of the equation of state of strongly interacting Fermi gases. As an important consequence, our results imply a corrected value for the Bertsch parameter ξ measured by Ku et al. [ Science 335 563 (2012)], which is ξ=0.370(5)(8)