Supersymmetry Breaking and alpha'-Corrections to Flux Induced Potentials

We obtain the vacuum solutions for M-theory compactified on eight-manifolds with non-vanishing four-form flux by analyzing the scalar potential appearing in the three-dimensional theory. Many of these vacua are not supersymmetric and yet have a vanishing three-dimensional cosmological constant. We show that in the context of Type IIB compactifications on Calabi-Yau threefolds with fluxes and external brane sources alpha'-corrections generate a correction to the supergravity potential proportional to the Euler number of the internal manifold which spoils the no-scale structure appearing in the classical potential. This indicates that alpha'-corrections may indeed lead to a stabilization of the radial modulus appearing in these compactifications.Comment: 28 pages, no figures, reference adde

Revisiting the Use of Customer Information for CRM

For the past decade, customer relationship management (CRM) has been one of the priorities in marketing research and practice. However, many of the CRM systems did not perform as the companies expected. As such shortcoming could be due to inappropriate data input, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the empirical CRM literature. Along the phases of the CRM process, the authors show which kind of data has successfully proven to achieve the CRM objectives. The study provides researchers with a review of the empirical research on CRM and allows practitioners insights on the usability of customer data for CRM. --Customer Relationship Management (CRM),Customer Data

The String of 10,000 Firecrackers

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS THE STRING OF 10,000 FIRECRACKERS by Jan Becker Florida International University, 2017 Miami, Florida Professor Les Standiford, Major Professor THE STRING OF 10,000 FIRECRACKERS is a collection of personal essays that examines the narrator’s upbringing as a Marine Corps brat, and her experience immigrating into civilian society in the United States after a childhood segregated behind barbed-wire on military bases. The collection begins with the title essay, when the narrator, at nine years-of-age, tosses an ignited string of 10,000 firecrackers at her stepfather, a decorated Vietnam veteran, triggering post-traumatic flashback, and a reflection on the author’s experience recovering traumatic amnesia. Intended to mimic the disjointed recall of trauma, the opening essay also serves to inform the subsequent essays in the collection, which take place between 1974 and 2014. Thematically, the collection explores: alienation from homeland and family, the diasporic nature of military life, the devastating effects of war, childhood sexual abuse, violence, death and grief, breaking the silence of long-held family secrets, and finding a place to call home

Analyzing Consistency of Formal Requirements

In the development of safety-critical embedded systems, requirements-driven approaches are widely used. Expressing functional requirements in formal languages enables reasoning and formal testing. This paper proposes the Simplified Universal Pattern (SUP) as an easy to use formalism and compares it to SPS, another commonly used specification pattern system. Consistency is an important property of requirements that can be checked already in early design phases. However, formal definitions of consistency are rare in literature and tent to be either too weak or computationally too complex to be applicable to industrial systems. Therefore this work proposes a new formal consistency notion, called partial consistency, for the SUP that is a trade-off between exhaustiveness and complexity. Partial consistency identifies critical cases and verifies if these cause conflicts between requirement

Intergenerational redistribution of income through capital funding pension schemes: simulating the Dutch pension fund ABP

In most countries, the largest proportion of the pension benefits that are paid out to the elderly are brought together by the contributions of the active population. This type of financing is known as a Pay-As-You-Go-scheme. In this scheme, an important ‘chain of solidarity' covers for the pension of the preceding generation. So, there is a pattern of winners and losers that is caused by the rates of ageing of the populations, in combination with PAYG-pension schemes. In pension schemes based on the Capital Funding (CF) type, individuals of every generation build up a certain future pension claim. So, every generation builds up its own future pension benefit in this type of scheme. Hence, CF pension schemes are believed not to rely on income flows between generations, since every generation finances its own future pension. The advantage then is that there are no winners or losers, from the generational point of view at least, so that demographic developments cannot jeopardize the system. But, this only holds for Defined-Contribution (DC) pension systems. In practice, we also observe Defined-Benefit (DB) pension systems. In fact, the larger part of the occupational pensions schemes in the Netherlands are DB ones. For this type of schemes it holds that absence of intergenerational income flows is a too optimistic view, though the redistribution is not that strongly as in the case of PAYG schemes. The central question in this contribution is whether intergenerational redistribution of income occurs via Capital Funding in case of DB pension schemes in the Netherlands. To that end we analyse the Dutch civil servants' pension fund in the Dutch dynamic microsimulation model NEDYMAS.microsimulation; ageing; social hypotheses; poverty; inequality

Marktorientierte Unternehmensführung und ihre Erfolgsauswirkungen : eine empirische Untersuchung

Das Konstrukt der marktorientierten Unternehmensführung ist bislang wissenschaftlich nur unzureichend untersucht worden. Aufbauend auf einer systemtheoretischen Grundlage entwickeln die Autoren ein Meßinstrument zur präzisen Erfassung der Marktorientierung auf der betrieblichen Führungsebene. Erfaßt wird der Grad der Marktorientierung verschiedener Führungsteilsysteme (z. B. des Organisationssystems, des Planungssystems und des Personalführungssystems). Die ebenfalls durchgeführten Dependenzanalysen ergaben, daß eine am Absatzmarkt ausgerichtete Unternehmensführung den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg einer Geschäftseinheit über eine Erhöhung des marktbezogenen Erfolgs indirekt positiv beeinflußt