The Development of Multidimensional Poverty in Germany 1985-2007

This paper deals with concepts of multidimensional poverty measurement and applies them to Germany. Three concepts of poverty are examined and included into one multidimensional approach: economic well being, capability and social exclusion. The empirical application relies on indices introduced by Bourguigon and Chakravarty (2003), and Alkire and Foster (2008). It uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study. The indices are tested for their robustness in several aspects, and the influence of changing levels of substitutability between achievements on the poverty dimensions is examined. It transpires that the depth of poverty is relatively stable for the period 1985 to 2007. A structural analysis of the poor in 2007 reveals that the group at greatest risk of poverty is the unemployed.multidimensional measurement, poverty, deprivation, inequality

The Grundgesetz After 50 Years: Analyzing Changes in the German Constitution. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 09.3, December 1999

Fifty years after its original drafting, the German constitution has seen its text amended many times. Indeed, among OECD countries, the Grundgesetz has one of the highest rates of constitutional change. This paper analyzes these changes. It does so in a quantitative manner in its first section, before proceeding to ask how the numerous changes can be explained. Three approaches from the legal and political science literature are presented: one emphasizing historical-structural factors, one analyzing changes as constitutional revisionism, and an institutional approach which focuses on the conditions for constitutional amendment. The strengths and weaknesses of each approach are then compared and contrasted, before the article concludes with an assessment of the characteristics of Gemuw constitutional policy

Shaken not stirred: Creating exotic angular momentum states by shaking an optical lattice

We propose a method to create higher orbital states of ultracold atoms in the Mott regime of an optical lattice. This is done by periodically modulating the position of the trap minima (known as shaking) and controlling the interference term of the lasers creating the lattice. These methods are combined with techniques of shortcuts to adiabaticity. As an example of this, we show specifically how to create an anti-ferromagnetic type ordering of angular momentum states of atoms. The specific pulse sequences are designed using Lewis-Riesenfeld invariants and a four-level model for each well. The results are compared with numerical simulations of the full Schroedinger equation.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Corporate Responses to Climate Change and Financial Performance: The Impact of Climate Policy

This paper examines the relationship between corporate activities to address climate change and stock performance. By separately analyzing the US and European stock markets for different sub-periods, we highlight the impact of the underlying climate policy regime. Methodologically, we compare risk-adjusted returns of stock portfolios comprising corporations that differ in their responses to climate change. In this respect, we apply the flexible Carhart fourfactor model besides the restricted one-factor model based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). While our portfolio analysis shows negative relationships over the entire observation period from 2001 to 2006, we find that a trading strategy, which bought stocks of corporations with a higher level of responses to climate change and sold stocks of corporations with a lower level, led to negative abnormal returns in regions and periods with less ambitious climate policy, but to positive abnormal returns in regions and periods with stringent climate policy.Climate change, Climate policy, Corporate environmental performance, Financial performance, Portfolio analysis, Asset pricing models

Pronounced asymmetry in the crystallization behavior during constant heating and cooling of a bulk metallic glass-forming liquid

The crystallization behavior of the supercooled bulk metallic glass-forming Zr41Ti14Cu12Ni10Be23 liquid was studied with different heating and cooling rates. A rate of about 1 K/s is sufficient to suppress crystallization of the melt upon cooling from the equilibrium liquid. Upon heating, in contrast, a rate of about 200 K/s is necessary to avoid crystallization. The difference between the critical heating and cooling rate is discussed with respect to diffusion-limited growth taking classical nucleation into account. The calculated asymmetry of the critical heating and cooling rate can be explained by the fact that nuclei formed during cooling and heating are exposed to different growth rates

Homomorphic Encryption for Speaker Recognition: Protection of Biometric Templates and Vendor Model Parameters

Data privacy is crucial when dealing with biometric data. Accounting for the latest European data privacy regulation and payment service directive, biometric template protection is essential for any commercial application. Ensuring unlinkability across biometric service operators, irreversibility of leaked encrypted templates, and renewability of e.g., voice models following the i-vector paradigm, biometric voice-based systems are prepared for the latest EU data privacy legislation. Employing Paillier cryptosystems, Euclidean and cosine comparators are known to ensure data privacy demands, without loss of discrimination nor calibration performance. Bridging gaps from template protection to speaker recognition, two architectures are proposed for the two-covariance comparator, serving as a generative model in this study. The first architecture preserves privacy of biometric data capture subjects. In the second architecture, model parameters of the comparator are encrypted as well, such that biometric service providers can supply the same comparison modules employing different key pairs to multiple biometric service operators. An experimental proof-of-concept and complexity analysis is carried out on the data from the 2013-2014 NIST i-vector machine learning challenge

Presentation of an Immunodominant Immediate-Early CD8+ T Cell Epitope Resists Human Cytomegalovirus Immunoevasion.

Control of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) depends on CD8+ T cell responses that are shaped by an individual's repertoire of MHC molecules. MHC class I presentation is modulated by a set of HCMV-encoded proteins. Here we show that HCMV immunoevasins differentially impair T cell recognition of epitopes from the same viral antigen, immediate-early 1 (IE-1), that are presented by different MHC class I allotypes. In the presence of immunoevasins, HLA-A- and HLA-B-restricted T cell clones were ineffective, but HLA-C*0702-restricted T cell clones recognized and killed infected cells. Resistance of HLA-C*0702 to viral immunoevasins US2 and US11 was mediated by the alpha3 domain and C-terminal region of the HLA heavy chain. In healthy donors, HLA-C*0702-restricted T cells dominated the T cell response to IE-1. The same HLA-C allotype specifically protected infected cells from attack by NK cells that expressed a corresponding HLA-C-specific KIR. Thus, allotype-specific viral immunoevasion allows HCMV to escape control by NK cells and HLA-A- and HLA-B-restricted T cells, while the virus becomes selectively vulnerable to an immunodominant population of HLA-C-restricted T cells. Our work identifies a T cell population that may be of particular efficiency in HCMV-specific immunotherapy

Interactions among intermediate redshift galaxies. The case of SDSSJ134420.86+663717.8

We present the properties of the central supermassive black holes and the host galaxies of the interacting object SDSSJ134420.86+663717.8. We obtained optical long slit spectroscopy data from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) using the Multi Object Double Spectrograph (MODS). Analysing the spectra revealed several strong broad and narrow emission lines of ionised gas in the nuclear region of one galaxy, whereas only narrow emission lines were visible for the second galaxy. The optical spectra were used to plot diagnostic diagrams, deduce rotation curves of the two galaxies, and calculate the masses of the central supermassive black holes. We find that the galaxy with broad emission line features has Seyfert~1 properties, while the galaxy with only narrow emission line features seems to be star-forming in nature. Furthermore, we find that the masses of the central supermassive black holes are almost equal at a few times 10^7 solar mass. Additionally, we present a simple N-body simulation to shed some light on the initial conditions of the progenitor galaxies. We find that for an almost orthogonal approach of the two interacting galaxies, the model resembles the optical image of the system