Law and economics of Microsoft vs. U.S. Department of Justice - New paradigm for antitrust in network markets or inefficient lock-in of antitrust policy?

This paper contains an economic and legal analysis of the lawsuit Microsoft vs. U.S. Department of Justice beginning with the District Court's decision on June 7, 2000 up to the Proposed Final Judgement on November 6, 2001. I found that the courts' underlying economic paradigm regarding the assessment of monopoly power in 'New Economy Network Markets' was strongly influenced by BRIAN W. ARTHUR's theory of path dependence claiming (1) that high-technology markets being subject to network effects generally involve a danger of being locked-in to an inferior technology since winning or losing in a technology race is determined by small early random historical events and not by economic efficiency and (2) that there is almost no possibility to overcome inferior lock-in positions since network (compatibility) effects create insurmountable switching costs protecting the lock-in monopolist. As to Microsoft, it was often claimed that Macintosh would have been the better solution than Windows. The U.S. courts are convinced that rivals such as Linux wouldn't have any chance to overcome Microsoft's lock-in position without any antitrust intervention. However, I argue in accordance with opponents of ARTHUR's work that path dependence theory is only a theoretical curiosity that lacks empirical evidence. The predominance of a certain technology and especially the predominance of Windows in the operating system market is determined by economic efficiency and dominant market positions can be eroded very quickly by providing better quality. There is no empirical indication that network effects protect Microsoft's monopoly as it was claimed by the courts within their 'applications barrier to entry' theory. I claim that current interpretations of the U.S. antitrust law don't meet the requirements of fair competition rules in the 'New Economy'. If plaintiffs and the U.S. Department of Justice are victorious over Microsoft and lock-in theories become generally accepted by courts and market participants, further antitrust lawsuits are going to follow since most markets in the 'New Economy' are subject to network effects and high seller concentration. Strict antitrust policy could dampen economic growth due to investor uncertainty and the impossibility to take advantage of scale-based productivity effects. --Microsoft,antitrust,network effects,path dependence

Study - High dielectric constant thin film capacitor materials. Deliverable hardware process specifications and test data Materials report

Development, and evaluation of thin film substrates containing sodium niobate capacitors, or sodium niobate dielectric materia

Beyond Measurement: {E}xtracting Vegetation Height from High Resolution Imagery with Deep Learning

Measuring and monitoring the height of vegetation provides important insights into forest age and habitat quality. These are essential for the accuracy of applications that are highly reliant on up-to-date and accurate vegetation data. Current vegetation sensing practices involve ground survey, photogrammetry, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and airborne light detection and ranging sensors (LiDAR). While these methods provide high resolution and accuracy, their hardware and collection effort prohibits highly recurrent and widespread collection. In response to the limitations of current methods, we designed Y-NET, a novel deep learning model to generate high resolution models of vegetation from highly recurrent multispectral aerial imagery and elevation data. Y-NET’s architecture uses convolutional layers to learn correlations between different input features and vegetation height, generating an accurate vegetation surface model (VSM) at 1×1 m resolution. We evaluated Y-NET on 235 km2 of the East San Francisco Bay Area and find that Y-NET achieves low error from LiDAR when tested on new locations. Y-NET also achieves an R2 of 0.83 and can effectively model complex vegetation through side-by-side visual comparisons. Furthermore, we show that Y-NET is able to identify instances of vegetation growth and mitigation by comparing aerial imagery and LiDAR collected at different times

Dopant for sodium niobate capacitor dielectric

Sodium niobate dielectric doped with barium titanate has potential application in integrated circuits with high packing densities and voltage levels below 5 to 8 volts

The use of an airborne lidar for mapping cirrus clouds in FIRE, phase 2

The Univ. of Washington (UW) and Georgia Tech have recently built a dual wavelength airborne lidar for operation on the UW's Convair C-131A research aircraft. This lidar was used in studying aerosols and clouds. These studies demonstrated the utility of airborne lidar in a variety of atmospheric research and prompt the suggestion that this facility be included in the next FIRE cirrus experiment. The vertically pointing airborne lidar would be used as a complement to ground based lidars. The airborne lidar would ensure extended coverage of IFO cases that develop upwind of the surface lidars or which miss the ground based lidars while still being the focus of satellite and aircraft in situ studies. The airborne lidar would help assure that cirrus clouds were simultaneously viewed by satellite, sampled by aircraft, and structurally characterized by lidar. System specifications are listed and a schematic is shown of the lidar system aboard the C-131A

Die zentralen Aufgaben des IWF : Leitlinien für ein Reformprogramm

The demand for sustainable criteria for environmental technology has over the past few years increaseddue to competition amongst companies in the business due to legal demands. Using criteria for environmentaltechnology is a way for companies to show buyers that their product is a long term investment. Byimplementing sustainable criteria for environmental technology, companies can be sure they are buying andusing the best available technology adjusted to their economy. Sustainable criteria for environmental technologymay in the future be used as eco-labelling, showing that companies are sustainable and proactive.The aim of this master thesis is to develop a basis of what should be included in criteria for environmentaltechnology. This basis is developed by using existing strategies and criteria and to perform further developmentof these. The development of strategies for sustainable environmental technology was made from strategies takenfrom the Agenda 21 document which were transformed and elucidated. Agenda 21 was chosen because itis sprung from the Brundtland report which holds the definition of sustainable development used in thisreport. Existing criteria for sustainability found during this work was placed under strategies from Agenda 21. Inorder to adjust the criterion to environmental technology this project also looked at what had been done inthis area, both by companies, international organisations and municipalities. The sustainability criteria thusfound were also placed under Agenda 21 strategies. After this stage there was an examination and a discussionof what criteria was missing to gain a sustainable perspective. This thesis shows that it is possible to use Agenda 21 for the development of strategies. The strategies haveto be complemented in order to gain a holistic perspective. It is also possible to take criteria from companiesand eco-labelling and place them under different strategies. Those criteria are not adjusted to environmentaltechnology and additional adjustments are needed. Implementation of sustainable criteria for environmentaltechnology is another issue to be discussed further.  www.ima.kth.s

HR* Graph Conditions Between Counting Monadic Second-Order and Second-Order Graph Formulas

Graph conditions are a means to express structural properties for graph transformation systems and graph programs in a large variety of application areas.With HR* graph conditions, non-local graph properties like “there exists a path of arbitrary length” or “the graph is circle-free” can be expressed. We show, by induction over the structure of formulas and conditions, that (1) any node-counting monadic second-order formula can be expressed by an HR∗ condition and (2) any HR* condition can be expressed by a second-order graph formula