Merit and Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism

This is a publisher's version of an article published in The Journal of Asian Studies in 1998. The offprint is posted here in accordance with existing publisher policy, or by special permission via correspondence.tru

Mapping Cultural Participation in Chicago

Charts the household income, educational level, race, and ethnicity of all neighborhoods in Chicago's metropolitan area and explores whether smaller, ethnic, and diverse organizations reach a different audience than the larger institutions

Industrial restructuring in European Transition Economies and TNC's Investment Motivations

Using survey evidence the paper characterises TNCs' strategic positioning in central and eastern European economies in terms of the relative status of seven motives for investing and the degree of use of seven sources of technology. As a key theme the ways in which the diverse objectives and technological positioning of TNCs' operations in the transition economies can affect both the initial industrial transformation and further sustained development of such host countries is analysed. The entry of TNCs to the transition economies is found to target the supply of the local markets, using the groups' mature technologies as embodied in established products. However, the presence of various secondary motives and supporting localised technology sources demonstrates the presence of significant evolutionary processes. These may lead to individualised (exportoriented) roles of subsidiaries in transition economies using local technology and creative competences.

The potential of combining MATISSE and ALMA observations: Constraining the structure of the innermost region in protoplanetary discs

In order to study the initial conditions of planet formation, it is crucial to obtain spatially resolved multi-wavelength observations of the innermost region of protoplanetary discs. We evaluate the advantage of combining observations with MATISSE/VLTI and ALMA to constrain the radial and vertical structure of the dust in the innermost region of circumstellar discs in nearby star-forming regions. Based on a disc model with a parameterized dust density distribution, we apply 3D radiative-transfer simulations to obtain ideal intensity maps. These are used to derive the corresponding wavelength-dependent visibilities we would obtain with MATISSE as well as ALMA maps simulated with CASA. Within the considered parameter space, we find that constraining the dust density structure in the innermost $5\,$au around the central star is challenging with MATISSE alone, whereas ALMA observations with reasonable integration times allow us to derive significant constraints on the disc surface density. However, we find that the estimation of the different disc parameters can be considerably improved by combining MATISSE and ALMA observations. For example, combining a 30-minute ALMA observation (at 310 GHz with an angular resolution of 0.03$^{\prime\prime}$) for MATISSE observations in the L and M bands (with visibility accuracies of about $3\,\%$) allows the radial density slope and the dust surface density profile to be constrained to within $\Delta \alpha=0.3$ and $\Delta (\alpha-\beta)=0.15$, respectively. For an accuracy of ${\sim 1\%}$ even the disc flaring can be constrained to within $\Delta \beta=0.1$. To constrain the scale height to within $5\,$au, M band accuracies of $0.8\,\%$ are required. While ALMA is sensitive to the number of large dust grains settled to the disc midplane we find that the impact of the surface density distribution of the large grains on the observed quantities is small.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, accepted by A&

Mechanical characterization of solution-derived nanoparticle silver ink thin films

Mechanical properties of sintered silver nanoparticles are investigated via substrate curvature and nanoindentation methods. Substrate curvature measurements reveal that permanent microstructural changes occur during initial heating while subsequent annealing results in nearly elastic behavior of the thinner films. Thicker films were found to crack upon thermal treatment. The coefficient of thermal expansion was determined from linear slopes of curvature curves to be 1.9±0.097 ppm/°C, with elastic modulus and hardness determined via nanoindentation. Accounting for substrate effects, nanoindentation hardness and modulus remained constant for different film thicknesses and did not appear to be a function of annealing conditions. Hardness of 0.91 GPa and modulus of 110 GPa are somewhat lower than expected for a continuous nanocrystalline silver film, most likely due to porosity

Children’s dialogue in the context of international research

In recent years, the study of religious diversity has become a significant educational issue in Europe and on the wider international scene. This is partly due to a recognition of the significance of religion as a factor in relation to issues of ethnic, national and cultural identity (Baumann, 1999), and as a factor in social divisiveness or social cohesion, for example as an indicator of what Modood calls ‘cultural racism’ (Modood, 1997).1 This development also reflects specific events such as the riots in some towns and cities in the north of England in 2001 (Home Office, 2001) and in Paris in 2005, and those of September 11, 2001 in the United States of America as well as their complex and ongoing consequences internationally (e.g. Beauchamp, 2002; Leganger-Krogstad, 2003). Such debates are especially relevant within states where migrants from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds have settled. The global and more local situations are related in a variety of ways, through the transnational identities of many families (Jackson and Nesbitt, 1993; Østberg, 2003) and the direct effects of international conflicts on community relations within particular states

Wages, Productivity and Work Intensity in the Great Depression

We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the external effects of unemployment and replacement rates had much less impact. Empirical work is undertaken against the background of an efficient bargaining model that embraces employment, hours of work and work intensity.

Partial Adjustment Without Apology

Many kinds of economic behavior appear to be governed by discrete and occasional individual choices. Despite this, econometric partial adjustment models perform relatively well at the aggregate level. Analyzing the classic employment adjustment problem, we show how discrete and occasional microeconomic adjustment is well described by a new form of partial adjustment model that aggregates the actions of a large number of heterogeneous producers. We begin by describing a basic model of discrete and occasional adjustment at the micro level, where production units are essentially restricted to either operate with a fixed number of workers or shut down. We show that this simple model is observationally equivalent at the market level to the standard rational expectations partial adjustment model. We then construct a related, but more realistic, model that incorporates the idea that increases or decreases in the size of an establishment’s workforce are subject to fixed adjustment costs. In the market equilibrium of this model, employment responses to aggregate disturbances include changes both in employment selected by individual establishments and in the measure of establishments actively undertaking adjustment. Yet the model retains a partial adjustment flavor in its aggregate responses. Moreover, in contrast to existing models of discrete adjustment, our generalized partial adjustment model is sufficiently tractable to allow extension to general equilibrium.

Atomic discreteness and the nature of structural equilibrium in conductance histograms of electromigrated Cu-nanocontacts

We investigate the histograms of conductance values obtained during controlled electromigration thinning of Cu thin films. We focus on the question whether the most frequently observed conductance values, apparent as peaks in conductance histograms, can be attributed to the atomic structure of the wire. To this end we calculate the Fourier transform of the conductance histograms. We find all the frequencies matching the highly symmetric crystallographic directions of fcc-Cu. In addition, there are other frequencies explainable by oxidation and possibly formation of hcp-Cu. With these structures we can explain all peaks occurring in the Fourier transform within the relevant range. The results remain the same if only a third of the samples are included. By comparing our results to the ones available in the literature on work-hardened nanowires we find indications that even at low temperatures of the environment, metallic nanocontacts could show enhanced electromigration at low current densities due to defects enhancing electron scattering