Public Research in Regional Networks of Innovators: A Comparative Study of Four East-German Regions

Universities and public research organizations are said to be an integrative and essential element of a functioning innovation system as they play a vital role not only in the generation of new technological knowledge, but also in its diffusion. We analyse four East German local networks of innovators which differ in structure and innovative performance and investigate the characteristic role of public research within these local systems by applying methods of social network analysis. Our results show that universities and non-university institutions of public research are key actors in all regional networks of innovators both in terms of patent output and in terms of centrality of their position in the networks. Further we find the 'thicker' networks to have more central public research organizations. Higher centrality of public research compared to private actors may be due to the fact that universities are explicitly designed to give away their knowledge and that they increasingly face the need to raise external funds.Innovator Networks; Public research; R+D Cooperation; Mobility

Perceived pollution and selective out-migration: revisiting the role of income for environmental inequality

The disproportionate exposure of minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged households to environmental pollution is often explained by selective migration or sorting mechanisms. Yet, previous empirical results remain inconclusive. Here, we offer an explanation for the mixed findings by focusing on the selective out-migration stage triggered by environmental pollution. We argue that many income-independent explanations for minority disadvantages predict sorting across destinations but are less predictive for the out-migration stage. We test if the subjective impairment through air pollution selectively affects the probability of out-migration according to income and minority status. We use household-level panel data of the German SOEP from 1986 to 2016 and within-household estimates of correlated random effects probit models. Findings show that perceived air pollution has a stronger effect on the likelihood of moving for households experiencing an increasing income. We also find differences between native German and first-generation immigrant households, but the differences become smaller and non-significant once we control for income. This is at odds with results from previous studies on the in-migration stage, where minorities are heavily disadvantaged but income plays a less important role. The decision to move from pollution seems to follow a different pattern than the determinants of the destination

Agents, audiences and peers: why international organizations diversify their legitimation discourse

In the face of public contestation, international organizations (IOs) invoke norms in their public communication to enhance relevant audiences' legitimacy beliefs. This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of what we term normative diversity in IOs' discursive legitimation by drawing on a novel dataset on norm-based justifications in more than 32,000 paragraphs of text published by 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019. We show that IOs vary strikingly in this respect: whereas some IOs invoke a narrow set of norms, often focused on economic welfare and functional capability, others engage a wide variety that includes security, national sovereignty, democracy or human rights. To explain this variance, we specify and test an explanatory framework that emphasizes IO audiences, agents and peer organizations as distinct origins. Our statistical analysis reveals that IOs diversify their discursive legitimation to 1) address heterogeneous audiences, 2) reconcile competing beliefs amongst agents themselves, and 3) integrate the legitimation of peer IOs. These findings indicate that IOs respond to the growing complexity of international cooperation in their discursive legitimation and may raise policy-makers' awareness of the difficulties in contemporary legitimation efforts

Public research in regional networks of innovators: a comparative study of four East-German regions

Universities and public research organizations are said to be integrative and essential elements of a functioning innovation system. We analyze four East German regional networks of innovators and investigate the characteristic role of public research within these networks by applying methods of social network analysis using patent data. Our results show that universities and non-university institutions of public research are key actors in all regional networks. Differences between regional innovative performance seem to be related to differences in the structural properties of the networks

Questions of Self-Designation in the \u27Ascension of Isaiah\u27

The Question of the \u27Parting of the Ways\u27 between Jews and Christians has become a matter of debate again: Is it really appropriate to speak about two more or less coherent groups going two different ways from a certain point in history — perhaps after Paul\u27s mission, after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), or after the Bar-Kokhba War (132-135 CE)? Does the image of a tree with one root and two different trunks going into two different directions really fit what the extant sources tell us about the complexities of the past? Or shouldn\u27t we distinguish between the situations at different geographical places and times, under different social and political circumstances, and of partly very different groups? Do categories like \u27Jew\u27, \u27Christian\u27, or \u27pagan\u27 help us to understand how real people and real groups understood themselves? Of course, we have to use \u27categories\u27 if we want to describe the past – we should, however, always be aware that our categories are likely not the categories of people living hundreds of years ago, and that, in any case, they are only heuristic tools which can even impede proper understanding, if we use them too schematically. Description of book from publisher\u27s websites: This book is one of the first modern collections of studies on important aspects of the Ascension of Isaiah, which occupies a special place among the early Christian writings due to its complicated origin and its relevance in regards of the early Christian self-understanding in respect of the Jews

Jewish, Christian – or What? Questions of Self-Designation in the \u27Ascension of Isaiah\u27

The Question of the “Parting of the Ways” between Jews and Christians has become a matter of debate again: is it really appropriate to speak about two more or less coherent groups going two different ways from a certain point in history – perhaps after Paul’s mission, after the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE), or after the Bar-Kokhba War (132-135 CE)? Does the image of a tree with one root and two different trunks going into two different directions really fit what the extant sources tell us about the complexities of the past? Or shouldn’t we distinguish between the situations at different geographical places and times, under different social and political circumstances, and of partly very different groups? Do categories like “Jew,” “Christian,” or “pagan” help us to understand how real people and real groups understood themselves? Of course, we have to use “categories” if we want to describe the past – we should, however, always be aware that our categories are likely not the categories of people living hundreds of years ago, and that, in any case, they are only heuristic tools which can even impede proper understanding, if we use them too schematically

Environmental Inequality and Residential Sorting in Germany: A Spatial Time-Series Analysis of the Demographic Consequences of Industrial Sites

Previous research has shown that low-income households bear a higher exposure to environmental pollution than high-income households. Some scholars have argued that selective siting of industrial facilities accounts for such environmental inequality, while others have argued that those citizens who can afford to move out of polluted regions do so, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged are sorted into polluted areas. Yet empirical evidence regarding the processes of environmental inequality is not conclusive. We build on an original data set that includes annual georeferenced data of 6,570 highly polluting industrial facilities in Germany from 2008 to 2017 and validate the fluctuation in facilities with geographical land-use data. We then connect the facilities to income and demographic data for 4,455 municipalities and investigate sociodemographic changes before and after the appearance of new facilities. Spatial models are employed to measure local relative changes, and fixed-effects individual slopes estimators are used to account for selection on economic trajectories. Results provide only limited support for the selective siting thesis but show that an area's average income decreases after the appearance of new industrial facilities, thereby resonating with the selective migration hypothesis. In contrast, facility closure does not attract, or reattract, more affluent households

Deep Denoising for Hearing Aid Applications

Reduction of unwanted environmental noises is an important feature of today's hearing aids (HA), which is why noise reduction is nowadays included in almost every commercially available device. The majority of these algorithms, however, is restricted to the reduction of stationary noises. In this work, we propose a denoising approach based on a three hidden layer fully connected deep learning network that aims to predict a Wiener filtering gain with an asymmetric input context, enabling real-time applications with high constraints on signal delay. The approach is employing a hearing instrument-grade filter bank and complies with typical hearing aid demands, such as low latency and on-line processing. It can further be well integrated with other algorithms in an existing HA signal processing chain. We can show on a database of real world noise signals that our algorithm is able to outperform a state of the art baseline approach, both using objective metrics and subject tests.Comment: submitted to IWAENC 201