High accuracy optical rate sensor

Optical rate sensors, in particular CCD arrays, will be used on Space Station Freedom to track stars in order to provide inertial attitude reference. An algorithm to provide attitude rate information by directly manipulating the sensor pixel intensity output is presented. The star image produced by a sensor in the laboratory is modeled. Simulated, moving star images are generated, and the algorithm is applied to this data for a star moving at a constant rate. The algorithm produces accurate derived rate of the above data. A step rate change requires two frames for the output of the algorithm to accurately reflect the new rate. When zero mean Gaussian noise with a standard deviation of 5 is added to the simulated data of a star image moving at a constant rate, the algorithm derives the rate with an error of 1.9 percent at a rate of 1.28 pixels per frame

International Trade and Individual Labour Market Perspectives: A Micro-Level Analysis of German Manufacturing Workers

This paper studies the impact of international trade on individual labour market outcomes in the German manufacturing sector for the period 1995-2006. Combining micro-level data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and industry-level trade data from input-output tables, we examine the impacts on (1) job-to-unemployment transitions and (2) annual earnings. The probability of becoming unemployed rises when workers are employed in Trade Sensitive industries and decreases for workers in Trade Gaining industries. Wage effects are statistically significant for three of four trade-exposed groups of industries, but they are relatively small. The personal characteristics of workers seem to exert a substantial effect on employment status and earnings level.International trade, employment status, individual wages

International trade and individual labour market perspectives: A micro-level analysis of German manufacturing workers

This paper studies the impact of international trade on individual labour market outcomes in the German manufacturing sector for the period 1995-2006. Combining micro-level data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and industry-level trade data from input-output tables, we examine the impacts on (1) job-to-unemployment transitions and (2) annual earnings. The probability of becoming unemployed rises when workers are employed in Trade Sensitive industries and decreases for workers in Trade Gaining industries. Wage effects are statistically significant for three of four trade-exposed groups of industries, but they are relatively small. The personal characteristics of workers seem to exert a substantial effect on employment status and earnings level. --International trade,employment status,individual wages

Consolidation in banking and financial stability in Europe: empirical evidence

Using aggregate balance sheet data from banks across the EU-25 over the period from 1997 to 2005 this paper provides empirical evidence that national banking market concentration has a negative impact on European banks' financial soundness as measured by the Z-score technique while controlling for macroeconomic, bank-specific, regulatory, and institutional factors. Furthermore, we find that Eastern European banking markets exhibiting a lower level of competitive pressure, fewer diversification opportunities and a higher fraction of government-owned banks are more prone to financial fragility whereas capital regulations have supported financial stability across the entire European Union. --Market structure,Financial stability,Banking regulation

Penang (Malaysia) 1997

PENANG'S 1st EAST ASIA FILM AND TELEVISION FESTIVAL LIKE the Hong Kong film industry, Iran has already had fifty years of filmmaking, amounting to the production of 1,200 films in that time. Few national cinemas have had to go through the changes and pressures that Iranian filmmaking has been subjected to from the Shah era of the 1970s to the tumultuous revolutionary days of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the recent creative years. In fact as early as 1989, the Hong Kong International Film Festival was showing Iranian features like Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Peddlar and Dariush Farhang's The Spell. Despite their difficulties, Iranian filmmakers have tenaciously held on to their art. This year, with much persistence, they have shown to the world that their cinema is more than children's films or propaganda. Even before Abbas Kiarostami's The Taste of Cherry (Ta'm-e Gilass) shared this May's Cannes Palme d'Or with The..

Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon in Colour

GEORGES MÉLIÈS: A TRIP TO THE MOON IN COLOURWithout doubt, the DVD medium can now be considered as a kind of video establishment. Even the more recent Blu-ray disc (BD) is becoming a familiar sight in home theatres. Thousands of new movie titles, many in parallel editions are flooding the video stores, while the prices are sinking, pushed down by generous sales. Moreover, the restoration of old films, shattering cultural, geographical and temporal boundaries are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated, taking advantage of advanced restoration technologies...

Pierre Étaix 5-DVD SET

PIERRE ÉTAIX 5-DVD SET The heyday of the slapstick is long past but this comedy form, perhaps the most filmic of all motion picture genres has not really disappeared. Some of its finest post-WWII accomplishments exist in the work of two famous French film comedians: Jacques Tati (1907-82), the creator of the unforgettable Monsieur Hulot and a generation younger, Pierre Étaix (b. 1928) - the master of subtle visual humour recalling Buster Keaton and Max Linder, the French genius of pre-WWI slapstick, and an inspiration of Chaplin. Étaix was undeniably influenced by Tati whom he met in 1954 and worked with for several years; he was assistant-director in Tati's MyUncle where he also played a minor role...

Film's Illusions

FILM'S ILLUSIONS: KULESHOV REVISITED FOR a century, moving images have been captivating millions around the world. Yet many of the attractions which bring people into cinema theatres and, more recently, which fix their eyes to television screens for hours on end, are only illusions. We say "movies" but no movement exists in film -- it is produced in the spectator's mind. The mechanics of this illusion is explained today with reference to two optical phenomena: The persistence of vision, described theoretically by Peter Mark Roget in 1824, and the so-called phi-phenomenon, also known as "stroboscopic effect," discovered by the gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer.(1) These two effects permit the human brain to perceive a series of related static images (more precisely, motion phases) as a continuous motion. It is this illusion that permits the existence of moving pictures and, more recently, television. Unlike the motion pictures, which need only..

Ekofilm 97

IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that the fairy-tale Southern Bohemian town of Český Krumlov became the site of the 23rd Festival of Film and Video programmes on Environment (EKOFILM 97). Cesky Krumlov, which is on the UNESCO's world cultural and natural heritage list, taking over the EKOFILM from the North Moravian Ostrava which hosted the festival since its inception during the communist rule in the mid-1970s. In those difficult days this festival was, as its present director Dr. Bedřich Moldán says, one of the "rare islands of renewed and fresh normality within an abnormal world." Some people see a deeper symbolism behind EKOFILM's new home: the steel-city Ostrava (a kind of Czech Detroit), was an example of environmental devastation while Český Krumlov, a few years ago still a neglected, dilapidating town, has been undergoing a careful restoration, revealing the Sleeping-Beauty charms of its medieval architecture...