INTEGRAL - operating high-energy detectors for five years in space

The INTEGRAL satellite, which studies the Universe in the hard X-ray and soft Gamma-ray domain, has been operational for 5 years now. The X-ray telescopes, which use the coded mask technique, provide unprecedented spectral and imaging resolution. This led to a number of discoveries, such as the distribution of diffuse emission in the Galaxy, the discovery of highly absorbed sources and fast X-ray transients in the Galactic Plane, localization of ~50 Gamma-ray bursts, and the resolution of the cosmic X-ray background around its peak at 30 keV. About 300 previously known X-ray sources have been detected and in addition more than 200 new sources have been discovered. INTEGRAL provides spectra starting at 3 keV and ranging up to several hundred keV. This article gives a brief overview about the major discoveries of INTEGRAL.Comment: 10 pages. Invited review to appear in the proceedings of the 10th ICATPP conference, Como, Italy, October 8-12, 200

Undoing ableism: disability as a category of historical and legal analysis

In this essay, I will apply disability as a category of legal and historical analysis to undo the different forms ableism can take in US history and law. My aim is to look at a specific time period in US history – the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century – in order to elucidate narratives of exclusion and marginalization of disabled people on the one hand and resistance and resilience on the other. My claim is that in this period, disability gains particular political and legal relevance as an intersectional, i.e. a gendered, classed, and racialized category of analysis, which leads to the cross-connection between ableism and other dominant ideologies, such as sexism, racism, and classism. In order to give my analysis historical and cultural specificity, I will look at two distinct historical and legal contexts. In the first part of this essay, I discuss the inter-relation of ableism and classism in the context of the industrialization and the subse-quent socioeconomic discrimination of disabled factory workers. As a legal subtext, the fellow servant rule will be discussed to understand how this particular law be-comes relevant for disability politics. In the second part of the essay, ableism is explored in the context of racism to understand how atavism and biological determinism contributed to the othering of disabled people, especially disabled women, in the context of eugenic ideology of the early twentieth century. Here I will discuss the US Supreme Court decision for the case Buck v. Bell in order to understand eugenic law as a reflection of an ideology that is both ableist and sexist at its core

Age-Biased Technological and Organizational Change: Firm-Level Evidence and Management Implications

This paper examines the question, whether the growing use of new technologies and decentralized forms of work organization affects the age structure of workforces within firms. The initial idea behind this relationship is that technological and organizational change may not only be skill-biased, but also age-biased. Based on human capital theoretical explanations that mainly focus on skill obsolescence in association with the need to acquire new skills, the hypothesis of an age-biased technological and organizational change (ABTOC) is derived and tested econometrically using German firm-level data. The empirical results show that the adoption of technological and organizational innovations decreases the firms’ demand for older workers and increases the demand for younger workers. Hence, ABTOC is found to be at the expense of older workers. Since ABTOC does not fit to the current development in terms of age-specific labor supply, this paper also suggests human resource management practices that encourage firms to combine the use of new technologies and organizational forms with an ageing workforce.Ageing workforces, new technologies, decentralized work organization, skill obsolescence, skill adaptation, productivity-wage-differentials

Oil Price Shock and Structural Changes in CMEA Trade

We analyse trade between countries of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990. Despite central planning and political motivation of the CMEA, we show that trade could be explained by standard demand factors surprisingly well. Moreover, we document that the oil price crisis had several repercussions on Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union as a supplier of crude oil benefited from the energy crisis in the 1970s. In particular, it used energy exports as an instrument of foreign policy. In turn, the responses of the individual CMEA countries in Central Europe were largely different