7,802 research outputs found
spotlight europe #2013/04, May 2013: The Changing Face of North Africa. An Opportunity for and with Europe.
North Africa is changing fast, and its youthful societies look back with pride at their recent uprisings. However, they are also getting frustrated by the fact that the economic outlook is not improving. Europe’s role in the strategically important southern Mediterranean area needs to be realigned in order to promote the development of democracy, employment opportunities, and security. There is a great deal of potential for cooperation with Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt
Raising Rivals' Fixed (Labor) Costs: The Deutsche Post Case
We analyze the bargaining problem of an incumbent firm and a union when the wage contract becomes generally binding. Our main application relates to competition among operators of mail delivery networks. We describe the Deutsche Post case which highlights the raising rivals' costs incentive and its consequences resulting from labor laws that make collective agreements generally binding. We show that minimum wages implemented by means of extension regulation are an effective deterrence instrument which frustrates both market entry as well as investments into the build-up of a mail delivery network.Minimum wages, postal services, collective bargaining, raising rivals' costs
Cyclone Codes
We introduce Cyclone codes which are rateless erasure resilient codes. They
combine Pair codes with Luby Transform (LT) codes by computing a code symbol
from a random set of data symbols using bitwise XOR and cyclic shift
operations. The number of data symbols is chosen according to the Robust
Soliton distribution. XOR and cyclic shift operations establish a unitary
commutative ring if data symbols have a length of bits, for some prime
number . We consider the graph given by code symbols combining two data
symbols. If such random pairs are given for data symbols, then a
giant component appears, which can be resolved in linear time. We can extend
Cyclone codes to data symbols of arbitrary even length, provided the Goldbach
conjecture holds.
Applying results for this giant component, it follows that Cyclone codes have
the same encoding and decoding time complexity as LT codes, while the overhead
is upper-bounded by those of LT codes. Simulations indicate that Cyclone codes
significantly decreases the overhead of extra coding symbols
Concentration, Coagglomeration and Spillovers: The Geography of New Market Firms in Germany
The Neuer Markt, launched in 1997 by Deutsche Börse, the German stock exchange, is Europe’s closest equivalent to the Nasdaq, the US high-tech oriented stock market. Although the New Economy in Germany is not restricted to Neuer Markt firms one may argue that these firms and their employees form the spearhead of Germany’s New Economy. In the current paper we employ the ‘dartboard approach’ pioneered by Ellison and Glaeser to analyse the spatial concentration of New Economy employment in Germany, the coagglomeration of firms belonging to different sub-sectors of Neuer Markt and the (intraregional) spillovers between different high tech industries. We refine the analysis by differentiating between Neuer Markt firms in general and New Economy firms in a more narrow sense, and we compare their spatial distribution with the structure of the ‘traditional economy’ as well as with the spatial distribution of other innovative activities such as patent applications or R&D. Key Words: Geographic concentration, New Economy, Neuer Markt, Dartboard Approach JEL Classification: G19, O30, O18, R11
From images via symbols to contexts: using augmented reality for interactive model acquisition
Systems that perform in real environments need to bind the internal state to externally
perceived objects, events, or complete scenes. How to learn this correspondence has been a long
standing problem in computer vision as well as artificial intelligence. Augmented Reality provides
an interesting perspective on this problem because a human user can directly relate displayed
system results to real environments. In the following we present a system that is able to bootstrap
internal models from user-system interactions. Starting from pictorial representations it learns
symbolic object labels that provide the basis for storing observed episodes. In a second step, more
complex relational information is extracted from stored episodes that enables the system to react
on specific scene contexts
Nonlinear conductivity in CaRuO3 thin films measured by short current pulses
Metals near quantum critical points have been predicted to display universal
out-of equilibrium behavior in the steady current-carrying state. We have
studied the non-linear conductivity of high-quality CaRuO thin films with
residual resistivity ratio up to 57 using micro-second short, high-field
current pulses at low temperatures. Even for the shortest pulses of s,
Joule heating persists, making it impossible to observe a possible universal
non-linearity. Much shorter pulses are needed for the investigation of
universal non-linear conductivity.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
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