On a Simple Survey Measure of Individual Risk Aversion

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lottery and deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion. This allows direct testing of common hy-poth-eses on risk atti-tudes in three datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed falls with income and wealth. Entre-preneurs are less risk averse than employees, civil servants are more risk averse than private sector employees, and women are more risk averse than men. We analyze six different specifications of the lottery question in a single data set and find quite consistent results. We conclude that a simple lottery ques-tion is a promising survey in-strument to extract differ-ences in risk attitudes among individuals.

Risk Attitudes and Wage Growth: Replication and Reconstruction

We replicate Shaw (1996) who found that individual wage growth is higher for individuals with greater preference for risk taking. Expanding her dataset with more American observations and data for Germany, Spain and Italy, we find mixed support for the earlier results. We present and estimate a new model and find that in particular the wage level is sensitive to attitudes towards risk taking.wage growth, risk, post-school investment

Improved Laboratory Transition Probabilities for Ce II, Application to the Cerium Abundances of the Sun and Five r-process Rich, Metal-Poor Stars, and Rare Earth Lab Data

Recent radiative lifetime measurements accurate to +/- 5% using laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) on 43 even-parity and 15 odd-parity levels of Ce II have been combined with new branching fractions measured using a Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) to determine transition probabilities for 921 lines of Ce II. This improved laboratory data set has been used to determine a new solar photospheric Ce abundance, log epsilon = 1.61 +/- 0.01 (sigma = 0.06 from 45 lines), a value in excellent agreement with the recommended meteoritic abundance, log epsilon = 1.61 +/- 0.02. Revised Ce abundances have also been derived for the r-process-rich metal-poor giant stars BD+17 3248, CS 22892-052, CS 31082-001, HD 115444 and HD 221170. Between 26 and 40 lines were used for determining the Ce abundance in these five stars, yielding a small statistical uncertainty of 0.01 dex similar to the Solar result. The relative abundances in the metal-poor stars of Ce and Eu, a nearly pure r-process element in the Sun, matches r-process only model predictions for Solar System material. This consistent match with small scatter over a wide range of stellar metallicities lends support to these predictions of elemental fractions. A companion paper includes an interpretation of these new precision abundance results for Ce as well as new abundance results and interpretations for Pr, Dy and Tm.Comment: 84 pages, 8 Figures, 14 Tables; To appear in the Astrophysical Journal Supplemen

My Private Cloud Overview: A Trust, Privacy and Security Infrastructure for the Cloud

Based on the assumption that cloud providers can be trusted (to a certain extent) we define a trust, security and privacy preserving infrastructure that relies on trusted cloud providers to operate properly. Working in tandem with legal agreements, our open source software supports: trust and reputation management, sticky policies with fine grained access controls, privacy preserving delegation of authority, federated identity management, different levels of assurance and configurable audit trails. Armed with these tools, cloud service providers are then able to offer a reliable privacy preserving infrastructure-as-a-service to their clients

Risk Attitude and Wage Growth: Replication and Reconstruction

We replicate Shaw (1996) who found that individual wage growth is higher for individuals with greater preference for risk taking. Expanding her dataset with more American observations and data for Germany, Spain and Italy, we find mixed support for the earlier results. We present and estimate a new model and find that in particular the wage level is sensitive to attitudes towards risk taking.wage growth, risk, post-school investment

AFM of metallic nano-particles and nano-structures in heavily irradiated NaCl

AFM investigations are reported for heavily, electron irradiated NaCl crystals in ultra high vacuum (UHV) in the non-contact mode with an UHV AFM/STM Omicron system. To avoid chemical reactions between the radiolytic Na and oxygen and water, the irradiated samples were cleaved and prepared for the experiments in UHV. At the surface of freshly cleaved samples, we have observed sodium nano-precipitates with shapes, which depend on the irradiation dose and the volume fraction of the radiolytic Na. It appears that the nano-structures consist of (i) isolated nano-particles, (ii) more or less random aggregates of these particles, (iii) fractally shaped networks and (iv) ‘‘fabrics’’ consisting of bundles of Quasi-1D arrays forming polymeric networks of nano-particles. Almost independent of the concentration of the metallic Na in the samples the size of the individual nano-particles is in the range 1–3 nm. Our new AFM results are fully in line with our CESR and previous Raman scattering results.

Magnetic field influence on the proximity effect in semiconductor - superconductor hybrid structures and their thermal conductance

We show that a magnetic field can influnce the proximity effect in NS junctions via diamagnetic screening current flowing in the superconductor. Using ballistic quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) electron channels as an example, we show that the supercurrent flow shifts the proximity-induced minigap in the excitation spectrum of a Q1D system from the Fermi level to higher quasiparticle energies. Thermal conductance of a Q1D channel (normalized by that of a normal Q1D ballistic system) is predicted to manifest such a spectral feature as a nonmonotonic behavior at temperatures corresponding to the energy of excitation into the gapful part of the spectrum.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, revised version with a new titl