Rethinking industrial policy

Industrial policy has a bad name: â??picking winnersâ?? and thus distorting competition, while exposing government to capture by vested interests. But there are reasons for a rethink. First, climate change: without government intervention to jump-start massive private investment in clean technologies, governments, by default, encourage investment in dirtier technologies. Second, a new post-crisis realism: laissez-faire complacency by many governments has led to mis-investment in the non-tradable sector at the expense of growth-rich tradables. Third, China â?? and some other emerging economies â?? are big deployers of growth-enhancing sectoral policies. The challenge for Europe is how it can design and govern sectoral policies that are competition-friendly and thus growth-enhancing.

Who you gonna call? Analyzing Web Requests in Android Applications

Relying on ubiquitous Internet connectivity, applications on mobile devices frequently perform web requests during their execution. They fetch data for users to interact with, invoke remote functionalities, or send user-generated content or meta-data. These requests collectively reveal common practices of mobile application development, like what external services are used and how, and they point to possible negative effects like security and privacy violations, or impacts on battery life. In this paper, we assess different ways to analyze what web requests Android applications make. We start by presenting dynamic data collected from running 20 randomly selected Android applications and observing their network activity. Next, we present a static analysis tool, Stringoid, that analyzes string concatenations in Android applications to estimate constructed URL strings. Using Stringoid, we extract URLs from 30, 000 Android applications, and compare the performance with a simpler constant extraction analysis. Finally, we present a discussion of the advantages and limitations of dynamic and static analyses when extracting URLs, as we compare the data extracted by Stringoid from the same 20 applications with the dynamically collected data

The role of other financial intermediaries in monetary and credit developments in the euro area

Monetary growth has increased significantly in the euro area in recent years, raising concerns about the risks to price stability. Viewed from a sectoral perspective, this increase reflects to a large extent the deposit holdings of other financial intermediaries (OFIs). This paper presents analytical work on the role of OFIs in monetary and credit developments in the euro area. Although, at the moment, some shortcomings in the data available – such as the lack of long time series data – seriously limit the analysis of the role of OFIs in monetary and credit aggregates, it seems clear that OFIs have gained considerable importance in recent years, not only as a factor affecting monetary developments, but also for the functioning of the financial system. This gain in importance may be due to financial deregulation and liberalisation, as well as financial innovation. These developments are reflected in the integration and deepening of euro area financial markets, as well as in investors’ attitude to risk.

A Novel Adaptive Inertia Strategy in Large-Scale Electric Power Grids

The increasing penetration of new renewable sources of energy in today's power grids is accompanied by a decrease in available electromechanical inertia. This leads to a reduced dynamical stability. To counterbalance this effect, virtual synchronous generators have been proposed to emulate conventional generators and provide inertia to power systems. The high flexibility of these devices makes it possible to control the synthetic inertia they provide and to have them operate even more efficiently than the electromechanical inertia they replace. Here, we propose a novel control scheme for virtual synchronous generators, where the amount of inertia provided is large at short times - thereby absorbing local faults and disturbances as efficiently as conventional generators - but decreases over a tunable time interval to prevent long-time coherent oscillations from setting in. This new model is used to investigate the effect of adaptive inertia on large-scale power grids. Our model outperforms conventional constant inertia in all scenarios and for all performance measures considered. We show how an optimized geographical distribution of adaptive inertia devices not only effectively absorbs local faults, but also significantly improves the damping of inter-area oscillations.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

VLSI implementation of an energy-aware wake-up detector for an acoustic surveillance sensor network

We present a low-power VLSI wake-up detector for a sensor network that uses acoustic signals to localize ground-base vehicles. The detection criterion is the degree of low-frequency periodicity in the acoustic signal, and the periodicity is computed from the "bumpiness" of the autocorrelation of a one-bit version of the signal. We then describe a CMOS ASIC that implements the periodicity estimation algorithm. The ASIC is functional and its core consumes 835 nanowatts. It was integrated into an acoustic enclosure and deployed in field tests with synthesized sounds and ground-based vehicles.Fil: Goldberg, David H.. Johns Hopkins University; Estados UnidosFil: Andreou, Andreas. Johns Hopkins University; Estados UnidosFil: Julian, Pedro Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y de Computadoras; ArgentinaFil: Pouliquen, Philippe O.. Johns Hopkins University; Estados UnidosFil: Riddle, Laurence. Signal Systems Corporation; Estados UnidosFil: Rosasco, Rich. Signal Systems Corporation; Estados Unido