This book examines the role of scientific expertise in minimum wage policy making in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It finds that scientific research is an important part of the public discourse on minimum wages in all three countries. Newspapers frequently cite scholars and research institutions, providing their readers with a good sense of how scientific research evaluates the effects of minimum wages. How often this happens depends on the context. Most importantly, newspapers from the United States cite researchers more frequently than newspapers from the two European countries. The book also shows that scientific research influences the policy preferences of political actors such as trade unions, political parties, and government agencies. The influence is based on policy-oriented learning. It is strong in Germany and the United Kingdom, and weaker in the United States. In both cases, cross-country differences are found to be related to different styles of using scientific expertise in the three countries.
This book presents an account of the exact solution of the Hubbard model in one dimension. The early chapters develop a self-contained introduction to Bethe's ansatz and its application to the one-dimensional Hubbard model. The later chapters address more advanced topics.
Drawing on research, theory and practice, this book presents ways in which practitioners, working in partnership with parents, can give children a successful start to school. Written in an accessible style, the book helps early years practitioners planning transition programs for new children and offers ideas for developing their professional practice when working with families. Starting school at the age of four or five is recognized as a major adjustment in a child's life that can determine his or her future success in education. This book highlights the factors that influence children's early adjustment, including their social and emotional wellbeing, so that schools can learn the best way to offer support. Practitioners, managers and those studying on early childhood courses will gain an understanding of the complexity and diversity of transition and will learn how they can make this a stress-free time for the children, families and professionals involved.
In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.
This book includes three essays covering the ownership perceptions individuals experience in family businesses. It advances current knowledge on the organizational factors anteceding individuals' psychological ownership as well as the attitudinal and behavioral consequences. Investigating overly strong psychological ownership, the first essay provides insights into the phenomenon of aging family business owner-managers who face difficulties in 'letting go', i. e. passing on leadership to their successor(s). The second essay offers a study of family business owner-managers' leadership styles and their influence on nonfamily employees' psychological ownership of the family business as well as individuals' motivation and performance. Given the special situation of nonfamily members working in family businesses, the third essay examines the effects of employees' and nonfamily managers' justice perceptions on both the ownership experience and commitment to the family business. The works presented in this book built a basis for several publications, such as articles in the Journal of Family Business Strategy and Group & Organization Management. Furthermore, they have been presented at various international conferences, have been nominated for a "most creative paper" award, and have contributed to the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. The findings not only constitute valuable additions to current research in management and organizational psychology, but can also provide benefit for those interested in family businesses. Managers, owners, and consultants working in or for family businesses would likely gain from the practical implications.
Respiratory and cardiac motion leads to image degradation in Positron Emission Tomography (PET), which impairs quantification. In this book, the authors present approaches to motion estimation and motion correction in thoracic PET. The approaches for motion estimation are based on dual gating and mass-preserving image registration (VAMPIRE) and mass-preserving optical flow (MPOF). With mass-preservation, image intensity modulations caused by highly non-rigid cardiac motion are accounted for. Within the image registration framework different data terms, different variants of regularization and parametric and non-parametric motion models are examined. Within the optical flow framework, different data terms and further non-quadratic penalization are also discussed. The approaches for motion correction particularly focus on pipelines in dual gated PET. A quantitative evaluation of the proposed approaches is performed on software phantom data with accompanied ground-truth motion information. Further, clinical applicability is shown on patient data. The book concludes with an outlook of recent developments and potential future advances in the field of PET motion correction.
Goal! covers the history of the beautiful game from its origins in English public schools in the early 19th century to its current role as a crucial element of a globalized entertainment industry. The authors explain how football transformed from a sport at elite boarding schools in England to become a pastime popular with the working classes, enabling factories such as the Thames Iron Works and the Woolwich Arsenal to give birth to the teams that would become the Premier League mainstays known as West Ham United and Arsenal. They also explore how the age of amateur soccer ended and, with the advent of professionalism, how football became a sport dominated by big clubs with big money and with an international audience.
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of todays most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke "context in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture. The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition--given or denied--in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the "imperial gaze of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.
We collect new data to assess the importance of supply-side credit market frictions by studying the impact of financial sector recapitalization packages on the growth performance of firms in a large cross-section of 50 countries during the recent crisis. We develop an identification strategy that uses the financial crisis as a shock to credit supply and exploits exogenous variation in the degree to which firms depend on external financing for investment needs, and focus on policy interventions aimed at alleviating the bank capital crunch. We find that the growth of firms dependent on external financing is disproportionately positively affected by bank recapitalization policies, and that this effect is quantitatively important and robust to controlling for other financial sector support policies. We also find that fiscal policy disproportionately boosted growth of firms more dependent on external financing. These results provide new evidence of a quantitatively important role of credit market frictions in influencing real economic activity.
With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System and the begin of floating between the major currencies, central banks have been formally freed from their obligations to defend the fixed parities of bilateral exchange rates. Nev ertheless, since then there have been countless occasions on which monetary authorities have officially intervened in the foreign exchange market. More over, numerous studies indicate that exchange rates have been much more variable than originally anticipated - in real and in nominal, as well as in short run and longer run measures (see for example Hesse and Braasch [1989] and Marston [1988]). Through the experience of high real sector costs, the topic of optimal exchange rate management soon reentered policy discussions. The term exchange rate management encompasses both the choice of ex change rate regime as well as active intervention policies within the given 1 system. Much of the recent policy discussion has focussed on the first issue, in particular proposals of how to reform the present international monetary order. And new systems such as the European Monetary System (EMS) have emerged for subgroups of countries. However, the question of finding the optimal system has not yet been resolved.
Gas at temperatures exceeding one million degrees is common in the Universe. Indeed it is likely that most of the gas in the Universe exists in intergalactic space in this form. Such highly-ionized gas, or plasma, is not restricted to the rarefied densities of intergalactic space, but is also found in clusters of galaxies, in galaxies themselves, in the expanding remnants of exploded stars and at higher densities in stars and the collapsed remains of stars up to the highest densities known, which occur in neutron stars. The abundant lower-Z elements, at least, in such gas are completely ionized and the gas acts as a highly conducting plasma. It is therefore subject to many cooperative phenomena, which are often complicated and ill-understood. Many of these processes are, however, well-studied (if not so well-understood) in laboratory plasmas and in the near environment of the Earth. Astronomers therefore have much to learn from plasma physicists working on laboratory and space plasmas and the parameter range studied by the plasma physicists might in turn be broadened by contact with astronomers. With that in mind, a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Physical Processes in Hot Cosmic Plasmas was organized and took place in the Eolian Hotel, Vulcano, Italy on May 29 to June 2 1989. This book contains the Proceedings of that Workshop.
“Today, people are returning to natural diets in order to live healthier and happier lives—the hallmarks of ‘wellness’—and science has been validating the benefits. One of the natural foods being rediscovered is the coconut. Although vilified as a cause of heart disease, coconut oil has always shown itself to be a healthy and curative oil. Numerous studies using the tools of modern science are finally revealing—and validating—the beneficial effects of coconut oil.” — From the Prologue
From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements' activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective - a story that, until now, has remained untold. Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.
While modern project management systems support teams during planning and development activities, primarily through performance-related process information, the equally relevant human factors are often insufficiently considered for explaining team dynamics (e.g., the affect of moods in teams). However, understanding team behavioral patterns are crucial for the accurate planning and steady execution of development tasks throughout an ongoing project. A computer-aided feedback concept is described, unifying interdisciplinary foundations and methods from the software engineering, data science, organizational, and social psychology fields for disclosing team dynamics in agile software projects. The concept covers the systematic capture of sociotechnical data combined with descriptive, predictive, and exploratory model-based methods that support understanding behavioural changes during the development process. Design science from information systems research is used in academic and industrial case studies to conceptualize and operationalize the feedback methods into a practical Jira plugin. A concluding evaluation through an action research method in two industrial software projects results in quantitative and qualitative findings regarding the feedback utilization and utility during agile development processes (e.g., team communication changes related to accomplished performances). The case studies underscore the practical relevance for systematic feedback and the need to better understand human factors in software projects.
For decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Fabian Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as sites that were once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly subsumed by corporate giants. Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also explores the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote mainstream Anglophone culture and its consumerist trappings. The book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. An engaging read for fans, industry professionals, and scholars alike, Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think.
Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.
Silicone rubber belongs to the group of synthetic rubbers and, due to its property profile, offers broad application possibilities in a large number of industrial sectors. The processing of high-consistency silicone rubber in the extrusion process places high demands on the processor in terms of process understanding and material behavior. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the fundamental and comprehensive analysis of the extrusion process of high-consistency silicone rubber.
The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album’s inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn’t bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? In Genre in Popular Music, Fabian Holt provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, Holt embarks on a wide-ranging and ambitious collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll’s explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, Holt finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience and to the social organization of musical life.
An Introduction to Clouds provides a fundamental understanding of clouds, ranging from cloud microphysics to the large-scale impacts of clouds on climate. On the microscale, phase changes and ice nucleation are covered comprehensively, including aerosol particles and thermodynamics relevant for the formation of clouds and precipitation. At larger scales, cloud dynamics, mid-latitude storms and tropical cyclones are discussed leading to the role of clouds on the hydrological cycle and climate. Each chapter ends with problem sets and multiple-choice questions that can be completed online, and important equations are highlighted in boxes for ease of reference. Combining mathematical formulations with qualitative explanations of underlying concepts, this accessible book requires relatively little previous knowledge, making it ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in atmospheric science, environmental sciences and related disciplines.
Like FEM, the Boundary Element Method (BEM) provides a general numerical tool for the solution of complex engineering problems. In the last decades, the range of its applications has remarkably been enlarged. Therefore dynamic and nonlinear problems can be tackled. However they still demand an explicit expression of a fundamental solution, which is only known in simple cases. In this respect, the present book proposes an alternative BEM-formulation based on the Fourier transform, which can be applied to almost all cases relevant in engineering mechanics. The basic principle is presented for the heat equation. Applications are taken from solid mechanics (e.g. poroelasticity, thermoelasticity). Transient and stationary examples are given as well as linear and nonlinear. Completed with a mathematical and mechanical glossary, the book will serve as a comprehensive text book linking applied mathematics to real world engineering problems.
In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to address these challenges. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since organizations tend to have a huge number of such models, analysis techniques are required that ensure the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. The goal of this doctoral thesis is the development of model refactoring techniques by integrating and applying concepts from the three main branches of theoretical linguistics: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The syntactical refactoring technique addresses linguistic issues that arise by expressing process behavior with natural language. The semantic refactoring technique reworks terminology with overlapping and synonymous meaning. The pragmatic refactoring technique provides recommendations for incompletely specified process models. All of the presented techniques have been evaluated with real-world process model repositories from various industries to demonstrate their applicability and efficiency.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.