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Grammatica Grandonica
(2013)
In May 2010, Johann Ernst Hanxleden’s Grammatica Grandonica was rediscovered in Montecompatri (Lazio, Rome). Although historiographers attached much weight to the nearly oldest western grammar of Sanskrit, the precious manuscript was lost for several decades. The first aim of the present digital publication is to offer a photographical reproduction of the manuscript. This facsimile is accompanied by a double edition: a facing diplomatic edition with the Sanskrit in Malayāḷam script, followed by a transliterated established text.
The European Values Education (EVE) project is a large-scale, cross-national, and longitudinal survey research programme on basic human values. The main topic of its second stage was family values in Europe. Student teachers of several universities in Europe worked together in multicultural exchange groups. Their results are presented in this issue.
Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tools are used for the creation, maintenance, and evolution of data warehouses, data marts, and operational data stores. ETL workflows populate those systems with data from various data sources by specifying and executing a DAG of transformations. Over time, hundreds of individual workflows evolve as new sources and new requirements are integrated into the system. The maintenance and evolution of large-scale ETL systems requires much time and manual effort. A key problem is to understand the meaning of unfamiliar attribute labels in source and target databases and ETL transformations. Hard-to-understand attribute labels lead to frustration and time spent to develop and understand ETL workflows. We present a schema decryption technique to support ETL developers in understanding cryptic schemata of sources, targets, and ETL transformations. For a given ETL system, our recommender-like approach leverages the large number of mapped attribute labels in existing ETL workflows to produce good and meaningful decryptions. In this way we are able to decrypt attribute labels consisting of a number of unfamiliar few-letter abbreviations, such as UNP_PEN_INT, which we can decrypt to UNPAID_PENALTY_INTEREST. We evaluate our schema decryption approach on three real-world repositories of ETL workflows and show that our approach is able to suggest high-quality decryptions for cryptic attribute labels in a given schema.
This thesis deals with two theories of international trade: the theory of comparative advantage, which is connected to the name David Ricardo and is dominating current trade theory, and Adam Smith’s theory of absolute advantage. Both theories are compared and their assumptions are scrutinised. The former theory is rejected on theoretical and empirical grounds in favour of the latter. On the basis of the theory of absolute advantage, developments of free international trade are examined, whereby the focus is on trade between industrial and underdeveloped countries. The main conclusions are that trade patterns are determined by absolute production cost advantages and that the gap between developed and poor countries is not reduced but rather increased by free trade.
Cyber-physical systems achieve sophisticated system behavior exploring the tight interconnection of physical coupling present in classical engineering systems and information technology based coupling. A particular challenging case are systems where these cyber-physical systems are formed ad hoc according to the specific local topology, the available networking capabilities, and the goals and constraints of the subsystems captured by the information processing part. In this paper we present a formalism that permits to model the sketched class of cyber-physical systems. The ad hoc formation of tightly coupled subsystems of arbitrary size are specified using a UML-based graph transformation system approach. Differential equations are employed to define the resulting tightly coupled behavior. Together, both form hybrid graph transformation systems where the graph transformation rules define the discrete steps where the topology or modes may change, while the differential equations capture the continuous behavior in between such discrete changes. In addition, we demonstrate that automated analysis techniques known for timed graph transformation systems for inductive invariants can be extended to also cover the hybrid case for an expressive case of hybrid models where the formed tightly coupled subsystems are restricted to smaller local networks.
Program behavior that relies on contextual information, such as physical location or network accessibility, is common in today's applications, yet its representation is not sufficiently supported by programming languages. With context-oriented programming (COP), such context-dependent behavioral variations can be explicitly modularized and dynamically activated. In general, COP could be used to manage any context-specific behavior. However, its contemporary realizations limit the control of dynamic adaptation. This, in turn, limits the interaction of COP's adaptation mechanisms with widely used architectures, such as event-based, mobile, and distributed programming. The JCop programming language extends Java with language constructs for context-oriented programming and additionally provides a domain-specific aspect language for declarative control over runtime adaptations. As a result, these redesigned implementations are more concise and better modularized than their counterparts using plain COP. JCop's main features have been described in our previous publications. However, a complete language specification has not been presented so far. This report presents the entire JCop language including the syntax and semantics of its new language constructs.
Data dependencies, or integrity constraints, are used to improve the quality of a database schema, to optimize queries, and to ensure consistency in a database. In the last years conditional dependencies have been introduced to analyze and improve data quality. In short, a conditional dependency is a dependency with a limited scope defined by conditions over one or more attributes. Only the matching part of the instance must adhere to the dependency. In this paper we focus on conditional inclusion dependencies (CINDs). We generalize the definition of CINDs, distinguishing covering and completeness conditions. We present a new use case for such CINDs showing their value for solving complex data quality tasks. Further, we define quality measures for conditions inspired by precision and recall. We propose efficient algorithms that identify covering and completeness conditions conforming to given quality thresholds. Our algorithms choose not only the condition values but also the condition attributes automatically. Finally, we show that our approach efficiently provides meaningful and helpful results for our use case.
During the overall development of complex engineering systems different modeling notations are employed. For example, in the domain of automotive systems system engineering models are employed quite early to capture the requirements and basic structuring of the entire system, while software engineering models are used later on to describe the concrete software architecture. Each model helps in addressing the specific design issue with appropriate notations and at a suitable level of abstraction. However, when we step forward from system design to the software design, the engineers have to ensure that all decisions captured in the system design model are correctly transferred to the software engineering model. Even worse, when changes occur later on in either model, today the consistency has to be reestablished in a cumbersome manual step. In this report, we present in an extended version of [Holger Giese, Stefan Neumann, and Stephan Hildebrandt. Model Synchronization at Work: Keeping SysML and AUTOSAR Models Consistent. In Gregor Engels, Claus Lewerentz, Wilhelm Schäfer, Andy Schürr, and B. Westfechtel, editors, Graph Transformations and Model Driven Enginering - Essays Dedicated to Manfred Nagl on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, volume 5765 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 555–579. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2010.] how model synchronization and consistency rules can be applied to automate this task and ensure that the different models are kept consistent. We also introduce a general approach for model synchronization. Besides synchronization, the approach consists of tool adapters as well as consistency rules covering the overlap between the synchronized parts of a model and the rest. We present the model synchronization algorithm based on triple graph grammars in detail and further exemplify the general approach by means of a model synchronization solution between system engineering models in SysML and software engineering models in AUTOSAR which has been developed for an industrial partner. In the appendix as extension to [19] the meta-models and all TGG rules for the SysML to AUTOSAR model synchronization are documented.
MDE techniques are more and more used in praxis. However, there is currently a lack of detailed reports about how different MDE techniques are integrated into the development and combined with each other. To learn more about such MDE settings, we performed a descriptive and exploratory field study with SAP, which is a worldwide operating company with around 50.000 employees and builds enterprise software applications. This technical report describes insights we got during this study. For example, we identified that MDE settings are subject to evolution. Finally, this report outlines directions for future research to provide practical advises for the application of MDE settings.
Experimental and quantitative research in the field of human language processing and production strongly depends on the quality of the underlying language material: beside its size, representativeness, variety and balance have been discussed as important factors which influence design, analysis and interpretation of experiments and their results. This volume brings together creators and users of both general purpose and specialized lexical resources which are used in psychology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and cognitive research. It aims to be a forum to report experiences and results, review problems and discuss perspectives of any linguistic data used in the field.
The European Values Education (EVE) project is a large-scale, cross-national, and longitudinal survey research programme on basic human values. The main topic of its second stage was religion in Europe. Student teachers of several universities in Europe worked together in multicultural exchange groups. Their results are presented in this issue.
One of the key challenges in service-oriented systems engineering is the prediction and assurance of non-functional properties, such as the reliability and the availability of composite interorganizational services. Such systems are often characterized by a variety of inherent uncertainties, which must be addressed in the modeling and the analysis approach. The different relevant types of uncertainties can be categorized into (1) epistemic uncertainties due to incomplete knowledge and (2) randomization as explicitly used in protocols or as a result of physical processes. In this report, we study a probabilistic timed model which allows us to quantitatively reason about nonfunctional properties for a restricted class of service-oriented real-time systems using formal methods. To properly motivate the choice for the used approach, we devise a requirements catalogue for the modeling and the analysis of probabilistic real-time systems with uncertainties and provide evidence that the uncertainties of type (1) and (2) in the targeted systems have a major impact on the used models and require distinguished analysis approaches. The formal model we use in this report are Interval Probabilistic Timed Automata (IPTA). Based on the outlined requirements, we give evidence that this model provides both enough expressiveness for a realistic and modular specifiation of the targeted class of systems, and suitable formal methods for analyzing properties, such as safety and reliability properties in a quantitative manner. As technical means for the quantitative analysis, we build on probabilistic model checking, specifically on probabilistic time-bounded reachability analysis and computation of expected reachability rewards and costs. To carry out the quantitative analysis using probabilistic model checking, we developed an extension of the Prism tool for modeling and analyzing IPTA. Our extension of Prism introduces a means for modeling probabilistic uncertainty in the form of probability intervals, as required for IPTA. For analyzing IPTA, our Prism extension moreover adds support for probabilistic reachability checking and computation of expected rewards and costs. We discuss the performance of our extended version of Prism and compare the interval-based IPTA approach to models with fixed probabilities.
In continuation of a successful series of events, the 4th Many-core Applications Research Community (MARC) symposium took place at the HPI in Potsdam on December 8th and 9th 2011. Over 60 researchers from different fields presented their work on many-core hardware architectures, their programming models, and the resulting research questions for the upcoming generation of heterogeneous parallel systems.
Version Control Systems (VCS) allow developers to manage changes to software artifacts. Developers interact with VCSs through a variety of client programs, such as graphical front-ends or command line tools. It is desirable to use the same version control client program against different VCSs. Unfortunately, no established abstraction over VCS concepts exists. Instead, VCS client programs implement ad-hoc solutions to support interaction with multiple VCSs. This thesis presents Pur, an abstraction over version control concepts that allows building rich client programs that can interact with multiple VCSs. We provide an implementation of this abstraction and validate it by implementing a client application.
The World Wide Web as an application platform becomes increasingly important. However, the development of Web applications is often more complex than for the desktop. Web-based development environments like Lively Webwerkstatt can mitigate this problem by making the development process more interactive and direct. By moving the development environment into the Web, applications can be developed collaboratively in a Wiki-like manner. This report documents the results of the project seminar on Web-based Development Environments 2010. In this seminar, participants extended the Web-based development environment Lively Webwerkstatt. They worked in small teams on current research topics from the field of Web-development and tool support for programmers and implemented their results in the Webwerkstatt environment.
Duplicate detection is the task of identifying all groups of records within a data set that represent the same real-world entity, respectively. This task is difficult, because (i) representations might differ slightly, so some similarity measure must be defined to compare pairs of records and (ii) data sets might have a high volume making a pair-wise comparison of all records infeasible. To tackle the second problem, many algorithms have been suggested that partition the data set and compare all record pairs only within each partition. One well-known such approach is the Sorted Neighborhood Method (SNM), which sorts the data according to some key and then advances a window over the data comparing only records that appear within the same window. We propose several variations of SNM that have in common a varying window size and advancement. The general intuition of such adaptive windows is that there might be regions of high similarity suggesting a larger window size and regions of lower similarity suggesting a smaller window size. We propose and thoroughly evaluate several adaption strategies, some of which are provably better than the original SNM in terms of efficiency (same results with fewer comparisons).
Unique column combinations of a relational database table are sets of columns that contain only unique values. Discovering such combinations is a fundamental research problem and has many different data management and knowledge discovery applications. Existing discovery algorithms are either brute force or have a high memory load and can thus be applied only to small datasets or samples. In this paper, the wellknown GORDIAN algorithm and "Apriori-based" algorithms are compared and analyzed for further optimization. We greatly improve the Apriori algorithms through efficient candidate generation and statistics-based pruning methods. A hybrid solution HCAGORDIAN combines the advantages of GORDIAN and our new algorithm HCA, and it significantly outperforms all previous work in many situations.
IT systems for healthcare are a complex and exciting field. One the one hand, there is a vast number of improvements and work alleviations that computers can bring to everyday healthcare. Some ways of treatment, diagnoses and organisational tasks were even made possible by computer usage in the first place. On the other hand, there are many factors that encumber computer usage and make development of IT systems for healthcare a challenging, sometimes even frustrating task. These factors are not solely technology-related, but just as well social or economical conditions. This report describes some of the idiosyncrasies of IT systems in the healthcare domain, with a special focus on legal regulations, standards and security.
Business process models are abstractions of concrete operational procedures that occur in the daily business of organizations. To cope with the complexity of these models, business process model abstraction has been introduced recently. Its goal is to derive from a detailed process model several abstract models that provide a high-level understanding of the process. While techniques for constructing abstract models are reported in the literature, little is known about the relationships between process instances and abstract models. In this paper we show how the state of an abstract activity can be calculated from the states of related, detailed process activities as they happen. The approach uses activity state propagation. With state uniqueness and state transition correctness we introduce formal properties that improve the understanding of state propagation. Algorithms to check these properties are devised. Finally, we use behavioral profiles to identify and classify behavioral inconsistencies in abstract process models that might occur, once activity state propagation is used.
CSOM/PL is a software product line (SPL) derived from applying multi-dimensional separation of concerns (MDSOC) techniques to the domain of high-level language virtual machine (VM) implementations. For CSOM/PL, we modularised CSOM, a Smalltalk VM implemented in C, using VMADL (virtual machine architecture description language). Several features of the original CSOM were encapsulated in VMADL modules and composed in various combinations. In an evaluation of our approach, we show that applying MDSOC and SPL principles to a domain as complex as that of VMs is not only feasible but beneficial, as it improves understandability, maintainability, and configurability of VM implementations without harming performance.
Estimation and testing the effect of covariates in accelerated life time models under censoring
(2010)
The accelerated lifetime model is considered. To test the influence of the covariate we transform the model in a regression model. Since censoring is allowed this approach leads to a goodness-of-fit problem for regression functions under censoring. So nonparametric estimation of regression functions under censoring is investigated, a limit theorem for a L2-distance is stated and a test procedure is formulated. Finally a Monte Carlo procedure is proposed.
We analyse different Gibbsian properties of interactive Brownian diffusions X indexed by the lattice $Z^{d} : X = (X_{i}(t), i ∈ Z^{d}, t ∈ [0, T], 0 < T < +∞)$. In a first part, these processes are characterized as Gibbs states on path spaces of the form $C([0, T],R)Z^{d}$. In a second part, we study the Gibbsian character on $R^{Z}^{d}$ of $v^{t}$, the law at time t of the infinite-dimensional diffusion X(t), when the initial law $v = v^{0}$ is Gibbsian.
New survey data for a panel of Polish firms is used to estimate employment and wage adjustments under various forms of ownership (insider vs. outsider) and asymmetric response to exogenous shocks. In contrast to earlier studies, dynamic panel data estimators (GMM) allow for endogeneity of observed variables and partial adjustment to shocks. Results differ from other findings in the transition literature: wages have little effect on dynamic labor demand and the firm-size wage effect is confirmed. Firms that expand employment have to pay significantly larger wage increases and rising sales add little to employment, suggesting labor hoarding. Dec1ining sales, however, significantly reduce employment and privatization (or anticipation thereof) has the expected benefits.
In socialist economies firms have provided various social benefits, like child care, health care, food subsidies, housing etc. Using panel data from Bulgarian and Polish firms, this paper attempts to explain firm-specific provision of social benefits in the process of transition. We investigate empirically with the help of qualitative response models, how ownership type and structure, firm size, profitability, change in management, foreign direct investment, wage and employment policies, union involvement and employee power have impacted the state of non-wage benefits provision.
Privatisation and ownership : the impact on firms in transition survey evidence from Bulgaria
(1999)
Previous papers in this Special Series, have described in detail the theoretical background and development patterns, along with some empirical results, for the privatisation processes in Bulgaria and Poland. A range of issues have been raised which demand closer empirical investigation. For this purpose, the research group has developed questionnaire studies for Bulgaria and Poland. In Bulgaria, the National Statistical Institute (NSI) carried out the case studies between February and April 1998. The problems of the questionnaire set-up were identified in apre-test study, but unlike the Polish case, they led to only minor differentiation. Since financial limitations prevented a larger sample size, a sample size of 61 mid-sized and large Bulgarian enterprises was selected. Failure to respond was not a serious problem, unlike with the Polish questionnaire; this is because the NSI has maintained good links to the enterprise sector and management were prepared to give detailed answers, even on questions of their firms' financial status. However, as the Polish experience suggests, it has become obvious that the privatisation process is also associated with management's increasing reluctance to answer comparatively 'intimate' questions. Thus, future questionnaire studies must take a much higher rate of refusals into consideration. The pre-selection procedure in Bulgaria was determined by the project target, which sought to analyse the effects of the privatisation process on firm' s behaviour during the transition process, and hence only firms which had already existed before the changes were included. For small and medium-size enterprises (SME's), most of which were founded after the changes, partly due to the legal processes of spontaneous privatisation, some empirical, as weIl as analytical, studies were carried out. Thus, the research group limited the scope of investigation to enterprises with more than 250 employees. The underlying hypothesis is that employment problems are concentrated in larger firms, in particular amongst those still (partly) state owned. Because of the former ownership structures and relatively slower capacity for management change, the assumption is that state-owned enterprises (SOE's) which have only been recently privatised might still have traditional links to government even after privatisation. On the one hand, the SME's are obviously more prone to, and linked with, market processes. As a result, they don't have the financial potential and incentives to follow job-hoarding strategies. On the other hand, there are almost no SME's which are still stateowned. Hence, the prevailing opinion in the literature is that 'larger industrial firms were apt to be least efficient, most often producing inadequate and non-competitive products, with a high degree ofunder-utilisation oflabour and most inflexible to change' (lones & Nikolov 1997, p. 252). Thus, as mentioned above, though there may be some limitations with regard to firm representation, our sample characterises a number of enterprises that offer fertile ground for the analysis of firms' adjustment to the newly established market realities in a transition economy. Our study is unique in the sense that existing empirical studies on privatisation and enterprise restructuring generally cover the time period just before and after the initial stages of transition, e.g. 1988/89 to 1992. In those studies, samples of firms in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria recognise that behavioural adaptations at the enterprise level had taken place just before the actual privatisation process materialised. Therefore, almost all of the firms under examination were still state-owned. The firms were usually divided according to their performance as 'good', 'average' and 'bad' enterprises. The main findings of those early studies have shown that the macroeconomic adaptations (i.e., macro-level changes which induced micro-level adjustment by the firms), as well as emerging market structures, have created enormous pressures which in turn have influenced firms' economic behaviour, reallocation of resources and consequent restructuring. This evidence supports the hypothesis that the SOE's started restructuring and adjusting their behaviour and performance, in response to the harsh realities of more open markets, before privatisation actually started. In this paper, we seek to present some results on these developments in Bulgaria, at the later stages of transition and privatisation (1992-1996). The aim of our questionnaire study is therefore to show the effects of the privatisation process and ownership on the behavioural adaptations of firms which had once been state-owned or continue to be owned by the state. The period under investigation is 1992 to 1996. For 1990 and 1991, the number of missing values is reactively high and, where relevant, we partly exclude these observations from our analysis. The paper contains seven sections. Section 11 outlines the macroeconomic environment in which our sample firms operate, provides some specifics of the Bulgarian privatisation process, and discusses data quality. Section 111 concentrates on the analysis of privatisation, the specific forms of ownership that resulted from it, and firm size. In Section IV, we describe the trends of the main economic variables within firms (such as employment, wages, labour productivity, etc), and a number of proxies of firm viability, while Section V presents some regression results to corroborate the discussion of the previous section. Section VI gives an overview of survey results of the impact of enterprise determined wage policy, trade union activity and membership, government control, and social benefits on enterprise restructuring. Section VII is a summary of our findings.
Privatisation in Central and Eastern Europe can be defined as the transfer of property rights from the State to private owners. The transfers are carried out so as to vest the new private owners with the full property rights of use and disposal over their property, these rights being guaranteed by the legal framework established by the rule of law. In Bulgaria, one can distinguish between three main stages in the process of privatisation. Each was shaped by the conflicting resolutions of frequently changing governments and meant to serve different political goals. The first stage (1990-1993) is characterised by the blockade of legal privatisation, as ‘spontaneous privatisation’ was accorded high priority. As in other former socialist countries, great emphasis was placed on the so-called commercialisation of state-owned enterprises. This did not involve the actual transfer of State property into private hands, but rather the independent transformation of state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies, as well as the establishment of subsidiary companies.1 The goals of introducing more efficient structures and applying modern methods of production by transferring property to a more suitable management were not achieved. The second stage (1993-1995) is a cash privatisation, which laid the foundation for an employee/management buy-out, aided by the legal provisions granting concessions in the payment of instalments. The most important factor in the third stage of the process of privatisation in Bulgaria was the adoption of the mass privatisation model as an alternative method of procedure. In 1996, legal regulations for mass privatisation were introduced and a privatisation fund was established. In the meantime, the process has evolved into its fourth stage, during which a strategy of privatisation has been formulated under the supervision of a monetary council, and various agreements with the IMF and the World Bank are being adhered to. Privatisation is the decisive factor in the structural reforms of East European countries. The problem of converting State property into more effective forms of property management has been exacerbated by the additional demand of carrying out the far-reaching structural changes as swiftly as possible. The expectation that a large part of State property would be privatised within a short time in Bulgaria, has not been met for a number of reasons. When the reforms began, the private sector was too weakly developed to become a catalyst for structural changes. Until 1995 there were no laws regulating the stock exchange or securities and bonds - the capital market was practically non-existent. Moreover, the various political parties could not agree upon the various models and objectives of privatisation. The population itself had no capital. The restitution of private ownership which will not be discussed in further detail was limited to the smallest businesses, traders and workshops. Furthermore, the Privatisation Agency and State authorities employed to initiate the privatisation process lacked experience. Another problem hindering privatisation was that the laws passed lacked precision and were constantly subject to change.
The economy in Poland has changed tremendously in recent years. Agricultural enterprises can defend their market share only if they are able to adjust quickly and efficiently to new circumstances. The most effective strategy to cope with changing operating conditions is a strategy of permanent development of human resources. This strategy must embrace a constant improvement of professional entrepreneurial skills and of management structures within organizations. Only such a strategy will allow businesses to hold on to or to increase their market standing despite strong competition. It will also allow them to meet, for instance, the newly introduced standardisation procedures for goods produced and supplied. This challenge holds especially true for agricultural enterprises that operate in highly competitive markets; markets which are currently characterised by a permanent surplus of supply over demand and a great number of businesses, mainly of small or medium size. Demand in the agricultural market is exerted by millions of consumers, all of different consumption habits with idiosyncratic consumption preferences. Agricultural producers as a group are extremely sensitive to any kind of change in their environment. This is especially true in the current transition period when a worsening of economic conditions can be observed: an economic downturn caused by the price of inputs increasing at a faster rate than agricultural product prices and an ineffective agricultural policy. One of the agricultural production factors which allows for quick adjustment to change and which can thus be used to improve one’s market position is the human factor. It is a wellknown fact that a good level of professional skills in combination with ongoing means of furthering and updating professional qualifications of workers can help to facilitate coping with market challenges. The aim of this study is first to determine specific quality and quantity features of human resources in agricultural production, looking, inter alia, at changes in employment, specific employment structures and the number of recruitments and dismissals in a given period. A further aim was to undertake an efficiency analysis of limited partnerships which leased their agricultural real estate from the Agricultural Property Agency (APA) in the Voivodeship of Gorzów between 1995 and 1997. The first analysis was carried out using data which were collected from surveys amongst the owners of 36 privately owned farms and the managers of 14 limited partnerships. The data cover the period between 1994 and 1997. The incentive to conduct research on large farms in the Gorzów Voivodeship using the Data Envelopment Analysis method (DEA) lay in the outcome of various earlier studies on the financial standing of limited partnerships leasing real estate from APA in the Gorzów Voivodeship in 1996 and 1997. Apart from general adjustment processes, these inquiries proved that, in 1997, the economic condition of the farms analysed was worse when compared to the situation in 1996; the following ratios worsened: the financial support ratio, the liquidity ratio, the turnover ratio, the profitability ratio and the cost level ratio (see Świtłyk, 1998, 1999). These results determined the focus of our research, namely input efficiency in particular limited partnerships. The base of our calculations was a research model which consisted of efficiency measures focusing on firms’ inputs The analysis was carried out on a sample of 90 firms in the years between 1995 and 1997 (30 firms every year). Other data material was collected from national statistical office reports on incomes, costs and financial results (F-O1) and statistics about land usage, crop area and yields (R-O5). In the next section we briefly discuss privatisation in agriculture. Sections 3 and 4 present results from our survey. Section 5 concludes.
After promising beginnings towards transformation, in 1991 the Bulgarian economy fell into deep crisis in the period from 1995 to 1997. Social policy, already overstrained due to the demands of transition, was unable to cope effectively with the rapidly spreading state of emergency. The following essay analyses the development of the social indicators and instruments of social security in the years 1990 to 1998. In addition to unemployment and unemployment insurance, the issue of pensions and poverty will also be examined.
Like in all countries in transition, the tax as well as the transfer system have been under serious reform pressures. The socialistic systems were not able to fulfill the necessary functions in providing a certain degree of redistribution and social security, which are inevitable for social oriented market economies. Increasing income and wage differentiation is one of the most important prerequisites for a market oriented ability to pay tax system. But in the transformation period, numerous quasi-legal or even illegal property transactions have taken place, thus leading to wealth concentrations on the one hand while as consequence of the bankruptcy of socialism, enormous poverty problems have arisen on the other. For the political acceptance of the transformation process it is of utmost importance that an efficient and fair tax system is implemented and social security is organised by the state on a level which secures at least the physical minimum of subsistence or – if economically possible – even a social-cultural minimum. Whether the state should go further in providing compulsory social insurance systems has been a hotly debated topic for decades even in the welfare and social states of the Western type. Whereas the basic security systems have to be financed by general tax revenue, for a compulsory social insurance system – due to the insurance character – special earmarked social security contribution are held necessary. Both public goods and services as well as at least basic security have to be financed by total tax revenue. For the acceptance and fairness of the whole system the total redistributive effect of both sides of the budget – the tax system as well as the expenditure system – are decisive. In this paper we will concentrate on the revenue side, e.g. on the taxes as well as on the social security contributions. Adam Smith had already formulated some very simple tax norms which have been transformed in modern tax theory. The equivalence as well as the ability-topay principle are basic yardsticks for every tax system in a democratic oriented market system, not to forget tax fairness. In the historical development process equity-oriented measures have often produced an enormous complexity of the single taxes as well as of the whole tax system. Therefore, reconsidering the Smithian principles of simplicity and of minimum compliance costs for the tax payer would even press many Western European tax systems to undergo serious reform processes which often are delayed because of intense interest group influence. Hence, a modern tax system is a simple one which consists only of a few single taxes which are easy to administer. Such a system consists of two main taxes, the income and the value added tax. Consequently in all countries of transition both taxes have been implemented, while the implementation was fostered by the fact that both also constitute the typical components of the EU member states systems. Therefore such a harmonising tax reform is the most important prerequisite to become a membership candidate. Bulgaria also tried to follow this general pattern in reforming the income tax system starting in 1992 and replacing the old socialistic turnover tax and excise duty system by the value added tax (VAT) in 1994. Especially with regard to the income tax system the demand for simplicity has not been met yet. Complex rules to define the tax base as well as a steeply progressive tax schedule have led to behavioral adaptations which are even strengthened by the effects of a high social contribution burden which is predominantly laid on the employers. In the following some concise descriptions of the tax and social contribution system are given; the paper closes with a summary, in which the impacts of the system are evaluated and some political recommendations for further reforms are presented.
Industrial policy and social strategy at the corporate level in Poland : questionnaire results
(1999)
This paper presents results from a survey of industrial policy of the state and the social security system at the corporate level in Poland. Previous reports in this area indicated preferable directions of research to be taken in order to prove various hypotheses of the purposefulness of an integral approach to industrial policy and social security in the analysis of economic processes in transition (see Weikard 1997). This paper summarises the results and draws conclusions from a questionnaire study on subsidies, social benefits and economic policy in Polish firms during the process of transformation. Our results and conclusions show the scope and character of the processes in the area of industrial and social policy in the period 1994 to 1997. The paper is divided into five parts. The first part concerns the aims and methodology of the questionnaire; it also gives a brief description of the sample. The second part shows how enterprises dealt with the issues of employment and wages in this period. The third part characterises industrial policy at the corporate level, while the next presents results from the survey of various social schemes pursued. The final part aims at an integral approach in the analysis of various processes taking place in Polish enterprises. The survey was conducted in the period April to June 1998. Its aim was to observe certain phenomena occurring at the corporate level. The questionnaire was distributed among the managers, directors and presidents of large-size enterprises, which had been selected to satisfy the following three criteria. Firstly, the number of employees had to be considerable (over 300 workers). This criterion was applied following the consideration that certain social phenomena are more conspicuous in enterprises with large manpower. Secondly, only operating enterprises were selected, the enterprises which closed down were disregarded. Finally, for the purposes of the survey the units differed as regards their legal situation and form of ownership. Out of over 1800 enterprises 370 units were drawn where we sent the questionnaire. Unfortunately, as many as 51.9% of the respondents refused co-operation, questions to a certain extent puts the representativeness of the sample in question. Finally, 178 questionnaires were subsequently completed and returned for analysis. However, not all of these questionnaires included full answers to all of the 75 questions; therefore, while discussing the results of the survey we have indicated the number of relevant answers we have received.
The aim of the work was to present the results of the analyses economic standing of the partnership companies which lease agricultural real estate from Agricultural Property Agency of State Treasury (APA) in 1996 and 1997. The analyses proved poor economic condition of the firms under investigation and especially their low level of stabilisation (the index of total debt was in 1996 equal to 0.88 and in 1997 to 0.96) and the low level of their solvency.
The study presents estimates and analyses of the social expenditure in Poland. Changes which occurred during the transformation period are a reflection of consciously launched political transformations as well as decisions taken as a result of current needs and political pressures. This has an impact on the volume and structure of expenditures which are under consolidation. The debate devoted to budget issues, which gets more intense every autumn, testifies to increasing problems with correcting guidelines for distribution of expenditures. Even slight changes stand for depriving a specified group of transfers, what in democratic conditions produces strong protests. A similar negative attitude to changes became evident with regard to taxation. Recommendations presented in 1998 by the Polish government [see Ministry of Finance, 1998a, 1998b] introduce substantial modifications to the current tax system (withdrawal from tax exemptions and introduction of a tax-free minimum income) and thus met with a massive reluctance of major political fractions. This study provides readers with information on the volume of public expenditures, the source of public revenue, that is taxes, and a thorough study on expenditures allocated to social goals. The analysis was carried out on the basis of own estimates, which employ data acquired from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy.
In centrally planned economies state subsidies were the main instrument of supporting the economic sector. Most of them had also social functions (e.g. through subsidising the consumption of households). In the period of transition, with the withdraw all of the state from economic decisions of the enterprises, new social problems appeared. The paper analyses the process of granting state support to economic units - its scope and forms - in the 90-ties.
This paper analyses the macroeconomic developments which have taken place in the Bulgarian economy in the period 1993-1997. The paper also looks at the institutional arrangements and the process of economic policy-making in the country. In this context the problems the Bulgarian economy has experienced in the transition process towards a market-oriented economy are also studied. The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 looks at the institutional arrangements and the process of economic policy-making through 1995. Section 3 studies the deep economic crisis in 1996 and points out what went wrong in that period. Section 4 continues studying the economic crisis of the Bulgarian economy as well as the problems in the transition process during the first half of 1997. Section 5 looks at the economic developments during the second half of 1997 and points to the prospects for growth in 1998. Section 6 deals with the Bulgarian financial institutions and the existing institutional arrangements. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper.
Industrial policy measures can be a reasonable supplement to economic and social policy actions during the period of transformation of centrally planned economies. This paper shows the interplay between industrial and social policy. Special attention is given to the timing and sequencing of the transformation process. This approach is closely modeled on the example of New Zealand.
Content: I. The nature and form of international law 1. The acceptance of the existence of an international legal order 2. The legal position of the individual in international law II. Obligations of states in the protection of international human rights 1. Treaty-based human rights obligations 2. The nature of treaty-based human rights obligations 3. The ”absolute” and ”objective” character of human rights treaty obligations 4. Human rights conventions as self-contained regimes 5. The problem of characterisation of human rights obligations of states III. Human rights obligations arising from general principles of international law 1. Obligations erga omnes and human rights norms 2. The outlawing of genocide as obligation erga omnes 3. Protection from slavery as obligation erga omnes 4. The outlawing of acts of aggression as obligation erga omnes 5. Protection from racial discrimination as obligation erga omnes 6. The basic rights of the human person as obligation erga omnes 7. Jus Cogens and the search for peremptory norms of human rights 8. International crimes and human rights norms 9. The relationship between the concepts: erga omnes, jus cogens, international crime and human rights IV. International instruments for the coercive enforcement of state obligations to ‘respect and ensure’ human rights 1. Countermeasures as consequences of breach of treaties in international law 2. Application of reprisals for the enforcement of treaty-based human rights obligations 3. Intervention for the protection of human rights in international law 4. Intervention by the Security Council for the protection of human rights: the situation before the East-West détente 5. Humanitarian intervention after the end of the Cold War 6. The legal nature of ECOWAS intervention in the Liberian Civil War 7. The legality of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo 8. Some instances of intervention with mixed motives V. Non-forceful measures for the enforcement of states’ human rights obligations 1. Economic and financial pressure as means of enforcing states’ obligation to respect and observe human rights 2. The application of the clausula rebus sic stantibus for the protection of human rights 3. The enforcement of human rights through the World Bank 4. The enforcement of human rights through the ILO 5. Diplomatic recognition as an instrument for securing a state's respect and promotion of human rights 6. Refusal to comply with an extradition agreement as a means of enforcing a state’s human rights obligations 7. Denial of immunity as a means of enforcing a state’s human rights obligations 8. Publicity as an instrument for the enforcement of human rights VI. Judicial enforcement of state obligations to ‘respect and ensure’ human rights 1. Enforcement of human rights through International Criminal Tribunals 2. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia 3. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 4. The International Special Court of Sierra Leone Résumé
This is the 16th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. The present issue continues the series on Linguistic Fieldnotes providing data elicited and documented by different members of the Sonderforschungsbereich 632. Here, the focus is placed on primary linguistic data from Gur and Kwa languages, collected and prepared by Anne Schwarz, former investigator in Project B1 and D2, and Ines Fiedler, former investigator in Project B1 and D2 and current member of Project B7 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
This is the 15th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. This online version contains the Questionnaire on Focus Semantics contributed by Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann and Markus Greif, members of Project D2 investigating information structural phenomena from a typological perspective. The present issue provides a tool for collecting and analyzing natural data with respect to relevant linguistic questions concerning focus types, focus sensitive particles, and the effects of quantificational adverbs and presupposition on focus semantics. This volume is a supplementation to the Reference manual of the Questionnaire on Information Structure, issued by Project D2 in ISIS 4 (2006).
In Kooperation mit Partnern aus der Industrie etabliert das Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI) ein “HPI Future SOC Lab”, das eine komplette Infrastruktur von hochkomplexen on-demand Systemen auf neuester, am Markt noch nicht verfügbarer, massiv paralleler (multi-/many-core) Hardware mit enormen Hauptspeicherkapazitäten und dafür konzipierte Software bereitstellt. Das HPI Future SOC Lab verfügt über prototypische 4- und 8-way Intel 64-Bit Serversysteme von Fujitsu und Hewlett-Packard mit 32- bzw. 64-Cores und 1 - 2 TB Hauptspeicher. Es kommen weiterhin hochperformante Speichersysteme von EMC² sowie Virtualisierungslösungen von VMware zum Einsatz. SAP stellt ihre neueste Business by Design (ByD) Software zur Verfügung und auch komplexe reale Unternehmensdaten stehen zur Verfügung, auf die für Forschungszwecke zugegriffen werden kann. Interessierte Wissenschaftler aus universitären und außeruniversitären Forschungsinstitutionen können im HPI Future SOC Lab zukünftige hoch-komplexe IT-Systeme untersuchen, neue Ideen / Datenstrukturen / Algorithmen entwickeln und bis hin zur praktischen Erprobung verfolgen. Dieser Technische Bericht stellt erste Ergebnisse der im Rahmen der Eröffnung des Future SOC Labs im Juni 2010 gestarteten Forschungsprojekte vor. Ausgewählte Projekte stellten ihre Ergebnisse am 27. Oktober 2010 im Rahmen der Future SOC Lab Tag Veranstaltung vor.
In current practice, business processes modeling is done by trained method experts. Domain experts are interviewed to elicit their process information but not involved in modeling. We created a haptic toolkit for process modeling that can be used in process elicitation sessions with domain experts. We hypothesize that this leads to more effective process elicitation. This paper brakes down "effective elicitation" to 14 operationalized hypotheses. They are assessed in a controlled experiment using questionnaires, process model feedback tests and video analysis. The experiment compares our approach to structured interviews in a repeated measurement design. We executed the experiment with 17 student clerks from a trade school. They represent potential users of the tool. Six out of fourteen hypotheses showed significant difference due to the method applied. Subjects reported more fun and more insights into process modeling with tangible media. Video analysis showed significantly more reviews and corrections applied during process elicitation. Moreover, people take more time to talk and think about their processes. We conclude that tangible media creates a different working mode for people in process elicitation with fun, new insights and instant feedback on preliminary results.
On the 20.01.1991 the Latvian people defended the Latvian political elite from the Soviet OMON troops in order to achieve independence. After this impressive sign of civil society the people fell asleep, the level of mobility and the satisfaction with the functioning of democracy therefore is rather weak. The referendum (2008), to gain the right to dissolve the Parliament by the people, initiated by the Trade Unions can be assessed as a sign that there is something on the move. This paper is trying to give an impression of the situation of the civil society in terms of participation in the decision- making process. Hereby the focus lays on NGOs: What is the legal base and which problems do they face. To learn more about the situation interviews were organized with representatives of NGOs from different sectors like community development; Social inclusion; advocating gender issues as well as environment and sustainable development. As a result of the research it can be said that the civil society made some steps forward but it is still struggling with a high level of corruption, lack of interested from the elite and the ordinary people and the insecure financial state.
This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010.
This is the 15th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. This online version contains the Questionnaire on Focus Semantics contributed by Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann and Markus Greif, members of Project D2 investigating information structural phenomena from a typological perspective. The present issue provides a tool for collecting and analyzing natural data with respect to relevant linguistic questions concerning focus types, focus sensitive particles, and the effects of quantificational adverbs and presupposition on focus semantics. This volume is a supplementation to the Reference manual of the Questionnaire on Information Structure, issued by Project D2 in ISIS 4 (2006).
This paper opens a series of discussion papers which report about the findings of a research project within the Phare-ACE Programme of the European Union. We, a group of Bulgarian, German, Greek, Polish and Scottish economists and agricultural economists, undertake this research to provide An Integrated Analysis of Industrial Policies and Social Security Systems in Countries in Transition.1 This paper outlines the basic motivation for such study.
Roughly every third Wikipedia article contains an infobox - a table that displays important facts about the subject in attribute-value form. The schema of an infobox, i.e., the attributes that can be expressed for a concept, is defined by an infobox template. Often, authors do not specify all template attributes, resulting in incomplete infoboxes. With iPopulator, we introduce a system that automatically populates infoboxes of Wikipedia articles by extracting attribute values from the article's text. In contrast to prior work, iPopulator detects and exploits the structure of attribute values for independently extracting value parts. We have tested iPopulator on the entire set of infobox templates and provide a detailed analysis of its effectiveness. For instance, we achieve an average extraction precision of 91% for 1,727 distinct infobox template attributes.
Computer games may be defined as artifacts that connect the input devices of a computer (such as keyboard, mouse or controller) with its output devices (in most cases a screen and speakers) in such a way that on the screen a challenge is displayed. On the screen we see pictorial elements that have to be manipulated to master a game, that is to win a competition, to solve a riddle or to adopt a skill. Therefore the characteristics of the representational function of computer games have to be contrasted phenomenologically with conventional games on the one hand and cinematic depictions on the other. It shows that computer games separate the player from the playing field, and translate bodily felt concrete actions into situational abstract cinematic depictions. These features add up to the situational abstract presentation of self-action experience. In this framework computer games reveal a potential as a new means of shared cognition that might unfold in the 21st century and change the beingin- the-world in a similar way as cinematic depiction did in the 20th century