Suchergebnisse

We incorporate thermal effects for injection currents ranging up to 150 mA in order to model the tuning behavior of a two-section, all-active distributed-Bragg-reflector (DBR),ridge-wave guide semiconductor laser utilized for a single-mode operation. In particular, we investigate wavelength tuning as a function of injected currents within the grating andphase/gain sections of the laser cavity and examine how any athermal lasing conditions may arise. The effect of thermal drift on the resonant wavelength due to a change in refractive index as well as thermal expansion of the laser cavity is included within a traveling wave analysis (TWA). From the TWA, the spatial distribution of gain along the active region of the laser is also derived in order to help describe the tuning behavior for a high-order (37th) grating previously optimized to minimize line width. A comparative analysis with a singlemirrored, active-passive DBR laser is also included. Results show a good agreement withreported experimental data and compare well with the wavelength stability of other laser devices. ; This work was supported in part by the ScienceFoundation of Ireland under Grants 15/IFB/3317, 15/IA/2854, and CONNECT 13/RC/2077; and in partby the European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Grant agreement 713567.

Purpose This paper aims to assess the often repeated, but empirically unconfirmed, supposition that there is a positive connection between foreign board members (FBMs) and firm innovativeness and to set a research agenda for future studies on the topic. Design/methodology/approach The analyses are based on a large sample of firms within the European Union, utilizing patent and trademark data together with information on the national diversity of the boards. Findings The analyses confirm that there is a positive association between FBMs and firm innovativeness. Contrary to expectations, FBMs from less innovative countries than the countries of their host companies are more associated with innovative firms than are FBMs from more innovative countries. Research limitations/implications This study provides empirical support for propositions, drawn from resource dependency theory and group effectiveness/diversity theories, that diverse boards of directors can lead to greater firm-level creativity and innovativeness. It also outlines a detailed research agenda for future studies to build on the tentative findings presented in this paper. Practical implications The findings suggest that greater national diversity in the board of directors can enhance innovation. Originality/value Earlier studies on board diversity have not analyzed empirically the issue of national diversity. The originality of this paper lies in its attempt to address this gap in the corporate governance literature.

In order to obtain Marketing Authorization for an oral rabies vaccine in the European Union, not only safety studies in the target species, red fox and raccoon dog, are required. Since baits are distributed unsupervised in the environment, specific safety studies in selected non-target species are compulsory. Furthermore, oral rabies vaccines are based on live, replication-competent viruses and thus distinct safety studies in the target species for such type of vaccines are also mandatory. Here, the results of these safety studies in target and selected non-target species for a 3rd generation oral rabies virus vaccine construct, SPBN GASGAS (Rabitec), are presented. The studies included the following species; red fox, raccoon dog, domestic dog, domestic cat, domestic pig, wild rodents. The following safety topics were investigated; overdose, repeated dose, dissemination, shedding, horizontal and vertical transmission. It was shown that SPBN GASGAS did not cause disease or any other adverse reaction in vaccinated animals and naïve contact animals. The vaccine did not disseminate within the host beyond the site of entry. No horizontal transmission was observed in wild rodents. In the target species, there was evidence that in a few cases horizontal transmission of vaccine virus could have occurred under these experimental conditions; most likely immediately after vaccine administration. The vaccine construct SPBN GASGAS meets therefore the latest revised minimal safety requirements as laid down in the European Pharmacopoeia.

Most current models for the landscape evolution over geological timescales are based on semi-empirical laws that consider riverbed incision proportional to rock erodability (dependent on lithology) and to the work performed by water flow (stream power). However, the erodability values obtained from these models are entangled with poorly known conditions of past climate and streamflow. Here we use the erosion reported for 82 outburst floods triggered by overtopping lakes as a way to estimate the outlet erodability. This avoids the common assumptions regarding past hydrology because water discharge from overtopping floods is often well constrained from geomorphological evidence along the spillway. This novel methodology yields values of erodability that show a quantitative relation to lithology similar to previous river erosion analyses, expanding the range of hydrological and temporal scales of fluvial incision models and suggesting some consistency between the mathematical formulations of long-term and catastrophic erosional mechanisms. Our results also clarify conditions leading to the runaway erosion responsible for outburst floods triggered by overtopping lakes. ; Funding was provided by the Spanish Government and the European Union through the projects SaltGiant (H2020 #765256), TECLA (CGL2011–26670) and MITE (CGL2014-59516) and through a Salvador de Madariaga grant (PR2011-0044). ; Peer reviewed

When making investments in railway infrastructure it is important to be able to identify the limits for freight transportation in order to not only use the infrastructure in the best possible way, but to also guide future capacity investments. This paper presents a model to assess the capacity of railway freight transportation on a long term strategic level. The model uses an hourly time discretization and analyses the impact of railway network expansions based on future demand forecasts. It provides an optimal macroscopic freight train schedule and can indicate the time and place of any congestion. In addition, two expansions of the primary model are developed. The first can be used to determine the minimal number of expansions needed to ensure all freight can be feasibly routed, while the second can be used to schedule freight trains at hours not congested by passenger trains using variable penalties for the different passenger busy time slots. As part of a European Union project, all models are applied to a realistic case study that focuses on analyzing the capacity of railway network, in Denmark and Southern Sweden using demand forecasts for 2030. Results suggest that informative solutions can be found quickly with the proposed approach. The project was partly funded by the EU-project EWTC-II.

Teichler (2009) wrote "ERASMUS was a trigger for a qualitative leap of internationalisation strategies and policies since the 1990s: towards cooperation and mobility on equal terms, and towards systematic and strategic internationalisation". Though, one might say, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) follow that path with the aim of generating, strengthening and promoting said qualitative leap including within their institutional structures. The European Union struggled for each and every one of the HEIs to be strengthened by means of a program that allowed them to strengthen their internationalization process and give them an equality of conditions, at an EU level, as receptors of help to participate in international activities. In this sense, this study will provide an unconventional understanding of the EU's HEIs' participation level, and will try to open a debate to discuss at further depth as to how much they were able to be equal beneficiaries of the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 Strand 1. This research is part of a doctoral investigation project. It was structured as a descriptive study and it utilized secondary information which came from data published by the EACEA on its website as well as from different online documents. According to the study's findings, the EMA2S1 was an open tool for all European HEIs, but it benefitted only some of them.

Private archival institutions collect records from churches, trade unions, companies, associations and any other non-government organisations. Organisations and associations have played an important role in Swedish public life during the twentieth century, being agents in the process of democratisation and societal change leading to the modern welfare state. Citizens' influence on politics and administration has to a large extent been channelled through organisations of various kinds. During the second half of the last century, a nationwide network of so-called popular movement archives emerged, initiated by the records creating organisations themselves. These institutions are important complements to the public archives, covering other spheres of society and contributing to preserve the history of everyday life, and political and social development. However, the traditional forms of stable rule-based organisations with structured records creation are dissolving, and being replaced with more loosely connected and continuously changing communities working in an online environment. Furthermore, the last decades have witnessed the emergence of digital information, and most private institutions lack the technological infrastructure and knowledge to receive digital records for long-term preservation. This study explores the developments and current status of popular movement archives in Sweden, and the challenges they are facing, in order to outline a scenario for future development and consequences for future societal memory. ; acceptedVersion

In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians). The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimise the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity. To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VGGFace2, on MS-Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the IJB-A and IJB-B face recognition benchmarks, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. The dataset and models are publicly available.

The paper investigates the factors that led the Italian government to accede to the Fiscal Compact in spite of its demanding requirements for the country's budgetary policy. Specifically, the paper assesses the extent to which Italian government's support for the Fiscal Compact was driven by the logic of the 'vincolo esterno' in a replication of the pattern that led Italy to sign the Maastricht Treaty. The paper finds only limited support to the 'vincolo esterno' argument. Rather than being motivated by domestic dysfunctions or socialization to the fiscal discipline doctrine, the Italian government acted mainly out of market punishment fears. Interestingly, however, three factors filtered such external pressures and contributed shaping government's support for the new Treaty. First, the Economic and Monetary Union unfinished architecture, and in particular the lack of a European financial firewall, weakened opposition to the new Treaty. That is to say, the institutional context constrained the choices that Italian policymakers could pursue. Second, the pro-European orientations of government members contributed to elevating the new Treaty to a symbol of European integration. Finally, the Italian government confronted a quite large domestic win-set during the negotiations, as the parties supporting the Monti government also supported Italy's participation to the new Treaty.

SummarySeveral studies have indicated that consanguineous marriages (unions between biologically related persons) are associated with increased risk of autosomal recessive diseases and several multifactorial traits. Mandaeans are a closed ethno-religious community living in areas of southern Iraq and Iran (Khuzestan Province). There are currently no data on the prevalence of consanguineous marriages among Mandaeans. The present study was carried out in 2016 to determine the prevalence of consanguinity among Iranian Mandaeans living in Khuzestan Province, south-west Iran. A total of 137 couples (urban areas: 79 couples; rural areas: 58 couples) were included in the study. Information on the consanguineous marriages of the subjects was collected through direct interviews. Marriages were classified by the degree of relationship between couples as double first cousins, first cousins, first cousin once removed, second cousins and unrelated marriages. The coefficient of inbreeding (F) was calculated for each couple and the mean coefficient of inbreeding (α) estimated for the population, stratified by rural and urban areas. The overall frequency of consanguinity was found to be 50.7% in urban and 86.2% in rural areas. There was a significant difference between rural and urban areas in types of marriages (χ2=24.8, df=4, p<0.001) and first cousin marriages (51.8%) were the most common type. The overall α-value was estimated to be 0.0363 for the Iranian Mandaean population.

The aim of this article is to analyse the global and European foreign, security and defence policies of the Federal Republic of Germany and their implications for the broad international environment of Germany. Special attention is paid to the issues of Germany's emancipation in the international order after the end of the East-West conflict, when it became clear that the regional conflicts and their transnational impact gained a new and multidimensional character for the German security policy. Given this evolution of the international system, Germany has gradually changed its former foreign and security policies. The state currently intends to take greater responsibility for international politics, which translates into a simultaneous increase in its political and economic power in the international arena. This new global role of the Federal Republic of Germany is manifested by the so-called White Paper on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr approved on 13 July 2016. This document presents primarily the hierarchy of threats in today's world, their definitions and attempts to neutralize them in compliance with German interests. Instruments to ensure a smooth achievement of this goal include the modernization of the German armed forces, the creation of intervention troops and their participation in multinational military operations conducted by NATO and the European Union.

Purpose
Universities are proper knowledge institutions, since knowledge represents both the input and the output of their activities. Several guidelines have been issued by the European Union and national governments for the promotion of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure by universities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the amount and nature of voluntary IC disclosure in Italian universities and to gauge the opinion of university managers on IC managing and reporting.


Design/methodology/approach
The study applies content analysis and a survey. The content analysis was applied to a group of voluntary social reports (SRs) issued by Italian universities, while the survey was submitted to all top managers of Italian universities.


Findings
The research found a significant amount of IC disclosure in SRs. Also, university top managers demonstrated an awareness of benefits deriving from IC managing and reporting practices, both for decision-making processes and to respond to stakeholder's needs.


Originality/value
The current paper contributes to IC literature by providing an assessment of IC voluntary disclosure practices in Italian universities, analysing reports other than the annual report (which is the only document media analysed by research so far). Furthermore, while previous research has focussed on IC disclosure, the current study investigates the motivations for IC managing and provides insights into the benefits deriving from IC reporting in universities.

This article aims to analyze some of the impressions of social actors involved in the implementation of European rural development policies, starting with the reform of the PAC (Common Agricultural Policy) for the period of 2014-2020, particularly its second pillar, with its territorial policy. In the first part, we review the main changes introduced by that reform, approved at the end of 2013. In a following section, we summarize the theoretical reference of neo-institutionalism, in a broad perspective, which seems appropriate to the analysis carried out, both in the process of horizontal institutionalization and in the structure of governance of the rural territorial development policy of the European Union. In a third section, we highlight some aspects identified by us together with some Local Action Groups (GAL), responsible in the first instance for implementing the changes introduced by the second pillar of the PAC. Finally, in a last section, taking as reference the field work carried out through qualitative interviews and the theoretical references used, we argue that the innovations introduced in the period of 2007-2013 and reformed for the period 2014-2020, modified the vertical institutions involved in rural development policy, by incorporating in its implementation the national and subnational governments, and ended up provoking, in our view, a crisis that also affects the horizontal institutions of their governance structures.

Abstract. The European Union set the ambitious objective to reach within 2020 the goal of Good Environmental Status. The European Commission (2008) represents the legislative framework that drives member state efforts to reach it. The Integrated Maritime Policy supported the need to provide a European knowledge base able to drive sustainable development by launching in 2009 a new European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet). Through a stepwise approach, EMODnet Chemistry aims to provide high-quality marine environmental data and related products at the scale of regions and sub-regions defined by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The chemistry lot takes advantage and further develops the SeaDataNet pan-European infrastructure and the distributed approach, linking together a network of more than 100 National Oceanographic Data Centres providing data from more than 500 data originators. The close interaction with EEA, RSCs, ICES and EMODnet–MSFD coordination group facilitated the identification of the most appropriate set of information required for the MSFD process. EMODnet Chemistry provides aggregated and validated regional data collections for nutrients, dissolved gasses, chlorophyll, and contaminants, properly visualized with OGC WMS and WPS viewing services. Concentration maps with 10-year moving window from 1960 to 2014, by season and for selected vertical layers, are computed and made available.

Pressure ulcers (PUs) are a common, costly, debilitating problem across all healthcare sectors, despite significant investment in education and training and use of human resources, equipment, and technological advancements. In recognising the persistent problem of PUs, the European Wound Management Association (EWMA) and the European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (EPUAP) have created a group to work collectively on a specific project advocating for the prevention of PUs to be considered as a major health care and patient safety issue. Aim: The overall aim of the project is to establish a joint EPUAP-EWMA working group on PU prevention and engage in patient safety agendas at the European level as well as at the national level in selected European countries. Discussion: We are seeking to place prevention of PUs as a high priority on the patient safety agenda within the European Union (EU). To achieve this, given the lack of agreed methodology for incidence monitoring, we advocate for the use of standardised monitoring of PU prevalence, with targeted prevention measures to reduce prevalence, made available across the continuum of care. Conclusion: Adopting PU prevalence as a key measurement tool across the wider health care sector in the EU, will ensure that both adequate monitoring of prevalence and use of prevention can be achieved.