An efficient length- and rate-preserving concatenation of polar and repetition codes

We improve the method in \cite{Seidl:10} for increasing the finite-lengh performance of polar codes by protecting specific, less reliable symbols with simple outer repetition codes. Decoding of the scheme integrates easily in the known successive decoding algorithms for polar codes. Overall rate and block length remain unchanged, the decoding complexity is at most doubled. A comparison to related methods for performance improvement of polar codes is drawn.Comment: to be presented at International Zurich Seminar (IZS) 201

Spin-noise in the anisotropic central spin model

Spin-noise measurements can serve as direct probe for the microscopic decoherence mechanism of an electronic spin in semiconductor quantum dots (QD).We have calculated the spin-noise spectrum in the anisotropic central spin model using a Chebyshev expansion technique which exactly accounts for the dynamics up to an arbitrary long but fixed time in a finite size system. In the isotropic case, describing QD charged with a single electron, the short-time dynamics is in good agreement with a quasi-static approximation for the thermodynamic limit. The spin-noise spectrum, however, shows strong deviations at low frequencies with a power-law behavior. In the Ising limit, applicable to QDs with heavy-hole spins, the spin-noise spectrum exhibits a threshold behavior above the Larmor frequency. In the generic anisotropic central spin model we have found a crossover from a Gaussian type of spin-noise spectrum to a more Ising-type spectrum with increasing anisotropy in a finite magnetic field. In order to make contact with experiments, we present ensemble averaged spin-noise spectra for QD ensembles charged with single electrons or holes. The Gaussian-type noise spectrum evolves to a more Lorentzian shape spectrum with increasing spread of characteristic time-scales and g-factors of the individual QDs.Comment: 24 pages, 16 figures, submitted to PR

The Postwar West German Economic Transition: From Ordoliberalism to Keynesianism

The Federal Republic of Germany has experienced a fundamental shift in economic philosophy from Ordoliberalism to Keynesianism. This paper elucidates the main tenets of both schools of thought and their eventual influences on economic policy from 1945 through the late 1960s. West Germany’s transition to Keynesianism follows a relatively cohesive narrative, as the complexities of event history resonate to similar effect in academic and political spheres. By the end of this investigation, intellectual quagmires surrounding economic successes of the postwar period appear as the logical consequences of an academic community that underestimates the importance of normative economic philosophy for policy implementation and society writ large. Reconnecting historical narrative with economic philosophy thus serves in a dual capacity, clarifying a particularly controversial period in economic historiography while also illuminating the underlying problems of our present circumstance.Economic History, Ordoliberalism, Keynesianism, German Economic Reform

Tax Competition in an Expanding European Union

This paper empirically examines whether expansion of the EU has increased international tax competition. To do so, we use a market potential weighting scheme to estimate the slope of best responses. We find robust evidence for tax competition. In particular, our estimates suggest that EU membership affects responses with EU members responding more to the tax rates of other members. This lends credence to the above noted concerns.Tax Competition; Foreign Direct Investment; Spatial Econometrics

Punctured Trellis-Coded Modulation

In classic trellis-coded modulation (TCM) signal constellations of twice the cardinality are applied when compared to an uncoded transmission enabling transmission of one bit of redundancy per PAM-symbol, i.e., rates of $\frac{K}{K+1}$ when $2^{K+1}$ denotes the cardinality of the signal constellation. In order to support different rates, multi-dimensional (i.e., $\mathcal{D}$-dimensional) constellations had been proposed by means of combining subsequent one- or two-dimensional modulation steps, resulting in TCM-schemes with $\frac{1}{\mathcal{D}}$ bit redundancy per real dimension. In contrast, in this paper we propose to perform rate adjustment for TCM by means of puncturing the convolutional code (CC) on which a TCM-scheme is based on. It is shown, that due to the nontrivial mapping of the output symbols of the CC to signal points in the case of puncturing, a modification of the corresponding Viterbi-decoder algorithm and an optimization of the CC and the puncturing scheme are necessary.Comment: 5 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2013 (ISIT

On Solving L-SR1 Trust-Region Subproblems

In this article, we consider solvers for large-scale trust-region subproblems when the quadratic model is defined by a limited-memory symmetric rank-one (L-SR1) quasi-Newton matrix. We propose a solver that exploits the compact representation of L-SR1 matrices. Our approach makes use of both an orthonormal basis for the eigenspace of the L-SR1 matrix and the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury formula to compute global solutions to trust-region subproblems. To compute the optimal Lagrange multiplier for the trust-region constraint, we use Newton's method with a judicious initial guess that does not require safeguarding. A crucial property of this solver is that it is able to compute high-accuracy solutions even in the so-called hard case. Additionally, the optimal solution is determined directly by formula, not iteratively. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this solver.Comment: 2015-0