Vocational, college and career counseling in Switzerland : blended information and e-counseling in a digitized world

In the course of the 2030 agenda of vocational education and training (VET) in Switzerland, career development and career management skills in a digitized working world play an important role (SERI, 2017). Therefore the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) commissioned a scientific report on the future of career counseling in Switzerland (Hirschi, 2018) as part of the mission statement for vocational education and training in Switzerland. In this paper we will present two stand-alone initiatives directed at fostering vocational, college and career counseling in Switzerland by incorporating elements of automation and digitization. First, a blended information concept for the media libraries of the public career guidance centres in the Canton of Berne / Switzerland and second an ecounseling concept for vocational, college and career counseling at the IAP Institute of Applied Psychology at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)

Nontrivial Galois module structure of cyclotomic fields

We say a tame Galois field extension $L/K$ with Galois group $G$ has trivial Galois module structure if the rings of integers have the property that \Cal{O}_{L} is a free \Cal{O}_{K}[G]-module. The work of Greither, Replogle, Rubin, and Srivastav shows that for each algebraic number field other than the rational numbers there will exist infinitely many primes $l$ so that for each there is a tame Galois field extension of degree $l$ so that $L/K$ has nontrivial Galois module structure. However, the proof does not directly yield specific primes $l$ for a given algebraic number field $K.$ For $K$ any cyclotomic field we find an explicit $l$ so that there is a tame degree $l$ extension $L/K$ with nontrivial Galois module structure

Intra-European Trade of Manufacturing Goods : An extension of the Gravity Model

In this paper, we propose and test several extensions of the standard gravity model. This yields a specification that allows for (i) a more flexible income response; (ii) a competitiveness effect with a general and a specific component; and (iii) an alternative and consistent measure of remoteness. Those extensions were found to be significant factors to explain intra-EU trade. Next, we analyze the effect of EU harmonization of technical regulations on domestic and intra-EU trade. We find, at different levels of aggregation of the manufacturing sector, that harmonization of regulations has contributed to more intra-EU trade but, apparently, did not affect the so called border effect.

Estimating Water Quality Benefits: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

Knowledge of the benefits and costs to water users is required for a complete assessment of policies to create incentives for water quality improving changes in agricultural production. A number of benefit estimation methods are required to handle the varying nature of water quality effects. This report reviews practical approaches and theoretical foundations for estimating the economic value of changes in water quality to recreation, navigation, reservoirs, municipal water treatment and use, and roadside drainage ditches.benefits, water quality, economic welfare, demand, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle

Do baryons trace dark matter in the early universe?

Baryon-density perturbations of large amplitude may exist if they are compensated by dark-matter perturbations so that the total density remains unchanged. Big-bang nucleosynthesis and galaxy clusters allow the amplitudes of these compensated isocurvature perturbations (CIPs) to be as large as $\sim10$. CIPs will modulate the power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations---those due to the usual adiabatic perturbations---as a function of position on the sky. This leads to correlations between different spherical-harmonic coefficients of the temperature/polarization map, and it induces B modes in the CMB polarization. Here, the magnitude of these effects is calculated and techniques to measure them are introduced. While a CIP of this amplitude can be probed on the largest scales with WMAP, forthcoming CMB experiments should improve the sensitivity to CIPs by at least an order of magnitude.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, updated with version published in Phys. Rev. Lett. Results unchanged. Added expanded discussion of how to disentangle compensated isocurvature perturbations from weak lensing of the CMB. Expanded discussion of early universe motivation for compensated isocurvature perturbation

Unifying the essential concepts of biological networks: biological insights and philosophical foundations

Over the last decades, network-based approaches have become highly popular in diverse fields of biology, including neuroscience, ecology, molecular biology and genetics. While these approaches continue to grow very rapidly, some of their conceptual and methodological aspects still require a programmatic foundation. This challenge particularly concerns the question of whether a generalized account of explanatory, organisational and descriptive levels of networks can be applied universally across biological sciences. To this end, this highly interdisciplinary theme issue focuses on the definition, motivation and application of key concepts in biological network science, such as explanatory power of distinctively network explanations, network levels, and network hierarchies

Unobservable Product Differentiation in Discrete Choice Models: Estimating Price Elasticities and Welfare Effects

Discrete choice models used in statistical applications typically interpret an unobservable term as the interaction of unobservable horizontal differentiation and idiosyncratic consumer preferences. An implicit assumption in most such models is that all choices are equally horizontally differentiated from each other. This assumption is problematic in a number of recent studies that use discrete choice frameworks to evaluate the welfare effects from different numbers of goods (e.g. Berry and Waldfogel, 1999; Rysman, 2000). Researchers might think that it is possible for product space to "fill up" and that ignoring this issue might lead to an overestimate of welfare as the number of new products increases. This paper proposes a solution whereby the researcher estimates the decrease in value that agents receive from higher numbers of products as a result of the decreasing importance of horizontal differentiation. The paper reviews previous results on how a linear random utility model (LRUM) can be mapped into an address (Hotelling) model. The paper shows how realistic assumptions on differentiation in an address setting can be mapped into an LRUM. LRUM models imply that all choices are strong gross substitutes. In order to preserve that condition in an address model, n choices must be differentiated along at least $n-1$ dimensions. This paper proposes that utility drawn from different dimensions be weighted differently. Mapping this feature into an LRUM requires weighting the utility from each choice based upon the dimension along which it is differentiated from others. As researchers will typically be unwilling to make assumptions about which dimension products differ on, the paper discusses integrating over the different possibilities in a computationally inexpensive way that still allows the researcher to relax the assumption of symmetric differentiation.