Infrared emission and excitation in LMC HII regions

The infrared excess (IRE) of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) HII nebulae is found to correlate positively with the temperature of the ambient radiation field or with the He(+)/H(+) abundance ratio. This result is discussed in terms of a selective absorption of the photons in the range 504 to 912 A relative to the He ionizing photons. This interpretation may explain the paradox of finding highly excited nebulae with only relatively moderate equivalent width of their Balmer lines

"Political Aspects of European Monetary Integration After WW II"

It is nearly impossible to fully understand the developments and problems of European economic and monetary integration without examining its historical and political background. European monetary integration has at times been propelled, at times been hindered by political motives and developments. Political motivations were already of great importance for the first stage of European economic and monetary integration in the framework of the OEEC and the European Payments Union in the forties and fifties. Even more for the creation of the European Communities (ECSC, EURATOM, EEC) in the fifties. However, considerations of national sovereignty and diverse if not conflicting concepts of economic and monetary policy priorities resulted in the virtual exclusion of economic and monetary policies from any serious attempts of coordination and harmonization. The completion of the EEC customs union and the monetary crises in the late sixties led to a major effort in economic and monetary policy integration culminating in the Werner Plan of 1970. The only result of these efforts was the "snake" which, while in the end shrinking to not much more than a DM zone, provided some framework for monetary cooperation. and The economic difficulties of the seventies on a European and global scale but also the desire to boost the political momentum behind European integration led to the EMS. Political considerations played an important role not only in reviving the process toward Economic and Monetary Union which led to the Delors Report but also in the specific design of the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty and in the premature notion of the EMS as a de facto monetary union. Contrary to many expectations, the EMS crises in 1992 and 1993 did not lead to an abandonment of the objectives of the Maastricht Treaty but resulted in efforts - for political as well as economic reasons - to salvage the EMS and to continue with efforts aimed at economic convergence for the core of the EMS countries. Strong adherence to national sovereignty, insufficient economic convergence, and difficulties in agreeing on meaningful elements of political union undermined until now attempts to create EMU. The substitution of national currencies - powerful symbols of national sovereignty and achievements - by an untested European currency requires progress in the mentioned areas

Accounting for the spouse when measuring inequality of opportunity

Existing literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) has failed to address the question as to how the circumstances and choices of spouses in a couple should be treated. By omitting information relevant to the spouse in IOp estimations, the implicit assumption was full responsibility for the partner's income, effort and circumstance variables. In this paper, we discuss whether or not the partner's characteristics should be treated as responsibility factors. Using German micro data, we analyze empirically, how IOp estimates are affected when a partner's circumstance or effort variables are included as own circumstances in the analysis. Our analysis indicates that including spouse's variables can increase IOp measures by more than 20 (35) percent for gross (net) earnings. The less the responsibility assumed for the partner's variables, the higher the IOp estimate

Employing MPI Collectives for Timing Analysis on Embedded Multi-Cores

Static WCET analysis of parallel programs running on shared-memory multicores suffers from high pessimism. Instead, distributed memory platforms which communicate via messages may be one solution for manycore systems. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard for communication on these platforms. We show how its concept of collective operations can be employed for timing analysis. The idea is that the worst-case execution time (WCET) of a parallel program may be estimated by adding the WCET estimates of sequential program parts to the WCET estimates of communication parts. Therefore, we first analyse the two MPI operations MPI_Allreduce and MPI_Sendrecv. Employing these results, we make a timing analysis of the conjugate gradient (CG) benchmark from the NAS parallel benchmark suite

Light-harvesting superstructures of green plant chloroplasts lacking photosystems

"This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Belgio, E., Ungerer, P., and Ruban, A. V. (2015) Light-harvesting superstructures of green plant chloroplasts lacking photosystems. Plant Cell Environ, 38: 2035–2047. doi: 10.1111/pce.12528.which has been published in final form at https://dx.10.1111/pce.12528. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.This work was supported by TheLeverhulme Trust and BBSRC research grants to A.V.R

The intelligence reform agenda: what next?

Intelligence is now at the forefront of our national security effort. Recent reforms have delivered more money and more people to the intelligence community but limited structural changes. This Policy Analysis, by Carl Ungerer, offers an assessment of the intelligence reform agenda and proposes some further steps towards restructuring the intelligence community and its activities to meet the national security challenges of the next decade. It argues that reforms to the coordination mechanisms, community engagement, education, training and accountability regimes are necessary to ensure that intelligence continues to play a central role in Australia’s national security

The communicative effectiveness of different types of communication strategy

This study examines compensation strategies (techniques for dealing with knowledge gaps between learner and interlocutor), relates them to synoptic and ectenic learning (Ehrman and Leaver, 2002, 2003), and suggests reasons for the fact that ectenic learners, who need conscious control of what they are learning, seemed to communicate meanings of words to judges better than the synoptics, who feel freer to rely on their intuition and pre-conscious processing, but also tend to use more novel and therefore less readily comprehensible figures of speech. The subjects were French learners of English