The Rocky Road to Privatization

Carbohydrate structure: the rocky road to automation.

With the introduction of intuitive graphical software, structural biologists who are not experts in crystallography are now able to build complete protein or nucleic acid models rapidly. In contrast, carbohydrates are in a wholly different situation: scant automation exists, with manual building attempts being sometimes toppled by incorrect dictionaries or refinement problems. Sugars are the mo...

WattDB - a Rocky Road to Energy Proportionality

Energy efficiency is becoming more important in database design, i. e., the work delivered by a database server should be accomplished by minimal energy consumption. So far, a substantial number of research papers examined and optimized the energy consumption of database servers or single components. In this way, our first efforts were exclusively focused on the use of flash memory or SSDs in a...

Management versus Ownership: the Road-privatization Debate

Roads are frequently cited as a public good even though economists have shown that privatizing the roads would solve some of the problems endemic to public roads, namely, high accident rates, congestion, and pollution (see Roth 1996, 1967; Block 1983, 1979, 1980). Economists have analyzed the problem of externalities and shown how the effects of freerider behavior can be contained. The question...

The rocky road to the top: why talent needs trauma.

The increasingly well funded and high-tech world of talent development (TD) represents an important investment for most sports. Reflecting traditional concepts of challenge and focus, the vast majority of such systems expend a great deal of effort maximizing support to the young athletes and trying to counter the impact of naturally occurring life stressors. In this article, we suggest that muc...

The rocky road: qualitative research as evidence.