Asset-price bubbles challenge the explanatory and predictive power of standard economic theory, suggesting that neuroeconomic measures should be explored as potential tools for improving the predictive power of standard theory. We begin this exploration by reviewing results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of lab asset-price bubbles and herding behavior (i.e., following...

Microcanonical simulations of spectral truncations of the barotropic quasigeostrophic model are utilized to demonstrate systematic departures from Gaussianity in these models. Truncated equations conserve both the energy and the enstrophy, and predictions of the equilibrium statistical theory are Gaussian for all values of geophysical parameters. Nevertheless, nonzero topographic modes induce s...

Aims The term bone quality is used often in a dentomaxillofacial context. It needs to be assessed prior to implant placement, or in the evaluation of disease processes. Nevertheless a clear definition of bone quality is lacking (Ribeiro-Rotta et al 2010). A quantitative evaluation can be done with histomorphometry. This evaluation, however, strongly depends on segmentation performance. The aim ...

JAN-WILLEM VAN LEUSSEN & MAAIKE VONDENHOFF This report describes an attempt to remodel Boersma and Hamann (2007)'s Optimality Theoretic account of evolution of phonemic contrasts in an agent-based environment, inspired by agent simulations such as de Boer (2000). While we succeeded in transplanting B&H's model to the more complex world populated by agents, we were not able to replicate all thei...

ZigBee is a fairly new but promising wireless sensor network standard that offers the advantages of simple and low resource communication. Nevertheless, security is of great concern to ZigBee, and enhancements are prescribed in the latest ZigBee specification: ZigBee-2007. In this technical report, we identify an important gap in the specification on key updates, and present a methodology for d...

Symmetry is an important factor in solving many constraint satisfaction problems. One common type of symmetry is when we have symmetric values. In a recent series of papers, we have studied methods to break value symmetries (Walsh 2006a; Walsh 2007). Our results identify computational limits on eliminating value symmetry. For instance, we prove that pruning all symmetric values is NP-hard in ge...

We show that previous results suggesting that government ownership of banks is associated with lower long run growth rates are not robust to adding more ‘fundamental’ determinants of economic growth. We also present new cross-country evidence for 1995-2007 which suggests that, if anything, government ownership of banks has been robustly associated with higher long run growth rates. While acknow...

We consider a new class of light vectorlike exotics with fractional electric charge which do not come in complete representations of a grand unified gauge group, and are nevertheless compatible with gauge coupling unification and other predictions from Grand Unified Theories. Such states naturally arise in orbifold constructions of the heterotic string. Some aspects of their phenomenology and t...

The German research system is well developed and consists of a manifold of different organisations for both basic and applied research and industrial development (Frietsch and Kroll 2010). Within the research system, the universities are the largest public organisation which carries our research and development (R&D). Of the total German R&D expenditures of 61.5 billion Euro in 2007, universiti...

Awards are non-material, extrinsic compensation taking the form of orders, medals, decorations and prizes. They have been widely used in monarchies and republics, private organizations, not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, they have so far not received much attention. This paper develops empirically testable hypotheses, analysing the determinants of the supply of awards. The ...