The effects of a pressurized suit on human performance were investigated. The suit is known as an Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) and is worn by astronauts while working outside their spacecraft in a low earth orbit. Isolated isokinetic joint torques of three female and three male subjects (all experienced users of the suit in 1G gravity) were measured while working at 100% and 80% of their...

A web portal is a set of HTML documents that comprise a tree rooted at the portal entry site; the leaves are links to other websites. Each node within the tree represents a cluster of documents, decreasing in generality as one descends down the tree. Portals are useful for organizing and enabling users to search large repositories of documents, either centralized or distributed. Whereas search ...

This article traces whether and how Germany’s preferences on the integration of fiscal constraints have evolved since founding Economic Monetary Union (EMU). Focusing state elites mass publics as driving forces government preferences, also examines what has shaped German Treaty Maastricht. The finds that welcomed benefits a single currency but feared risks high inflation liability for other cou...

The plan for European Monetary Union (EMU) hangs in part on the incidence of aggregate demand and supply shocks in the participating countries. This paper addresses that question empirically, using a bivariate VAR. Identification of the underlying orthogonal demand and supply shocks is achieved using only long-run restrictions. Data for 16 European countries and 11 West German states (Länder) s...

In addressing this topic it is first of all important to understand that the adoption of the euro marks only the last stage in a much broader process which started with accession to the EU. At that point, Malta concurrently joined the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), but its participation in EMU is for the time being limited. In particular, Malta has not yet entered ERM II. This means that bo...

The monetary implications arising from EMU for Swiss monetary policy show up primarily in the exchange rate. Until now, fluctuations in the Swiss franc against the euro have been surprisingly moderate. The Swiss franc has thus tracked the euro's decline against the US dollar without experiencing strong inflationary pressures and a convergence in the interest-rate differential: a paradoxical res...