Integrating structured and unstructured data in a business-intelligence-system

The recent liberalization of the German energy market has forced the energy industry to develop and install new information systems to support agents on the energy trading floors in their analytical tasks. Besides classical approaches of building a data warehouse giving insight into the time series to understand market and pricing mechanisms, it is crucial to provide a variety of external data from the web. Weather information as well as political news or market rumors are relevant to give the appropriate interpretation to the variables of a volatile energy market. Starting from a multidimensional data model and a collection of buy and sell transactions a data warehouse is built that gives analytical support to the agents. Following the idea of web farming we harvest the web, match the external information sources after a filtering and evaluation process to the data warehouse objects, and present this qualified information on a user interface where market values are correlated with those external sources over the time axis.

Integrating a traditional minority into a Nordic society: Elite discourse on the Finnish Roma

Contemporary citizenship studies have been more concerned with the theory and philosophy of citizenship than with empirical studies. The general objective of this contribution is to broaden the understanding of how notions of citizenship are constructed and re-valued in the social world. The study draws on a qualitative analysis of political elite discourse on Romani issues in the Finnish Parliament from 1989-2003. How issues concerning the Roma are debated elucidates the dilemmas of universal rights and duties within the Nordic welfare model, and the possibilities for cultural diversity within this framework. While the Finnish parliamentary debate accentuated tolerance and the acceptance of difference as strengthening factors for Finnish social citizenship, it was not before the new millennium that the political discourse changed to increasingly stress notions of discrimination and structural inequalities in relation to the incapability to provide for a full an inclusive citizenship as regards the Romani minority.

Integrating Pricing and Inventory Control: Is it Worth the Effort?

In this paper we first show that the gains achievable by integrating pricing and inventory control are usually small for classical demand functions. We then introduce reference price models and demonstrate that for this class of demand functions the benefits of integration with inventory control are substantially increased due to the price dynamics. We also provide some analytical results for this more complex model. We thus conclude that integrated pricing/inventory models could repeat the success of revenue management in practice if reference price effects are included in the demand model and the properties of this new model are better understood.

The Increasing Importance of Administrative Practices in the Shaping of the Welfare State

Dans cet article, nous analysons les changements de l' Etat-providence suédois a l' exemple des services municipaux de soins pour personnes agées. On montre qu'il est possible de tracer des processus de transformation à trois niveaux. Analysées comme phénomènes complèmentaires cela montre à quelle envergure les pratiques administratives sont devenues le lieu primordial de la mise en forme de l' Etat-providence. L'incorporation du managérialisme, comme mode prévalent de gouvernance et d'organisation de services et des politiques sociales mène a la conclusion qu'on devient temoin d'une transformation d' un regime (d Etat-providence) moral et politique à un regime administratif. Dans le dernier paragraphe, nous argumentons que cette transformation affaiblit la citoyenneté sociale et transfère les valeurs et principes de la politique sociale a la sphère administrative. Nous argumentons dès lors que cette perspective analytique a des implications plus larges pour la charactérization des “Welfare regimes” et pour l'analyse des différences transnationales.