Ownership structure and innovation: Is there a real link?

This work focuses on the study of the relationship between ownership and control structure of the company and its innovative activity. Its aim consists of analysing the role that may be played by determinants within the company related to ownership structure when the decision to incur research and development activities is taken as well as on the output of this innovate process. Among these determinants we may think of issues such as who owns the firm and how the control of decision-making is distributed, the nature of this control and the level of concentration of ownership, among others. The study is carried out for the year 2001 using a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing industries.

Ownership structure and innovation: Is there a real link?

This work focuses on the study of the relationship between ownership and control structure of the company and its innovative activity. Its aim consists of analysing the role that may be played by determinants within the company related to ownership structure when the decision to incur research and development activities is taken as well as on the output of this innovate process. Among these determinants we may think of issues such as who owns the firm and how the control of decision-making is distributed, the nature of this control and the level of concentration of ownership, among others. The study is carried out for the year 2001 using a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing industries.

The Nordic Gene Bank's Prunus clone archive in Finland 1

Selostus: Pohjoismaisen geenipankin Prunus-kokoelma Suomessa : 1. Hapankirsikkakannat

The Nordic Gene Bank's Prunus clone archive in Finland 2

Selostus: Pohjoismaisen geenipankin Prunus-kokoelma Suomessa : 1. Luumukannat

Submerged Vanes for Flow Control and Bank Protection in Streams, HR-255, 1984

This study was conducted for the purpose of evaluating a new concept for a bank-protection structure: The Iowa Vane . The underlying idea involves countering the torque exerted on the primary flow by its curvature and vertical velocity gradient, thereby eliminating or significantly reducing the secondary flow and thus reducing the undermining of the outer banks and the high-velocity attack on it. The new structure consists of an array of short, vertical, submerged vanes installed with a certain orientation on the channel bed. A relatively small number of vanes can produce bend flows which are practically uniform across the channel. The height of the vanes is less than half the water depth, and their angle with the flow direction is of the order of l0 degrees. In this study, design relations have been established. The relations, and the vanes' overall performance, have been tested in a laboratory model under different flow and sediment conditions. The results are used for the design of an Iowa-Vane bank protection structure for a section of East Nishnabotna River along U.S. Highway 34 at Red Oak, Iowa.

The Limits of Issue Ownership Dynamics : The Constraining Effect of Party Preference

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party "owns" the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. However, based on the broad literature on partisan bias, we predict that parties' efforts to change issue ownership perceptions will have a difficult time breaching the perceptual screen created by a voter's party preference. Using two separate experiments with a similar design we show that the effect of partisan issue messages on issue competence is moderated by party preference. The effect of issue messages is reinforced when people already like a party, and blocked when people dislike a party.

The Conservativeness of the Central Bank when Institutional Quality is Poor

We propose an extension of Alesina and Tabellini 's model (1987) to include corruption, which is understood as the presence of weak institutions collecting revenue through formal tax channels. This paper analyses how conservative should an independent central bank be when the institutional quality is poor. When there are no political distortions, we show that the central bank has to be more conservative than the government, except with complete corruption. In this particular case, the central bank should be as conservative as the government. Further, we obtain that the relationship between the optimal relative degree of conservativeness of the central bank and the degree of corruption is affected by supply shocks. Concretely, when these shocks are not important, the central bank should be less conservative if the degree of corruption increases. However, this result may not hold when the shocks are relevant. JEL classi fication: D6, D73, E52, E58, E62, E63. Keywords: Central Bank Conservativeness; Corruption; Fiscal Policy; Monetary Policy; Seigniorage.

Paleohydrological Reconstruction from Late Holocene Records in Interdune Lakes (N'Guigmi, Northern Bank of the Lake Chad, Niger)

An old erg covers the northern part of the Lake Chad basin. This dune landform allowed the formation of many inter- dune ponds of various sizes. Still present in certain zones where the groundwater level is high (e.g. Kanem, southern Manga), these ponds formed in the past a vast network of lacustrine microsystems, as shown by the nature and the dis- tribution of their deposits. In the Manga, these interdune deposits represent the main sedimentary records of the Holo- cene environmental succession. Their paleobiological (pollens, diatoms, ostracods) and geochemical (δ18O, δ13C, Sr/ Ca) contents are often the basis for paleoenvironmental reconstruction. On the other hand, their sedimentological char- acters are rarely exploited. This study of palustro-lacustrine deposits of the Holocene N'Guigmi lake (northern bank of the Lake Chad; Niger) is based on the relationships between the sedimentological features and the climato-hydrological fluctuations. The mineralogical parameters (e.g. calcium carbonate content, clay mineralogy) and the nature of autoch- thonous mineralization (i.e. amorphous silica, clays, calcium carbonates) can be interpreted using a straightforward hy- dro-sedimentary model. Established to explain the geochemical dynamics of Lake Chad, this model is based on a bio- geochemical cycle of the main elements (i.e. silicium, calcium) directly controlled by the local hydrological balance (i.e. rainfall/evaporation ratio). All these results show that a detailed study of sedimentological features can provide impor- tant paleohydrological informations about the regional aridification since ca 6500 14C BP.

Small-scale non-industrial private forest ownership in the United States : rationale and implications for forest management

Abstract

Report on a special investigation of certain bank accounts held by the City of Davenport Fire Department for the period January 1, 2009 through October 22, 2014

Report on a special investigation of certain bank accounts held by the City of Davenport Fire Department for the period January 1, 2009 through October 22, 2014

The relationship between virtual body ownership and temperature sensitivity.

In the rubber hand illusion tactile stimulation seen on a rubber hand, that is synchronous with tactile stimulation felt on the hidden real hand, can lead to an illusion of ownership over the rubber hand. This illusion has been shown to produce a temperature decrease in the hidden hand, suggesting that such illusory ownership produces disownership of the real hand. Here we apply immersive virtual reality (VR) to experimentally investigate this with respect to sensitivity to temperature change. Forty participants experienced immersion in a VR with a virtual body (VB) seen from a first person perspective. For half the participants the VB was consistent in posture and movement with their own body, and in the other half there was inconsistency. Temperature sensitivity on the palm of the hand was measured before and during the virtual experience. The results show that temperature sensitivity decreased in the consistent compared to the inconsistent condition. Moreover, the change in sensitivity was significantly correlated with the subjective illusion of virtual arm ownership but modulated by the illusion of ownership over the full virtual body. This suggests that a full body ownership illusion results in a unification of the virtual and real bodies into one overall entity - with proprioception and tactile sensations on the real body integrated with the visual presence of the virtual body. The results are interpreted in the framework of a"body matrix" recently introduced into the literature.

Drift and ownership toward a distant virtual body.

In body ownership illusions participants feel that a mannequin or virtual body (VB) is their own. Earlier results suggest that body ownership over a body seen from behind in extra personal space is possible when the surrogate body is visually stroked and tapped on its back, while spatially and temporal synchronous tactile stimulation is applied to the participant's back. This result has been disputed with the claim that the results can be explained by self-recognition rather than somatic body ownership. We carried out an experiment with 30 participants in a between-groups design. They all saw the back of a VB 1.2 m in front, that moved in real-time determined by upper body motion capture. All felt tactile stimulation on their back, and for 15 of them this was spatially and temporally synchronous with stimulation that they saw on the back of the VB, but asynchronous for the other 15. After 3 min a revolving fan above the VB descended and stopped at the position of the VB neck. A questionnaire assessed referral of touch to the VB, body ownership, the illusion of drifting forwards toward the VB, and the VB drifting backwards. Heart rate deceleration (HRD) and the amount of head movement during the threat period were used to assess the response to the threat from the fan. Results showed that although referral of touch was significantly greater in the synchronous condition than the asynchronous, there were no other differences between the conditions. However, a further multivariate analysis revealed that in the visuotactile synchronous condition HRD and head movement increased with the illusion of forward drift and decreased with backwards drift. Body ownership contributed positively to these drift sensations. Our conclusion is that the setup results in a contradiction-somatic feelings associated with a distant body-that the brain attempts to resolve by generating drift illusions that would make the two bodies coincide.