Stefan Schembera, Messung studentischer Kompetenzen gemäss der AACSB Assurance of Learning Standards , In: Performance Management im Hochschulbereich. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
In diesem Beitrag stellen wir praxisnah vor, wie die globalen Assurance of Learning (AoL) Standards der amerikanischen Qualitätssicherungsinstitution AACSB International (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) in einen spezifischen Fakultätskontext auf effiziente Weise eingebettet werden können. Unser Ziel ist, die Verbreitung bestehender Praktiken in diesem Bereich voranzutreiben.
Um ihre Studiengänge kontinuierlich zu verbessern, entwickelte die Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät (WWF) der Universität Zürich ein standardisiertes Modell zur Messung studentischer Kompetenzen. Grundlage für die Entwicklung des Modells ist einerseits die langjährige Erfahrung der AACSB im Bereich der Akkreditierung in den USA. Andererseits berücksichtigt das Modell die „Standards und Richtlinien für Qualitätssicherung im europäischen Hochschulbereich“, welche das Europäische Netzwerk für Qualitätssicherung (ENQA) 2003 im Auftrag der Minister der Unterzeichnerstaaten des Bologna-Prozesses entwickelte.
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Bruno Frey, Ein Europa ohne Euro und EU, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 240, p. 25, 14 October 2011. (Newspaper Article)
Ein Zusammenbruch des Euro und sogar der EU wäre nicht das Ende Europas. Die Länder würden sich schnell auf neue Vereinbarungen einigen, je nach Interessenlage. Ein Zusammenschluss Europas unter Verwendung solch flexibler, sich überlappender Verträge auf funktionaler Ebene wäre wünschenswert. |
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Bruno Frey, Lasse Steiner, World Heritage List: does it make sense?, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 17 (5), 2011. (Journal Article)
The UNESCO World Heritage List contains the 900 most treasured sites of humanity's culture and landscapes. This List is beneficial where heritage sites are undetected, disregarded by national decision‐makers, not commercially exploitable, and where national financial resources, political control, and technical knowledge for conservation are inadequate. Alternatives such as market and national conservation lists are more beneficial where the cultural and natural sites are already popular, markets work well, and where inclusion in the List does not raise the destruction potential by excessive tourism, and in times of war, or by terrorists. |
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Matej Hoffmann, Nico Schmidt, Kohei Nakajima, Fumiya Iida, Rolf Pfeifer, Perception, motor learning, and speed adaptation exploiting body dynamics: case studies in a quadruped robot, In: 5th International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines (AMAM), Tohoku University, Hyogo, Japan, 2011-10-11. (Conference or Workshop Paper)
Animals and humans are constantly faced with a highly dimensional stream of incoming sensory information. At the same time, they have to command their highly complex and multidimensional bodies. Yet, they seamlessly cope with this situation and successfully perform various tasks. For autonomous robots, this poses a challenge: robots performing in the real world are often faced with the curse of dimensionality. In other words, the size of the sensory as well as motor spaces becomes too large for the robot to efficiently cope with them in real time. In this paper, we demonstrate how the curse of dimensionality can be tamed by exploiting the robot’s morphology and interaction with the environment, or the robot’s embodiment (see e.g., [1]). We present three case studies with underactuated quadrupedal robots. In the first case study, we look at terrain detection. While running on different surfaces, the robot generates structured multimodal sensory information that can be used to detect different terrain types. In the second case study, we shift our attention to the motor space: the robot is learning different gaits. The online learning procedure capitalizes on the fact that the robot is underactuated and on a “soft“ control policy. In the third case study, we move one level higher and demonstrate how - given an appropriate gait - a speed adaptation task can be greatly simplified and learned online. |
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Qian Zhao, Hidenobu Sumioka, Rolf Pfeifer, The effect of morphology on the spinal engine driven locomotion in a quadruped robot, In: The 5th International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines, Osaka, Japn, 2011-10-11. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The biological hypothesis of spinal engine states that the locomotion is mainly achieved by the spine, while legs only serve as assistance. Inspired by this spinal engine hypothesis, a compliant, multi-DOF, biologically inspired spine has been developed and embedded into a quadruped robot without actuation on legs. The experimental results support this spinal engine hypothesis and reveal that this kind of robot can achieve rapid, stable, and even dynamical locomotion by appropriately tuning the spine’s morphological parameters, e.g., rearranging the silicone blocks. |
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Hung Vu Quy, Gilles Ramstein, Flurin Casanova, Lijin Aryananda, Matej Hoffmann, Farrukh Iqbal Sheikh, Helmut Hauser, Gait versatility through morphological changes in a new quadruped robot, In: The 5th International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines (AMAM2011), 2011-10-11. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
In dynamic locomotion, robots’ morphology and the ability to adapt it online play an important role in energy efficiency and coping with the highly unpredictable perturbations from the environment. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a quadruped robot whose morphology is particularly targeted towards energy-efficient dynamic locomotion. We propose a combination of mechanisms which allow for energy-efficient actuation, ground clearance, and gait versatility through adaptation of morphology (morphosis). We report on a series of experiments to validate the robot’s performance in different locomotion conditions. |
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Fabio Victora Hecht, Thomas Bocek, Richard G Clegg, Raul Landa, David Hausheer, Burkhard Stiller, LiveShift: Mesh-pull live and time-shifted P2P video streaming, In: 36th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), IEEE Computer Society, Bonn, Germany, 2011-10-10. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The popularity of video sharing over the Internet has increased significantly. High traffic generated by such applications at the source can be better distributed using a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay. Unlike most P2P systems, LiveShift combines both live and on-demand video streaming — while video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner. This paper describes an adaptive fully-distributed mesh-pull protocol that supports the envisioned use case and a set of policies that enable efficient usage of resources, discussing interesting trade-offs encountered. User-focused evaluation results, including both channel switching and time shifting behavior, show that the proposed system provides good quality of experience for most users, in terms of infrequent stalling, low playback lag, and a small proportion of skipped blocks in all the scenarios studied, even in presence of churn. |
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Christopher Wickert, Andreas Scherer, Laura Spence, Organizing CSR in Small and Large Firms: Implications of Firm Size, In: 6th Transatlantic Doctoral Academy Meeting. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Helmut Max Dietl, Kindle Fire: Die neue Marketingstrategie, cash zweiplus ag, cash.ch, http://www.cash.ch/news/kolumne/kindle_fire_die_neue_marketingstrategie-1086342-567, 2011-10-10. (Scientific Publication In Electronic Form)
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Burkhard Stiller, SESERV – Socio-economic Analysis of Networks and Services, In: IEEE CS TCCC Execom Meeting. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Philipp Johannes Renner, Karl Schmedders, Solving Principal Agent Problems by Polynomial Programming, In: SIAM conference on algebraic geometry. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
We present a new way to solve principal agent problems by polynomial programming techniques. We study the case where the agent's actions are unobservable by the principal but the outcomes are. We assume that the agent's actions lie in an interval and the space of outcomes is a finite set. Furthermore the agent's expected utility is a rational function in his actions. The resulting problem is a bilevel optimization problem with the principal's problem as the upper and the agent's problem as the lower level. The key idea is to find an exact reformulation of the agent's problem as a semidefinite optimization problem. Since this is a convex optimization problem, we then have necessary and sufficient global optimality conditions for the agent's problem. The reformulation can be done by using classical results from real algebraic geometry linking positive polynomials and semidefinite matrices. We obtain a nonlinear program. If all functions are rational functions, we then can solve it to global optimality. |
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Lorenz Hilty, Marcel Severith, Integrating ERP and environmental information systems – the case of life cycle inventories, In: EnviroInfo 2011 – 25th Symposium Informatics for Environmental Protection – Innovations in Sharing Environmental Observations and Information (Part 2), Shaker Verlag, Aachen, 2011-10-05. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
This paper takes the life cycle inventory database ecoinvent as an example of the integration of ERP and environ-mental information systems. A reference model describes the ERP-integrated creation of life cycle assessments based on ecoinvent data. The main challenges to implement the reference model from the viewpoint of ecoinvent are identi-fied and approaches for a solution presented. First, an outline for an ontology enhancing ecoinvent metadata is given to help bridge the so-called semantic gap. Second, the basic web services needed to attach to a service-oriented archi-tecture are described. |
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Lorenz Hilty, Sustainability of ICT: Issues of Dependability on Technical and Natural Systems, In: 24ièmes Entretiens Jacques Cartier. 2011. (Conference Presentation)
The talk will give an overview on sustainability issues of ICT, starting from the Green IT perspective and extending it in several directions: Life-Cycle thinking, issues beyond energy (scarce metals), enabling effects of ICT, and systemic effects of ICT. Based on a review of studies assessing the potential of ICT to reduce the carbon footprint of the economy, the conditions will be discussed under which ICT could substantially contribute to sustainable development. |
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Fabio Victora Hecht, LiveShift: Mesh-Pull Live and Time-Shifted P2P Video Streaming, In: 36th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2011). 2011. (Conference Presentation)
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Thomas Baumgartner, Daria Knoch, Philine Hotz, Christoph Eisenegger, Ernst Fehr, Dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex orchestrate normative choice, Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 14 (11), 2011. (Journal Article)
Humans are noted for their capacity to over-ride self-interest in favor of normatively valued goals. We examined the neural circuitry that is causally involved in normative, fairness-related decisions by generating a temporarily diminished capacity for costly normative behavior, a 'deviant' case, through non-invasive brain stimulation (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) and compared normal subjects' functional magnetic resonance imaging signals with those of the deviant subjects. When fairness and economic self-interest were in conflict, normal subjects (who make costly normative decisions at a much higher frequency) displayed significantly higher activity in, and connectivity between, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the posterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex (pVMPFC). In contrast, when there was no conflict between fairness and economic self-interest, both types of subjects displayed identical neural patterns and behaved identically. These findings suggest that a parsimonious prefrontal network, the activation of right DLPFC and pVMPFC, and the connectivity between them, facilitates subjects' willingness to incur the cost of normative decisions. |
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Geraldo Cerqueiro, Hans Degryse, Steven Ongena, Rules versus discretion in loan rate setting, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Vol. 20 (4), 2011. (Journal Article)
Loan rates for seemingly identical borrowers often exhibit substantial dispersion. This paper investigates the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted by banks to small and medium sized enterprises. We associate this dispersion with the loan officers’ use of "discretion" in the loan rate setting process. We find that “discretion” is most important if: (i) loans are small and unsecured; (ii) firms are small and opaque; (iii) the firm operates in a large and highly concentrated banking market; and (iv) the firm is distantly located from the lender. Consistent with the proliferation of information-technologies in the banking industry, we find a decreasing role for "discretion" over time in the provision of small credits to opaque firms. While widely used in the pricing of loans, "discretion" plays only a minor role in the decisions to grant loans. |
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Timo Wassmer, Information Spillover Effects between the Commodity and the Stock Markets, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
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Nikolaus Delius, The Chinese Regulatory Framework for Inclusive Finance in the Context of International Best Practices, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Bachelor's Thesis)
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Simon Baumgartner, Drivers of Emerging Market Sovereign Bond Spreads, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Master's Thesis)
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Peter H Kriss, George Loewenstein, Xianghong Wang, Roberto A. Weber, Behind the veil of ignorance: Self-serving bias in climate change negotiations, Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 6 (7), 2011. (Journal Article)
Slowing climate change will almost certainly require a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but agreement on who
should reduce emissions by how much is difficult, in part because of the self-serving bias—the tendency to believe that what is beneficial to oneself is also fair. Conducting surveys among college students in the United States and China, we show that each of these groups displays a nationalistic self-serving bias in judgments of a fair distribution of economic burdens resulting from mitigation. Yet, we also show, by disguising the problem and the identity of the parties, that it is possible to elicit perceptions of fairness that are not influenced by national interests. Our research reveals that the self-serving bias plays a major role in the difficulty of obtaining agreement on how to implement emissions reductions.
That is, the disagreement over what constitutes fair climate policy does not appear to be due to cross-national differences in what constitutes a fair distribution of burdens. Interventions to mitigate the self-serving bias may facilitate agreement. |
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