Contributions in Merlin

Im Schweizer HR-Barometer 2009 werden neben allgemeinen Trends die Themen Mobilität und Arbeitgeberattraktivität eingehend untersucht. Erfasst werden das tatsächliche Mobilitätsverhalten und die potenzielle Bereitschaft der Arbeitnehmenden, sich in der Arbeitswelt «mobil» zu verhalten. Weiter wird untersucht,welche Faktoren dazu führen, dass Unternehmen für Arbeitnehmende attraktiv sind und zu «Wahlarbeitgebern» werden. Die Themen der Vorjahre werden, im Hinblick auf die Trendentwicklungen von 2005 bis 2008 und auf den Vergleich zwischen deutsch- und französischsprachiger Schweiz, prägnant präsentiert. Das Schweizer HR-Barometer wird von einem wissenschaftlichen Forschungsteam der ETH und der Universität Zürich im jährlichen Turnus herausgegeben, jeweils mit einem Schwerpunktthema.

Despite a substantial body of research investigating the market significance of inventions by independent inventors, relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding their technological significance. A recent study conducted by [Dahlin, K., Taylor, M., Fichman, M., 2004. Today's Edisons or weekend hobbyists: technical impact and success of inventions by independent inventors. Res. Policy 33, 1167–1183] on the tennis racket industry shows that independent inventors are a heterogeneous group which includes both “heroes” who contribute substantially to technological progress and “hobbyists” who make only a marginal contribution. What is not asked – and therefore not explained – is why this distinction arises. In this paper, we focus on the type of prior technological knowledge (in terms of technological specialization and diversity) applied by independent inventors and their corporate counterparts as a factor explaining differences in technological impact. Our empirical setting is the field of medical equipment technology. We find that independent inventors are more sensitive to the negative effects of technological diversity than their corporate counterparts. Furthermore, our study reveals that technological specialization pays off more for independent inventors than for their corporate counterparts. Therefore, those independent inventors who apply low degrees of diversity and high degrees of specialization are capable of reaching the same level as or even outperforming their corporate counterparts, thus becoming “heroes”. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for research and corporate practice.

Terrorism has large social costs that are difficult to quantify for the well-known problems of eliciting people’s preferences for public goods. We use the LSA to assess these costs in utility and monetary terms. Based on combined cross-section time-series data, we estimate the costs of terrorism for France and the British Isles. We find large negative effects of terrorism on life satisfaction that translate into considerable compensating surpluses for a hypothetical reduction in terrorism, in particular for the serious conflict in Northern Ireland. The effects of terrorism are robust and differ across groups in accordance with prior expectations.

Trying to understand others is the most pervasive aspect of successful social interaction. To date there is no evidence on whether human products, which signal the workings of a mind in the absence of an explicit agent, also reliably engage neural structures typically associated with mental state attribution. By means of functional magnetic resonance imaging the present study shows that when subjects believe they are listening to a piece of music that was written by a composer (i.e., human product) as opposed to generated by a computer (i.e., nonhuman product), activations in the cortical network typically reported for mental state attribution (anterior medial frontal cortex [aMFC]), superior temporal sulcus, and temporal poles) were observed. The activation in the aMFC correlated highly with the extent to which subjects had engaged in attributing the expression of intentions to the composed pieces, as indicated in a postimaging questionnaire. We interpret these findings as indicative of automatic mechanisms, which reflect mental state attribution in the face of any stimulus that potentially signals the working of another mind and conclude that even in the absence of a socially salient stimulus, our environment is still populated by the indirect social signals inherent to human artifacts.

Indexing and storing triple-based Semantic Web data in a way to allow for efficient query processing has long been a difficult task. A recent approach to address this issue is the index- ing scheme Hexastore. In this work, we propose two novel on-disk storage models for Hexastore, that use RDF Schema information to gather data that semantically belong together and store them contiguously. In the clustering approach, elements of the same classes are stored contiguously within the indices. In the subindex approach, data of the same categories are saved in separate subindices. Thus, we expect to simplify and accelerate the retrieving process of Hexastore. The experimental evaluation shows a clear advantage of the standard storage model against the pro- posed approaches in terms of index creation time and required disk space.

Today, Software Analysis is a common instrument in the software development environment. As result of that, many software analysis tools were developed. Ghezzi et al. GG08 from the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich focused on the problem that the possibility to access and combine these tools is strongly limited. Their approach is to hide each tool behind a web service interface and publish these on a centralized broker. Furthermore these analysis services are semantically annotated and thus can be categorized by a predefined Software Analysis Taxonomy. This bachelor thesis deals with the development of a software prototype to implement the desired features such as indexing and categorizing analysis services. The goal is to implement a web service that delivers these features. Beside the web service a Flash based visualization, which accesses the service, should give human users the possibility to administrate and browse the service catalog. At the beginning of this paper, the Software Analysis Taxonomy, according to which the analysis services are categorized, gets defined, and extended to satisfy the needs of storing web services and its parameters. Furthermore a structure, how the analysis services have to be described in their SAWSDL, gets defined. The main part of this thesis focuses on the actual implementation of the Analysis Broker. Thus it is giving an overview about the concepts behind the catalog service and its visualization. On the basis of several examples, the paper reveals the functionality and the design decisions.

The importance of high quality data is particularly increasing within the scope of customer data representing strategic resources. This study concerns customer data quality within the Swiss Finance Industry, mentioning methods to capture and improve data quality as well as maintaining a high quality level. The study consists of two core components. A questionnaire investigates the status of data quality within enterprises. Furthermore, a technical analysis examines data quality by means of different quality dimensions. Thereafter, results from both studies are compared. They reveal - from the contemporary viewpoint - how customer data quality is ensured within a bank and whether potential for improvement is existent. In addition, different approaches are presented in order to exploit these capabilities.

This thesis deals with the development of a tutorial application on Regular Expressions. Regular Expressions are a means to describe text patterns and are based on formal language theories. The application can be used in two different modes, the default mode and the so-called flow mode. In flow mode the application tries to get the user into a flow state employing elements based on flow theories. These elements are not used in default mode, however, there are no elements specifically designed to prevent flow. Following the tutorial's development, an experiment using EEG measurements has been conducted. The aim of the experiment was to determine the suitability of the flow elements. Using statistical analysis, siginificantly higher flow values have been found in flow mode.

In this thesis, I examine the diffusion process for a complex medical technology, the PET scanner, in two different health care systems, one of which is more marketoriented (Switzerland) and the other more centrally managed by a public agency (Quebec). The research draws on institutional and socio-political theories of the diffusion of innovations to examine how institutional contexts affect processes of diffusion. I find that diffusion proceeds more rapidly in Switzerland than in Quebec, but that processes in both jurisdictions are characterized by intense struggles among providers and between providers and public agencies. I show that the institutional environment influences these processes by determining the patterns of material resources and authority available to actors in their struggles to strategically control the technology, and by constituting the discursive resources or institutional logics on which actors may legitimately draw in their struggles to give meaning to the technology in line with their interests and values. This thesis illustrates how institutional structures and meanings manifest themselves in the context of specific decisions within an organizational field, and reveals the ways in which governance structures may be contested and realigned when they conflict with interests that are legitimized by dominant institutional logics. It is argued that this form of contestation and readjustment at the margins constitutes one mechanism by which institutional frameworks are tested, stretched and reproduced or redefined.