Contributions in Merlin

Wegen der Finanzkrise fordert die Schweizer Bankenaufsicht EBK, dass UBS und Credit Suisse ihre Eigenmittel massiv aufstocken, damit die beiden Banken zukünftig über ein dickeres Risikopolster verfügen. Über Sinn und Unsinn einer Leverage Ratio ist eine intensive Diskussion entbrannt. Der abtretende Universitätsprofessor Rudolf Volkart befürwortet eine schärfere Regulierung unserer beiden Grossbanken, selbst wenn sie im schweizerischen Alleingang umgesetzt werden sollte – obwohl das Arbeitsplätze in der Schweiz kosten könnte. Der Zürcher Finanzprofessor Rudolf Volkart über Eigenkapitalerfordernisse für die Schweizer Grossbanken und Shareholder Value.

The new developments of the globalization process bring with them new responsibilities for the multinational corporation and its leaders. The aim of the paper was to identify those new responsibilities and to look at the changing role of leadership due to those responsibilities. This paper thereby acknowledges the need for a more descriptive and prescriptive social scientific approach by aiming for an understanding of what will be called globally responsible leadership. The article starts with pointing to the changing role of leadership due to new ecological, societal and business obligations leaders in organizations are facing. The following literature review of leadership theories shows that there is no theory that can fully address the new developments. Thus, it is developed a new framework of globally responsible leadership that encompasses those new obligations and that exemplifies the personal preconditions of globally responsible leaders. It is therefore drawn upon theories of responsibility form the philosophy of law and further disciplines. The elements of the framework of globally responsible leadership are explained and suggestions are made of how to empirically capture globally responsible leadership behaviour. At the end, the article points to future research directions.

null

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security, AIMS 2008, held in Bremen, Germany, in June 2008, under the auspices of IFIP. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 8 papers of the AIMS PhD workshop were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions to the main conference and 12 papers for the PhD workshop respectively. The papers are discussing topics such as autonomy, incentives and trust, overlays and virtualization, load balancing and fault recovery, network traffic engineering and analysis, and convergent behavior of distributed systems.

Informatics can make a relevant contribution to sustainable development, if the effects of ICT applications are systematically assessed from a life-cycle perspective and the results of life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies are taken into account by decision makers. The basic scheme of a product life cycle includes the three phases production, use and end of life. In the production phase, raw materials are transformed into the product. In the use phase, the product delivers the service it has been intended for. After the service life of the product ends, parts of the product may be reused or recycled. The rest leaves the system for final disposal or to be recycled in other product systems. Only if life-cycle thinking is applied both to ICT products and to products influenced by ICT applications, is it possible to decide whether a potential ICT application will have a positive or negative environmental impact on the bottom line. With life-cycle thinking, it will be possible to make substantial steps toward sustainable development. Informatics, and in particular environmental informatics as a specialized sub-discipline of it, can contribute to life-cycle thinking by supporting the modelling and data collection process in LCA studies. In addition, dynamic simulation models are useful in prospective technology assessment where LCA methodology reaches its limits.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a new formulation of statistical learning that will be more useful and relevant to the field of robotics. The primary motivation for this new perspective is the mismatch between the form of data assumed by current statistical learning algorithms, and the form of data that is actually generated by robotic systems. Specifically, robotic systems generate a vast unlabeled data stream, while most current algorithms are designed to handle limited numbers of discrete, labeled, independent and identically distributed samples. We argue that there is only one meaningful unsupervised learning process that can be applied to a vast data stream: adaptive compression. The compression rate can be used to compare different techniques, and statistical models obtained through adaptive compression should also be useful for other tasks.

null

null

null

null