Contributions in Merlin

Using dynamic causal modelling (DCM), we have presented provisional evidence to suggest: (i) the mismatch negativity (MMN) is generated by self-organised interactions within a hierarchy of cortical sources [Garrido, M.I., Kilner, J.M., Kiebel, S.J., Stephan, K.E., Friston, K.J., 2007. Dynamic causal modelling of evoked potentials: a reproducibility study. NeuroImage 36, 571–580] and (ii) the MMN rests on plastic change in both extrinsic (between-source) and intrinsic (within source) connections (Garrido et al., under review). In this work we revisit these two key issues in the context of the roving paradigm. Critically, this paradigm allows us to discount any differential response to differences in the stimuli per se, because the standards and oddballs are physically identical. We were able to confirm both the hierarchical nature of the MMN generation and the conjoint role of changes in extrinsic and intrinsic connections. These findings are consistent with a predictive coding account of repetition–suppression and the MMN, which gracefully accommodates two important mechanistic perspectives; the model-adjustment hypothesis [Winkler, I., Karmos, G., Näätänen, R., 1996. Adaptive modelling of the unattended acoustic environment reflected in the mismatch negativity eventrelated potential. Brain Res. 742, 239–252; Näätänen, R., Winkler, I., 1999. The concept of auditory stimulus representation in cognitive neuroscience. Psychol Bull 125, 826–859; Sussman, E., Winkler, I., 2001. Dynamic sensory updating in the auditory system. Brain Res. Cogn Brain Res. 12, 431–439] and the adaptation hypothesis [May, P., Tiitinen, H., Ilmoniemi, R.J., Nyman, G., Taylor, J.G., Näätänen, R., 1999. Frequency change detection in human auditory cortex. J. Comput. Neurosci. 6, 99–120; Jääskeläinen, I.P., Ahveninen, J., Bonmassar, G., Dale, A.M., Ilmoniemi, R.J., Levänen, S., Lin, F.H., May, P., Melcher, J., Stufflebeam, S., Tiitinen, H., Belliveau, J.W., 2004. Human posterior auditory cortex gates novel sounds to consciousness. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 101, 6809–6814].

This paper formulates an empirical model to estimate the impact of endogenous new regional trade agreement (RTA) membership on trade structure. The likelihood of new RTA membership is influenced by economic fundamentals such as country size, factor endowments, and trade and investment costs. In a sample of country-pairs covering mainly the OECD economies we find a particularly strong effect of endogenous RTAs on intra-industry trade in a difference-in-difference analysis based on matching techniques. The associated trade volume effects are similar to the ones found in previous research on the effects of endogenous RTAs. Overall, this indicates that RTA membership might reduce inter-industry trade not only in relative but also in absolute terms and that the trade volume effect is due to the associated growth in trade within industries.

The influence of the environment and genetics on individual biological characteristics such as body mass and stature is well known. Many studies of these relationships have been based on conscript data. These studies often suffer from the fact that their data cover only a part of the population. Characterized by prosperity, democratic stability and enormous micro-regional cultural diversity, Switzerland is in the unique situation of offering data covering more than 80% of annual male birth cohorts. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of socio-economic success, cultural differences, month of birth and altitude (among other factors) on individual anthropometric characteristics of conscripts (N~28,000) in the 2005 census. Our result highlights in such a large male sample the relationship between economic environment, regional cultural diversity, climate and other factors such as individual month of birth on stature and weight. Socioeconomic status, culture (as reflected by mother tongue) and month of birth were found to have significant effects on height and weight, while altitude did not show such effects. In general, weight is more affected by all these variables than height. Taking weight-dependent mortality and morbidity into account, it is of foremost public interest to know more about paired effects of living conditions on stature and weight in a highly developed society.

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The diffusion of innovation theory is deployed to investigate the global assimilation of collaborative information technologies (cIts). Based on the concepts of It acquisition and utilization, an assimilation framework is presented to highlight four states (limited, focused, lagging, and pervasive) that capture the assimilation of conferencing and groupware cIts. Data collected from 538 organizations in the united States, australia, hong kong, Norway, and Switzerland are aggregated and analyzed to explore assimilation patterns and the influence of decision-making pattern, functional integration, promotion of collaboration, organization size, and It function size on the assimilation of cIts. although most of these factors influence assimilation of cIts from nonadoption to a state of limited assimilation, and from limited assimilation to a state of pervasive assimilation, they may not be critical when assimilation of cIts deviates from the expected path. the implications of our findings are discussed for practice and research on assimilation of cIts.

The Semantic Web uses Web page annotations to enable machines to access the semantics of the pages content. This is done by the use of the data representation languages RDF and OWL to define ontologies for specific application domains. By the decentralized organization of the Web, it is not feasible to expect that only one ontology for each domain will be defined and used by everyone. There already are multiple ontologies that relate to the same or overlapping domains and this will not change in the future. Thereby, it is getting more and more difficult for developers of Semantic (Web) applications to support all these existing and future vocabularies. This problem could be solved with the help of a transformation service that can map between different ontologies from related domains. With it, applications would no longer need to understand unknown ontologies as they could inquire the transformation service to exchange data with other applications that use different ontologies. In this thesis, we present an approach to such a transformation service that performs transformations based on mapping definition files expressed in a simple and easy to understand XML syntax. We introduce a flexible mapping language that is applicable to a wide variety of transformation situations. In addition, we provide a prototype implementation of such a service that understands the proposed mapping language and therefore demonstrate its feasibility. The contributions of this thesis are the general applicable mapping language expressed as an XML application and the prototype implementation of the transformation service that understands such mappings and uses them to translate between different ontologies. Thereby, it becomes feasible to create many different mappings in an easy to use definition language. To further demonstrate the value of our transformation service, we integrate it into an application, the Semantic Clipboard, that is able to copy semantic data from Web pages to applications which use different ontologies.

UBS Wealth Management & Business Banking runs the self-developed System 'i-SAC' for the inventory of all the soft- and hardware components. To meet the requirements, which are highly dependent on the company, the usage of a standard-software is not feasible. The growing complexity of the software environment leads to an increased need for graphical reporting, which cannot be achieved with 'i-SAC'. The usage of an independent method is advisable, as the integration of complementary data sources is needed. Within the scope of this thesis, currently used tools and mechanisms are being examined. Based on requirements defined by employees working in different areas, a process for a flexible creation of visualizations is proposed and verified with the implementation of a prototype.