text:
The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society was celebrated on Friday 3 February 1933. We give two reports, the first as given in the minutes of the Society, the second as reported in The Scotsman.
Minutes of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
Jubilee Dinner
Jubilee Dinner
A dinner was held at 7.15 p.m. on Friday, 3rd February, 1933, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society, at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh. The Chair was occupied by the President, Dr William Peddie (Professor of Physics at University College, Dundee), one of the original members.
After the meal the toast of "The King" was proposed by the President, who then announced that apologies for absence had been received from Principal Sir Thomas Holland, F.R.S., Professor C G Darwin, Professor J E A Steggall, Dr and Mrs Stanley Robertson, Mr R P Hardie, Dr J A Third and Dr and Mrs Carse.
Proposing the toast of "The Founders of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society," Professor D'Arcy W Thompson, F.R.S., read extracts from a letter he had received from Mr A J G Barclay, the only surviving member of the original group of founders. He paid high tributes to the memory of Dr Cargill G Knott and Mr A Y Fraser, who with Mr Barclay had been most active in the formation of the Society in 1883, and gave reminiscences of his old friend and teacher Dr John Sturgeon Mackay, first President of the Society.
The toast was responded to by Mr David Kennedy Fraser (son of the late Mr A Y Fraser) and Miss Knott (daughter of the late Dr Knott).
Between the toasts Handel's Sonata in E was played by Mr W L Edge (piano) and Dr A C Aitken (violin). The evening concluded with the playing of Pugnani's Minuetto and Mistowski's Hornpipe by Prof. H W Turnbull (piano) and Dr A C Aitken.
The official guests were:
Professor D'Arcy W Thompson, Professor R A Sampson (Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh), and Dr James Robb (Secretary of the Carnegie Trust). The others present, in addition to the President, were:-
Dr A C Aitken (Editor of "Mathematical Notes"), Dr John Alison, Dr F Bath, Dr T P Black, Mr J T Brown, Mr A Buchan, Mr John W Butters, Dr J T Campbell, Dr J B Clark, Dr E T Copson (co-editor of "Proceedings"), Mrs C G Darwin, Mr and Mrs E G Dymond, Mr W L Edge, Mr and Mrs Kennedy Fraser, Mr J D Fulton, Mr David Gibb (Hon. Librarian) and Mrs Gibb, Dr R P Gillespie, Mr P G Gormley, Mr J A Hardie, Dr E M Horsburgh, Miss Knott, Dr G J Lidstone, Mr J B Lockhart (Hon. treasurer) and Mrs Lockhart, Mr C H Lott, Rev. A M Macleod, Dr Alex. Morgan, Mr Frank Murray, Mr J H Ogilvie, Mr R A Robb (Vice-President), Dr H S Ruse (Hon. Secretary), Mr A D Russell, Dr D E Rutherford, Dr R Schlapp, Dr G Timms, Professor H W Turnbull, F.R.S., (co-Editor of "Proceedings"), Mr A G Walker, Mr K K Weatherhead, Professor E T Whittaker, F.R.S., and Mrs Whittaker, Mr A W Young and Mr Zia ud Din.
The following report was published in The Scotsman on the following day:
Jubilee Celebration Dinner.
Jubilee Celebration Dinner.
A dinner was held last night at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. In January 1883 a circular letter was sent to Scottish mathematicians by the late Dr C G Knott, a Lecturer of the University of Edinburgh; Mr A J G Barclay, Glasgow High School; and Mr A Y Fraser, George Watson's College, Edinburgh, proposing that a Society should be established for the advancement of mathematical science in Scotland. "It may be added," said the letter, "that Professors Chrystal and Tait have expressed themselves as highly favourable to the project, as one that may lead to important results."
In the following month the first meeting was held and the Society formally constituted, Dr John S Mackay, a master at Edinburgh Academy, being elected president. During the first session Sir William Thomson, afterwards Lord Kelvin, Professors Chrystal, Tait, and Niven, Aberdeen, were elected honorary members. One of the ordinary members was the present president of the Society Mr William Peddie, who at that time was a Lecturer in Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, and is now Professor of Physics at University College, Dundee.
The subsequent development of the Society has fully justified the hope that its establishment might lead to important results. During the session 1884-85 it was resolved to publish a periodical, The Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, containing an account of the Mathematical research performed by the members. Later a smaller periodical, Mathematical Notes, was instituted for the publication of original mathematical work of a less specialised character. The former of these now ranks high among the principal scientific journals of the world, being distributed in every country in which mathematical research is performed. Moreover, the membership has so extended that there are few civilised countries which do not contain members of the Society.
In spite, however, of its international character, the Society remains peculiarly Scottish in its activities, and sets an example to similar bodies south of the Tweed by holding attractive and well-attended meetings in Edinburgh and elsewhere for the delivery of lectures on topics of scientific and educational interest. Moreover, it is unique among British Mathematical or physical societies in that it organises colloquia, every few years in St Andrews or Edinburgh, thus providing a medium for the exchange of ideas and an opportunity to mathematicians to form friendships with others of similar interests.
At last night's dinner the chair was occupied by the president. The toast of "The Founders" was proposed by Professor D'Arcy W Thompson, F.R.S., and was responded to by Mr David Kennedy Fraser and Miss Knott.
Others present included Mr R A Robb, vice-president; Dr James Robb, secretary of the Carnegie Trust; Professor R A Sampson, F.R.S., secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; Professor E T Whittaker, F.R.S., and Mrs Whittaker; Professor H W Turnbull, F.R.S.; Mrs C G Darwin, Dr T B Clark, Dr G J Lidstone, and Dr J Alison.


text:
The Elixir of Life is a potion produced by using the Philosopher's Stone that extends the life of the drinker.
The Elixir grants the drinker an indefinitely extended life, for as long as they keep drinking it regularly, though, the frequency with which it needs to be consumed (along with its entire creation process) is unknown. Any person who relies on the Elixir will die if they cannot obtain more Elixir before the last quantity imbibed wears off.
The Elixir also has the ability to somehow reincarnate a disembodied yet earthbound soul, mostly due to the powerful magical, life-based properties. Indeed, Lord Voldemort, surviving through his Horcruxes, planned to steal the Philosopher's Stone to use the power of the elixir for such purpose, but he was thwarted by Harry Potter in 1992.
The Elixir does not make the drinker truly immortal, but only lengthens the lifespan. For example, Nicolas Flamel (who created the Philosopher's Stone) and his wife Perenelle lived for little over six-hundred and sixty years because of this elixir, but eventually died when the Stone was destroyed (with their blessing) and their supply of Elixir subsequently depleted. It is also unknown whether or not the stone halts, reverses or slows ageing, whether or not there is a limit to the amount of Elixir the stone can produce in a time period, and whether or not there are any drawbacks to being reincarnated in this way.
Behind the scenes
- It is not mentioned whether the Elixir grants complete immortality or merely extends life. It is possible that someone who has taken the Elixir may still die of illness or injury.
- In the first film, Lord Voldemort claims that unlike Unicorn Blood or the living off another, the Elixir of Life can give him a body; however, in the movie, it is not made clear that the Elixir can supply one with a spare body.
- Given that this potion is an elixir it must be sweet and aromatic in nature (as all elixirs are, by definition).
- On Pottermore, the image used to illustrate the Elixir of Life for the "Favourites" screen is the same used for Infusion of Wormwood. Whether this is merely a placeholder image or is meant to imply the two are somehow related is unclear.
- Voldemort refused to rely on the Elixir of Life for his immortality, as he would be required to drink it for eternity, and the possibility of contamination or the stone's loss would result in his death. His streak of independence made it intolerable for him to rely on the Elixir to survive, and only desired it to recreate his body.
- One of the three main goals of alchemy was to create panacea, a remedy that would cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely. The creation of the Elixir of Life can be considered to be the success of this goal, as the potion extends life if drunk for eternity, and can bring a disembodied soul back to a physical form.
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (First mentioned)
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film) (Mentioned only)
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mentioned only)
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Mentioned only)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (video game)
- Harry Potter for Kinect (Mentioned only)
- Harry Potter Trading Card Game (First appearance)
- Pottermore

subset: commoncrawl


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text:
Author: Domas Mituzas
MySQL does not need SQL
The "DBMS" part of MySQL is fine – storage engines (especially with new kids on the block), replication, etc, but it really sucks at executing SQL.
I won't even get into complex SQL that has complex data dependencies, will start with very basic tasks.
SELECT * FROM table WHERE indexed = "A" LIMIT 1
If multiple indexes can satisfy the query, MySQL will hit each of them at least twice – looking up first "A" and last "A" records. It will do that while planning the SQL execution. Once it comes up with a plan, it will go and hit the index it picked again, this time once. So, if you have two candidate indexes, you will have 5 index accesses at 4 positions.
How would a direct cursor access work? Single index hit. Want to simulate that in SQL? You can add a 'FORCE INDEX' hint, then only one index will be considered, but still at two positions and you will have three index accesses. I wrote about this before.
This query:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE indexed IN (101, 201, 301) LIMIT 1
Would do six index dives during preparation as well (two for each IN position), plus another one during execution – seven dives when one would suffice.
What we learn from this is that whenever there's an opportunity for lazy evaluation, MySQL will gladly miss it and do most work possible to run your query.
If you could express it yourself, you'd be lazy and you'd be efficient. It gets even worse if we start expecting something more advanced than a basic cursor positioning.
Whenever you're doing a range scan on (a, b) indexed table:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE a BETWEEN 1 and 100 AND b=1234567 LIMIT 1
There's an easy optimization given low-cardinality 'a' – you jump to each 'a' position and then you can do a dive for the 'b' value. In a way you can emulate this behavior with:
SELECT * FROM table JOIN ( SELECT DISTINCT a FROM table ) x USING (a) WHERE b=1234567 LIMIT 1
As I mentioned, MySQL will skip any opportunity to be lazy and in this case it will fully materialize all distinct 'a' values. If it were able to lazy evaluate, there's a chance we can terminate the scan early.
We're adding ability to skip-scan records in our builds (you can follow the work at https://reviews.facebook.net/D59877).
It is quite easy to describe whatever is needed in basic loop though – storage engines already provide with necessary hooks for these types of access methods.
Another basic single-table SELECT that fails with SQL is a standard "feed" query:
SELECT * FROM table WHERE category IN (5,6) ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 5;
MySQL will have to pick between two alternatives, one would be just scanning 'time' index and searching for specified categories among found rows, another is read all entries for each category, sort them all and return top 5.
Efficient way to execute such query would involve having per-category cursors and merging their reads, something like:
( SELECT * FROM table WHERE category = 5 ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 5 ) UNION ALL ( SELECT * FROM table WHERE category = 6 ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 5 ) ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 5
MySQL is unable to merge these two cursors without writing all the data into temporary file and sorting it – although we already are reading much smaller datasets than with alternative naive (and readable) query. Besides, each subselect will open a table handler with all the associated buffers and if you want to merge hundred cursors you're looking at hundred open tables.
You can do this operation efficiently in bash (with 'sort -m'), it isn't that complicated algorithm in any scripting language, but having such access method in MySQL's SQL doesn't seem likely.
Even where MySQL is already doing efficient loose scan (like in indexed-based GROUP BY), there were basic bugs open for years where efficiency would go down the drain simply because a LIMIT is added.
There're quite a few other limitations in access methods that are quite annoying to work around. For example a query like this one:
SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY priority DESC, time ASC
Would be unable to use a regular index on (priority, time) – it can only walk everything in one direction and cannot have mixed order scans that are trivial to implement in basic procedural algorithm (move cursor to lowest time of lower priority, read all records for that priority in ascending order before repositioning the cursor to even lower priority).
Of course, one can change the direction of an index, or even have multiple indexes on same columns just to get an ordered read efficient. But none of that is needed if there's a proper access method that can be used by SQL execution.
Directional index hints may be needed just to specify common order (e.g. prefix compression in RocksDB makes one direction cheaper than the other, although both still much cheaper than full blown filesort).
Even basic single order traversal breaks if you're joining two tables:
SELECT * FROM t1 JOIN t2 USING (b) ORDER BY t1.a, t1.b, t2.c
In some cases I (*shudder*) had to use 'FORCE INDEX' without an ORDER BY to pick a direction I needed. One could expect basic functionality like ordered JOIN traversal to be part of SQL package.
There're various other issues related to JOINs – again, in the best tradition of MySQL, lazy evaluation of joins is not possible – it will gladly do more work than you'd ever need, reading from tables you did not ask for.
These things slowly slowly change with each version, and to get basic things right we have to yell a lot. Hurray, 5.7 may finally have fixes for issues we were working around back when 5.x series did not exist) – but that is just way too slow for an SQL layer to evolve.
MySQL employs many bright engineers many of whom are trying to make better cost decisions on same existing limited set of access methods they use, by spending more cycles and adding more and more overhead.
In order to execute various queries one has to either resort to network roundtrips after each row or over-fetch data all the time. You may suggest stored procedures, but their data access is limited to running SQL queries and returning them as multiple result sets (or buffer everything in temporary table). Amount of deferred work and lazy evaluation you can do in a stored procedure is quite limited and overhead of running many SQL statements within a procedure is high.
Ability to access data via lower level interfaces by high performance server-side language (Lua? JS?) would allow to circumvent many many many limitations and inefficiencies of existing SQL optimizer and execution layer while still allowing occasional SQL access, high performance storage engines, replication and all the tooling that has been built to support MySQL at scale.
What do we do today? We run lots of that conditional logic in our application and absorb lots of the cost with a cache layer in the middle. There's a chance that we would be able to spend less CPU, less I/O, less memory and less network resources if we could ask smarter queries expressed as procedures instead of wrangling all the relational algebra on top of dumb executor.
In some cases we have different database systems.
P.S. Many of the hypothetical scenarios map to workloads where amounts of data and query volume warrants all the optimizations I discussed here.
P.P.S. Other databases may have other set of issues.
linux memory management for servers
We've been learning for many years how to run Linux for databases, but over time we realized that many of our lessons learned apply to many other server workloads. Generally, server process will have to interact with network clients, access memory, do some storage operations and do some processing work – all under supervision of the kernel.
Unfortunately, from what I learned, there're various problems in pretty much every area of server operation. By keeping the operational knowledge in narrow camps we did not help others. Finding out about these problems requires quite intimate understanding of how things work and slightly more than beginner kernel knowledge.
Many different choices could be made by doing empiric tests, sometimes with outcomes that guide or misguide direction for many years. In our work we try to understand the reasons behind differences that we observe in random poking at a problem.
In order to qualify and quantify operational properties from our server systems we have to understand what we should expect from them. If we build a user-facing service where we expect sub-millisecond response times of individual parts of the system, great performance from all of the components is needed. If we want to build high-efficiency archive and optimize data access patterns, any non-optimized behavior will really stand out. High throughput system should not operate at low throughput, etc.
In this post I'll quickly glance over some areas in memory management that we found problematic in our operations.
Whenever you want to duplicate a string or send a packet over the network, that has to go via allocators (e.g. some flavor of malloc in userland or SLUB in kernel). Over many years state of the art in user-land has evolved to support all sorts of properties better – memory efficiency, concurrency, performance, etc – and some of added features were there to avoid dealing with the kernel too much.
Modern allocators like jemalloc have per-thread caches, as well as multiple memory arenas that can be managed concurrently. In some cases the easiest way to make kernel memory management easier is to avoid it as much as possible (jemalloc can be much greedy and not give memory back to the kernel via lg_dirty_mult setting).
Just hinting the kernel that you don't care about page contents gets them immediately taken away from you. Once you want to take it back, even if nobody else used the page, kernel will have to clean it for you, shuffle it around multiple lists, etc. Although that is considerable overhead, it far from worst what can happen.
Your page can be given to someone else – for example, file system cache, some other process or kernel's own needs like network stack. When you want your page back, you can't take it from all these allocations that easily, and your page has to come from free memory pool.
Linux free memory pool is something that probably works better on desktops and batch processing and not low latency services. It is governed by vm.min_free_kbytes setting, which has very scarce documentation and even more scarce resource allocation – on 1GB machine you can find yourself with 5% of your memory kept free, but then there're caps on it at 64MB when autosizing it on large machines.
Although it may seem that all this free memory is a waste, one has to look at how kernel reclaims memory. This limit sets up how much to clean up, but not at when to trigger background reclamation – that is done at only 25% of free memory limit – so memory pool that can be used for instant memory allocation is at measly 16MB – just two userland stacks.
Once you exhaust the free memory limit kernel has to go into "direct reclaim" mode – it will stall your program and try to get memory from somewhere (thanks, Johannes, for vmscan/mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin hint). If you're lucky, it will drop some file system pages, if you're less lucky it will start swapping, putting pressure on all sorts of other kernel caches, possibly even shrinking TCP windows and what not. Understanding what kernel will do in the direct claim has never been easy, and I've observed cases of systems going into multi-second allocation stalls where nothing seems to work and fancy distributed systems failover can declare node dead.
Obviously, raising free memory reserves helps a lot, and on various servers we maintain 1GB free memory pool just because low watermark is too low otherwise. Johannes Weiner from our kernel team has proposed tunable change in behaviors there. That still requires teams to understand implications of free memory needs and not run with defaults.
Addressing this issue gets servers into much healthier states, but doesn't always help with memory allocation stalls – there's another class of issues that was being addressed lately.
I wrote about it before – kernel has all sorts of nasty behaviors whenever it can't allocate memory, and certain memory allocation attempts are much more aggressive – atomic contiguous allocations of memory end up scanning (and evicting) many pages because it can't find readily available contiguous segments of free memory.
These behaviors can lead to unpredictable chain of events – sometimes TCP packets arrive and are forced to wait until some I/O gets done as memory compaction ended up stealing dirty inodes or something like that. One has to know memory subsystem much more than I do in order to build beautiful reproducible test-cases.
This area can be addressed in multiple ways – one can soften allocation needs of various processes on the system (do iptables really need 128k allocation for an arriving segment to log it via NFLOG to some user land collection process?), also it is possible to tweak kernel background threads to have less fragmented memory (like a cronjob I deployed many years ago) or of course, getting the memory reclamation order into decent shape instead of treating it as a black box that "should work for you unless you do something wrong" (like using TCP stack).
Some of our quick changes (like net: don't wait for order-3 page allocation) were addressing this case by case basis, but it was amazing to see that this kind of optimization was pulled in to cover many many more allocations via wide-reaching change (mm/slub: don't wait for high-order page allocation). From my experience, this addresses huge class of reliability and stability issues in Linux environments and makes system behavior way more adaptive and fluid.
There are still many gray areas in Linux kernel and desktop direction may not always help addressing them. I have test-cases where kernel is only able to reclaim memory at ~100MB/s (orders of magnitudes away from RAM performance) – and what these test cases usually have in common is "this would happen on a server but never on a desktop". For example if your process writes a [transaction] log file and you forget to remove it from cache yourself, Linux will thrash on the inode mutex quite a bit.
There're various zone reclaim contract violations that are easy to trigger with simple test cases – those test cases definitely expose edge behaviors, but many system reliability issues we investigate in our team are edge behaviors.
In database world we exasperate these behaviors when we bypass various kernel subsystems – memory is pooled inside the process, files are cached inside the process, threads are pooled inside the process, network connections are pooled by clients, etc. Kernel ends up being so dumb that it breaks on a simple problems like 'find /proc' (directory entry cache blows up courtesy of /proc/X/task/Y/fd/Z explosion ).
Although cgroups and other methods allow to constrain some sets of resources within various process groups, it doesn't help when a shared kernel subsystem goes into an overdrive.
There're also various problems with memory accounting – although kernel may report you quickly how many dirty file system pages it has, it doesn't give equal opportunities to network stack. Figuring out how much of memory is in socket buffers (and how full these buffers are) is a non-trivial operation, and on many of our systems we will have much more memory allocated to network stack than to many other categories in /proc/meminfo. I've written scripts that pull socket data from netlink, try to guess what is the real memory allocation (it is not straightforward math) to produce a very approximate result.
Lack of proper memory attribution and accounting has been a regular issue – in 3.14 a new metric (MemAvailable) has been added, which sums up part of cache and reclaimable slab, but if you pay more attention to it, there's lots of guessing whether your cache or slab is actually reclaimable (or what the costs are).
Currently when we want to understand what is cached, we have to walk the file system, map the files and use mincore() to get basic idea of our cache composition and age – and only then we can tell that it is safe to reclaim pages from memory. Quite a while ago I have written a piece of software that removes files from cache (now vmtouch does the same).
Nowadays on some of our systems we have much more complicated cache management. Pretty much every buffered write that we do is followed by asynchronous cache purge later so that we are not at the mercy of the kernel and its expensive behaviors.
So, you either have to get kernel entirely out of your way and manage everything yourself, or blindly trust whatever is going on and losing efficiency on the way. There must be a middle ground somewhere, hopefully, and from time to time we move in the right direction.
In desktop world you're not supposed to run your system 100% loaded or look for those 5% optimizations and 0.01% probability stalls. In massively interconnected service fabrics we have to care about these areas and address them all the time, and as long as these kinds of optimizations reach wider set of systems, everybody wins.
TL;DR: upgrade your kernels and bump vm.min_free_kbytes :-)
on removing files
If you remove a file, file system generally just marks in its metadata that previously occupied blocks can now be used for other files – that operation is usually cheap, unless the file has millions of segments (that is such a rare case, only seen in experimental InnoDB features that Oracle thought was a good idea).
This changes a bit with SSDs – if you update underlying device metadata, it can have smarter compaction / grooming / garbage collection underneath. Linux file systems have 'discard' option that one should use on top of SSDs – that will extend the life time of their storage quite a bit by TRIM'ing underlying blocks.
Now, each type of storage device will react differently to that, some of them support large TRIM commands, some of them will support high rate of them, some of them won't, etc – so one has to take that into account when removing files in production environments.
Currently Linux block layer sees TRIM commands in same shape as write commands, so if you are truncating a terabyte, it is seen as a terabyte of write activity (and managed in similar fashion). That may make your writes (and/or reads) suffer.
Probably correct place to handle this better could be a file system – but it doesn't have good feedback signals and doesn't really have the job of I/O scheduling. Currently it does this data discard at the same place as it returns blocks – in a path that is expected to be fast, so it may hold file system transaction for a duration of this operation. This may or may not stall other file system activity at the time.
So now that we know that devices can be stupid, device drivers are stupid, block layer is stupid and file systems are stupid, we have to somehow address this issue. An obvious solution is to delete files slower.
Lots of performance engineering can be done by adding right sleeps into appropriate places – so one can do that to 'rm' too – it can sleep a bit after certain amount of bytes removed. What to do with large files? We have to slowly truncate them before we unlink them.
So I built a slower rm:
Usage: slowrm [OPTION...] PATH [PATH] ... Help Options: -h, --help Show help options Application Options: -r, --recursive Dive into directories recursively -c, --chunk=128 Chunk size in megabytes -s, --sleep=0.1 Sleep time between chunks -f, --force Continue on errors (by default bail on everything) -x, --one-file-system Only operate on one file system
We do what we got to do.
on political correctness
Wikipedia administrators received this letter ("Midom" is my username on Wikipedias):
Hi, I've nothing to do with any of this but passing through oc.wikipedia.org I have noticed someone who I presume to be some kind of admin, one Midom who seems to be rather lacking in social skills, judging by what's going on here:https://oc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Utilizaire:Midom
I think I appreciate the technical issues being dealt with in there, but his behaviour is way out of line and clearly oversteps what is considered acceptable today in any functional online community.
Especially when this behaviour is directed towards a group who are small and lacking in resources, but very enthusiastic, such as the Occitan Wikipedia lot, this is just plain bullying.
He has, very much without discussion or consultation, decided on the deletion of a significant amount of data–while the reasons appear legitimate, the way in which this was approached by Midom is lamentable (and this is a different discussion, but one could argue that if the templates under discussion lend themselves to be misused in the way they allegedly were, that doesn't say much about the competence of the programmers involved so perhaps they, being a handsomely paid bunch these days, unlike the oc.wikipedia.org editors, should step in and find a solution to the problem. Just saying.)
So, for what little is left of Wikipedia's credibility, I urge you to take action and:
- Reprimand Midom for his reprehensible actions and attitude.
- Admonish him to present his apologies to the Occitan Wikipedia community for his rude, aggressive, and unhelpful behaviour.
As I said, I personally have no axe to grind here, but I do not condone bullying.
I might as well add, having made a note of the information volunteered by this user in his user page, I do reserve the right to contact his employer and make them aware of his highly irresponsible behaviour and questionable social and technical competence. Midom, it is up to you to take this as a learning experience and make amends with the users you have inconvenienced and offended. Providing some assistance to the OC guys in migrating their data into a form that doesn't clog up the servers wouldn't go amiss either. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.8.131.52 (talk) 00:24, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
To this person who decided that my operational intervention (and resulting soap opera) back in 2012 was heavy handed, I appreciate your communication skills and eloquence. Extreme political correctness was not needed to operate Wikipedias back in the day. What I remember from that time is that there'd be always some crazies like you, and we had to deal with them in one way or another. Thats what being open and transparent means.
On the other hand, you can always blame me for everything, thats what Wikipedia's Blame Wheel was invented for:
on ORDER BY optimization
Generally in MySQL we send queries massaged to a point where optimizer doesn't have to think about anything. In our major user database environment 99.9% of queries don't have alternative query plans available (either because of forced indexes or just straightforward Primary Key read). We have various other systems and from time to time we have to do SQL work there and chase optimizer errors.
There're multiple places where optimizer can make a choice in very basic queries, for example:
- Which index returns less rows
- Which index can be used for ORDER BY
A query that I was looking asked a very basic question, on a job instances table, show state and status for latest-by-ID entry for job name='Ship Christmas Presents' (real name was a bit different ;-). So, it was
SELECT c,d FROM t WHERE b=X ORDER BY a DESC LIMIT 1, where PK is
(a) and a possible index is on
What we were observing was a massive table scan on PK instead of using
(b, ...) indexing. Table in question was in hundreds of gigabytes, so that did hurt, a bit. If one forced the
(b,c) index, queries became really fast. This wasn't an issue with some intermittent statistics flapping.
The first thing that immediately caught my attention was that
LIMIT 2 produced a proper query plan, whereas
LIMIT 1 did not. I shipped a few-gigabyte sized subset onto my test machine and carefully went through what was happening.
EXPLAIN was just telling me that it will be picking bad query plan,
EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON was still telling the same, so I needed to look at some detailed execution data. MySQL has this extremely promising facility called 'optimizer trace', so I got the trace for my test-case. Unfortunately, the trace gave everything that I knew – that only one index made sense for reducing the dataset and that it changed to PK to order things better. It told me about number of rows and some "cost" of the plan – whatever those numbers mean, and it gave super-high numbers for table scan.
My optimizer trace did not tell why it decided to switch from decent query plan to absolutely horrible one, it just had a block telling that "
reconsidering_access_paths_for_index_ordering" and that
"plan_changed": true, which I already knew. On the other hand, that provided me with quick pointer into the source code – the six thousand lines of sql_select.cc. I could find above trace pointer somewhere in
test_if_skip_sort_order(), which then calls this:
test_if_cheaper_ordering(..., order, table, usable_keys, ref_key, select_limit, &best_key, ...);
Essentially, this function will look at all the indexes that can be used instead of "filesort" and see what would happen if we used them. This function would say that the
ref_key (b,c) – the index that returns least rows – is not the best key, and the best key is one on
(a). How did it come up with such conclusion? Short answer – optimizer is very naïve.
That logic is explained in this comment:
/* We assume that each of the tested indexes is not correlated with ref_key. Thus, to select first N records we have to scan N/selectivity(ref_key) index entries. ... */
It makes the naïve and somewhat optimistic calculation on
(a) and the most pessimistic possible calculation on
(b,c). I'll start with the pessimistic one. Optimizer assumes that there're 20000 instances for our job, and for each of these jobs we have to do a separate seek into PK, so our cost is 20000 (~300MB) for PK reads + few more reads on index itself.
Now the optimism (and bad query plan) comes from the idea that if we're only selecting only 1 out of 20000 rows, that means only 0.005% of table scan is enough to satisfy LIMIT 1. If we would provide LIMIT 10, it would be only 0.05%. On a 100GB table, that means 5MB of data read, and that seems to be cheaper than the very pessimistic calculation of more than 300MB above.
Unfortunately, optimizer doesn't understand, that there're humans who are building these systems, and humans have their own rationale and thinking. One of the ideas that a human would have is that if you have 100GB table, you better understand things like data locality and other sorts of efficiencies. That means that in real world most of large tables have various degrees of correlation of data. In our fictitious example we know that "Christmas" happen, well, at Christmas. Looking through our window we know that it isn't anywhere near Christmas.
So, database assumes that our data is distributed like this:
When it is more like this:
With this data distribution the pessimistic decision on
(b,c) becomes way too dark and miserable – there's a chance that "random" seeks into PK will all hit same pages, so we will need very few megabytes read. Our best case ends up being at ~5MB, our worst case is somewhere at above mentioned 300MB. Now optimistic decision can vary from "oh hey, I just started reading and found a row immediately" win of a lottery to "hey, I calculated an average for you" naïveté of 5MB to "oh snap, I was wrong" of say… 30GB.
Though we all agree that optimizer cannot everything, it errs into the direction of chasing much wider range of possibilities and being way more opportunistic rather than being somewhat more reliable. Obviously, it is very hard to tell whether changing some of these heuristics is possible in a way that would not affect million other places, but in this exact case we can look at what could be done better with information at our hand, either by rewriting queries or implementing somewhat procedural access.
One way is materializing the maximum ID first simply because it is already hidden in the
(b,c) index – internally inside InnoDB that index is
(b,c,a). So if we
SELECT MAX(a) FROM t WHERE b=X
we can get most of the data for the read just by scanning few index pages. We can use that data then to dive into primary key for that single row. Very similar approach can be taken with different limits.
We should also know that optimizer has most of this logic back from MyISAM times and it doesn't know that it knows multiple values of
(a) just by doing records-in-range estimation for
(b,c) index – it does two random dives and it already observes primary key values. Simply by knowing that both of these values represent the range nowhere close the table scan head or tail it can discard the truly expensive query plan.
Of course, that is messy and can have broken sampling, but hey, it may be better than nothing, although it will again assume something opposite – that data is somehow correlated. Which we humans think it is and computer is on the opposite side of the fence.
So, in summary, you have to understand that database assumes things you don't and sometimes you have to force your query plans or write your queries in a way that there's no optimization space for optimizer left.
See also:
on time in mysql processlist
There was one MySQL feature that I was always very afraid to ask for. I sure needed it for past 15 years of my MySQL practice, and yet I never got to it. I wanted MySQL processlist ('SHOW PROCESSLIST', later – information_schema.processlist) to have more accurate query execution time.
I submitted a patch for that to MongoDB (and it got merged and released really quickly). I couldn't admit to myself and others that MySQL does not have this functionality, even though it is hard to reason about systems in production without such data.
When 99.999% of queries happen within 1s, one has to resort to statistical analysis of zeroes and ones to determine how long they may be running (that is, if nine queries are at 0s and one is at 1s, there's a chance that all of them are running for 0.1s). Unfortunately, this kind of statistical analysis is not feasible in runtime environment when dealing with issues at hand.
One of reasons why I did not submit this feature request is because I did not want to be subjected to the embarrassment of not understanding MySQL Release Cycles, Stability and Performance Architecture.
Someone else (Hi, Simon!) decided to ask for this in late 2014.
By 2015 spring MySQL engineering team responded with "thank you for your feature request".
Few months later engineering team wrote that they won't be improving tools like processlist and instead will change behavior of performance_schema tables (which were not useful at that time anyway).
So, even though MySQL already shows time based on arithmetics of subtracting query start time from current time, having the tiny improvement on top of that was not deemed the right way, because, I guess, it doesn't fit the Performance Vision.
So, I'm confused. I'd like to see "SHOW PROCESSLIST" expanded to have this. Over time you learn the quirks and differences between it and I_S.PROCESSLIST that was added later in 5.1 (for example, one of them will truncate queries at zero-bytes, other will truncate queries at invalid unicode, even if data in queries is all binary). The whole truncation hierarchy of "SHOW PROCESSLIST" -> "I_S.PROCESSLIST" -> "SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST" deserves a separate discussion (rant?).
Enter Performance Schema. Assuming you don't care about degraded performance of your MySQL environment you compiled it in.
It already has performance_schema.threads table, which has same second-level precision on the PROCESSLIST_TIME column. It has few additional columns over standard processlist although it has a very interesting behavior – it doesn't show prepared statement texts in PROCESSLIST_INFO, so that information is truncated to 0 bytes (regular queries are truncated at 1024 bytes). So we have a third place to look for information, it was added in newer release, is Much Better (I don't know in what way though) than existing INFORMATION_SCHEMA and SHOW options.
Apparently the real place to look at this (with bugs fixed in latest release) is performance_schema.events_statements_current.
Timing data is in picoseconds so everything has to be divided by a trillion to get a meaningful number. I can mentally handle microseconds or milliseconds, but dealing with 17-digit-numbers is not for my simpleton mind. This is not supposed to be used directly and one has to use specially built tools to access this data or write their own layers of views.
It won't have user or schema information, so you're forced to join to another table (threads or I_S). The sad part of this is that there's no indexing/direct access methods provided and MySQL will use same methods as for any other non-indexed joins… The query would look something like:
select end_event_id, processlist_id id, processlist_user user, processlist_host host, processlist_db db, processlist_command command, processlist_state state, if(end_event_id is null,timer_wait/1000000000000,processlist_time) time, if (end_event_id is null, sql_text, NULL) info from events_statements_current right join threads using (thread_id) where type='foreground';
Now that I got to actual source of data I was wondering how useful it is in production environment. The answer is "not much". Apparently if you have few hundred queries running MySQL will be writing to gigabytes of memory courtesy of Performance Schema SQL digests feature even with said feature disabled.
I filed a bug here, but was still confused.
It looks that the way to answer any idea how to improve MySQL DBA experience is by throwing in more expensive, buggy, complicated features, that are painful or impossible to use and wave a flag of "nobody complained but you".
So I guess I can expose myself to more embarrassment, file same bug again. I really can't believe that current implementation is supposed to be helpful and useful to DBAs. I guess someone does. Unfortunately, the only time they try their features is when they have to write a blog post how to use it.
P.S. We use either instrumentation on client side or our slocket – slow-log-datagram-socket – interface to do ad-hoc aggregations with high precision timings. I have no idea why we didn't add direct high precision processlist ourselves.
See also:


text:
Artwork description:
Fine Art photographic print, professionally hand printed on fine art gallery paper using archival pigment ink and supervised by the artist. Limited edition print signed and numbered.
If you require a different size or framed, mounted and ready to hang or on canvas let me know and I shall create a tailored print for you.
#zurich #foster #switzerland #hotel #flag #swiss #richard ramirez
Dolder : Old & New
Photograph by Marc Ehrenbold
$214.02Free shipping
- Photograph on Paper
- From a limited edition of 10
- Size: 30 x 40 in (unframed)
- Signed and numbered on the back
- Style: Impressionistic
- Subject: Architecture and cityscapes
This artwork is sold by Marc Ehrenbold from United Kingdom


text:
Know what device every visitor is using to visit your website.
Use that knowledge to deliver a richer user experience and drive business growth.
Take your website to a whole new level.
Read More Downloads
51Degrees provides deeper insights into user preferences and device-specific behaviour, for mobile network operators and their suppliers.
Enhance your analytics, maximise your network and improve your customer services and targeting with TAC data from 51Degrees.
Read More Contact Us
Discover how your customers are viewing your website - what device, what screen size…
Learn how your website performs and discover great insights into how customers behave based on their device.
Richer content, better user experience, increased engagement.
Identify the connection speed and quality of every website visitor.
Deliver a better user experience on your website, by tailoring your content based on your customer's connection.
Great user experience, reduced shopping cart abandonment, better performance.
51Degrees legal terms and conditions.
The ability to quickly segment audiences, target appropriately and optimise ad creative based on accurate analytics is vital for Adtech companies.
51Degrees' Device Intelligence can help you do this with it's patented technology, unrivaled accuracy and industry leading speed.
Use Device Intelligence to take your business to a whole new level.
You have invested in advertising in all the right channels, why fall at the last hurdle.
Leading advertisers use device intelligence to ensure they understand every user before delivering digital content and experiences.
51Degrees ensures your website doesn't get in the way of your brand conversations.
Publishers mobile sites often have huge page load times which results in abandoned page visits and ads not being viewed.
51Degrees enables content and advertising requests to be optimized for every user's device.
Improve user experience, drive engagement and increase advertising revenue with 51Degrees Device Intelligence.
Responsive web design is not a one size fits all solution.
With money and man hours spent on advertising don't let a poor user experience compromises a potential conversion.
Implement 51Degrees server-side to optimize content faster, resulting in an improved user experience and increased conversion rates.
Leading digital agencies need to keep up to date with the latest trends and tool sets to ensure your clients get the best results can be a challenge when you are busy managing the day to day demand from clients.
Using 51Degrees you can adapt online content to maximise the potential of online conversions and steer the end user purchase path.
Plugin us into yours and your clients' web platforms and see a more granular level of detail about the devices used for clients site.
Your platform is dependent on accurate device data to support improving client-side performance by optimizing user experiences server-side
51Degrees provides the fastest and most accurate device information, including 217 device properties such as retail price, vendor, device age, screen size and more to allow more granular analytics and better content optimization
We support over 20 leading CMS platforms.
Find out how our products have been used to improve user experience and to maximise revenue.
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To generate these results in your business contact us.
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Understand how 51Degrees works with web platforms.
Learn about APIs for .NET, C#, C, C++, Java, Node, PHP, Perl, Python, NGINX, Varnish and JavaScript.
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There's documentation about the data model, migrating from competitors and how 51Degrees works.
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Browse the full list of properties available in 51Degrees device detection solutions. Find out what values are supported in the Lite, Premium and Enterprise data sets, including full descriptions and advice on how they can be used.
Enter a user-agent and find out the associated device, operating system, and browser.
Blog entries focused on API changes and uses.
Community support forums for questions and answers concern all 51Degrees products and services.
Purchase 51Degrees device data subscriptions and other products and services.
Answers to common questions about 51Degrees products and services.
Find devices contained in the 51Degrees data sets by vendor, model or using free text search. View the properties and values available for each device.
Compares the major measures, licencing models and costs associated with 51Degrees, DeviceAtlas and ScientiaMobile's WURFL product.
Find out how 51Degrees redefined the device detection industry.
Logos and corporate images useful to press, bloggers and affiliates.
Mobile device emulators for Windows based operating systems recommended by 51Degrees.
This blog shares the latest 51Degrees User-Agent Analysis including User-Agent examples from the latest Smartphones and Tablets. Currently, we have over 51,000 device models in our database.
Categories: Analysis, Device Data
Tags: Device Detection, Apple, Samsung, Chrome, Tablet, Blackberry, Android, Smart TV, Analysis, Xiaomi, 51Degrees, iPhone, User Agent, Safari, Device Models, Seznam.cz, Advertising, Tencent, Oppo, Galaxy, Vodafone, Infinix, Motorola, Disney, ebay, Guess, Webtrekk
Categories: News
Tags: News, HTC, Android, Device, Detection
Last week our data team added the PRIV BlackBerry into our database. It is the first-ever BlackBerry smartphone to run on Android. According to the manufacturer, this new device brings incredible new features to the Android platform that make sharing ideas and connecting with people faster and easier.
Categories: Device Data
Tags: Blackberry, Android
The early part of July saw England and Australia resume hostilities in The Ashes – the most hotly contested long form competition in global Cricket. Whilst the sport, never mind this particular contest, is well-known but rarely understood outside the countries where it is played, the competition remains the fiercest rivalry in the game's history.
Categories: Analysis
Tags: Android, Smartphone, Analysis
The battle between iOS and Android is usually played out in the battlefield of the high street, where the two key mobile operating systems compete for sales. The relative performance of each operating system can therefore fluctuate greatly: the month after a new iPhone launch iOS devices tend to do very well and the same is true when a new Android phone is launched or a price drop takes place.
The question we asked ourselves at 51Degrees.com was what does the battle look like out in the real world.
Elements of this article were featured in The Register. You can see the article here.
Tags: Analytics, Android, iOS
Based on data gathered by 51Degrees, our analytics tool provides information about the behaviour of devices accessing websites by countries or other criteria. You can check which software or browser indicates the highest browser activity and how it changes over the time. This knowledge can be used to understand which mobiles are the most popular to access global websites and can help to optimize the user experience on the most popular devices. Whether you are a web developer, marketer or journalist, you will find this tool interesting to you.
Here we are presenting examples of analytics you can get by using the 51Degrees Mobile Analytics tool.
Tags: Samsung, Chrome, HTC, Sony, Android, LG, Amazon, Mobile Analytics
The Desire Eye has been successfully launched by HTC. Let's review some of its features and find out how good the Desire Eye is between mid-range line-up.
Tags: HTC, Android
Wearable technology has been around a long time, in 16th century China the Qing Dynasty saw the introduction of a fully functional abacus on a ring. However the first wearable digital computers weren't seen till the 1980's, although these were mostly unsuccessful. The first watch phone debuted in 1999 but it wasn't until the late 2000's that we began to see more advanced wearable technology. These advances were made possible by improved battery and display technology as well as vastly aided by new interface standards such as Bluetooth. These early wearable computers would go on to shape the modern smart wearables available today.
Categories: Opinion
Tags: Android, Smartwatches
Last week Google finally put us all out of our misery regarding the "Mysterious L", by officially announcing the latest version of their Android operating system. The new Android 5.0 Lollipop hasn't been officially released yet (Although it has been in Beta for a number of months), but it is already the most eagerly anticipated development for Android fans in a long time, it seems that everybody can't wait to upgrade.
The excitement surrounding Lollipop is understandable as it seems Google have been given Android its biggest upgrade in a numbers of years. If you're a fan and an existing user it looks like you won't be disappointed by the promises made this time around. From the new vivid interface to the 'kill-switch' function which makes the device useless for thieves, you will enjoy exploring the latest improvements.
Categories: Device Data, News
Tags: Device Detection, Google, Android, OS
Earlier this week, Samsung had to pull the Galaxy S3 4.3 Android update after they received complaints from users. This week 51Degrees.mobi takes a look at which Android version is the most popular on global Samsung Galaxy S3 devices.
Tags: Apple, Samsung, Android


text:
< Back to Theatre
Show Boat: Cardiff
Set in America's Deep South, the story begins in 1887 on the Cotton Blossom show boat as it sets sail on the Mississippi River. Following the lives of the performers, dock workers, musicians and stagehands over a period of forty years, Show Boat is rich with nostalgia, humour, love stories and well-loved melodies including Ol' Man River and Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man.
With all the glamour of the old American-style big family musical and a cast of over 50 talented performers, Cape Town Opera lovingly bring this classic musical back to life alongside the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra.
Show Information
Tuesday, 22nd July 2014
Saturday, 26th July 2014
Venue Information
Wales Millennium Centre
Donald Gordon Theatre, Bute Place
Cardiff Bay
Map | Seating Plan


text:
Working out Before Summer
It's hard in the cold winter months to find the motivation to keep fit. With the days shorter and darker, it's not exactly the ideal motivation to get you up and going. And with the layers and thicker clothing to disguise your fading toned tummy and lean legs, it's difficult to maintain a slender physique.
The weather is warming up quick and the hot months are right around the corner, so you won't be able to hide in your baggy sweatshirts and loose jeans you've been living in all winter. The layers are coming off sooner than later so get ready! If you want that super trim and fit body come summertime, then you have to start now. No more excuses. No more procrastinating. It's go time TODAY..
Most people think all calories are processed the same way and that it's only about the numbers. Well, hate to break it, but that's not the case at all. Calories are not created equal and there is such a thing as quality calories. For example, the calories in a piece of chicken are much better than the calories in a candy bar, and the calories in a doughnut are not processed the same way the calories in an apple are.
Stay away from any processed carbs or foods, artificial sugars, and fat. Stick to a more wholesome diet and eat nutrient-rich, quality calories like eggs, chicken, quinoa, and vegetables. To continue eating healthy, plan out your meals in advance to refrain from making poor decisions when you get hungry or making a quick fast food stop.
Find cardio exercises that are fast paced and get your heart pumping, like interval training. Try to fit in at least 30 minutes to an hour of cardio 5 days a week. If you're struggling to fit that into your schedule, don't give up. If you can find at least 15 minutes to do a workout that gets your heart pumping a couple of times a day. So there shouldn't be any excuses!
Even though cardio can do a whole lot of good for you, strength training is what will push you over the edge. It can help you get the final results you want and be the finishing touch to your success. Try working out by a mirror to stay motivated watching your body work hard.
When you're not at the gym doing cardio or strength training, try to do the little things outside of the gym. By doing so, it will advance your progress and help you achieve your goals quicker. Here are some examples of the little things you can do during the day that make a big impact and burn extra calories.
- Park farther away in the parking lot so you have to walk further
- Take the stairs instead of riding the elevator
- Sit up straight in your office chair
- Take your dog out for a walk
- Do sit ups during the commercial breaks when you watch tv
- Pace when you're on the phone
- Fidget and move around so you are never completely still
- Take the long route
- Do calf raises while you wash the dishes
- Laugh more throughout the day
Time to start thinking about your summer body now.
WARNING: This post is not intended to replace the advice of a medical professional. The above information should not be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease or medical condition. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your diet, sleep methods, daily activity, or fitness routine. iFit assumes no responsibility for any personal injury or damage sustained by any recommendations, opinions, or advice given in this article.


text:
Texas Government
Sally Ride: American Heroine
- Details
- Category: Texas Legislature
- Published on 01 August 2012
- Written by Lillie Bush-Reves
Sally Ride: American Heroine
by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
On July 23rd, America lost a pioneer. Sally Ride served as a role model – for girls and women, certainly, but also for anyone interested in space – and her contributions to the American space program will ensure that her legacy is one of continuing inspiration.
Sally became the first American woman in space in 1983 when she was chosen to be a mission specialist aboard the shuttle Challenger. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sally for my book, American Heroines, in which I profiled women who paved the way in a number of fields – from aviation to medicine to science. One of the questions I asked was what trait she thought was most important for success. She surprised me by saying that it was the ability to work with other people. I had thought she might say "perseverance" – something often cited by women breaking into male-dominated professions. But for her, it was about the demands of the field: as a physicist, it was essential for collaboration, and as an astronaut, the close quarters and unique requirements of the job made it critical. Her answer should not be construed as deference to male colleagues, or a willingness to bend to others' demands. Sally Ride was strong-willed – so much so that her mother once said it was the reason she abandoned earlier dreams of a career in tennis: "it offended her that the ball wouldn't go just where she wanted." No, it was a scientist's understanding of the demands of the job. I will always remember how Sally displayed that same calm ability to get along when she handled questions about her gender from the press, and remarks from a few coworkers, with dignity and grace.
That measure of professionalism is what sets trailblazers apart. Sally was part of the first class of women to be accepted into the space program, but it is important to remember she was chosen for her accomplishments, not for her gender. She attended Stanford and earned bachelor's degrees in physics and English, a master's in physics and a Ph.D. in astrophysics. While training as an astronaut, she also worked as a NASA physicist and engineer, and helped develop a robotic arm used on the space shuttle to retrieve satellites. After her retirement from the program, President Reagan appointed her to serve on the panel investigating the tragic loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, and she reprised that role for a similar panel in 2003.
I have always believed that America's investment in science, technology, engineering and medicine – the STEM disciplines – is crucial to our success. I have spent my career ensuring America never cedes its leadership in innovation and technology advances. I was thrilled when Sally served on the Augustine Committee on the future of human spaceflight in 2009, which helped inform the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.
It is also critical to promote STEM education, to ensure that we train new generations of scientists. Sally Ride shared that belief, and dedicated much of her career to pursuing that goal. In 2001, she founded a company that developed programs, materials and training for science classes and sponsored science camps and classes designed to bring more girls into a field where – though we have made progress – they are still underrepresented.
In researching my book and conducting the interviews, I found that in every field, the first women to break through laid the groundwork, creating a foundation for subsequent generations to build on. It is true that each generation of female pioneers owes something to those who have come before – that we have "stood on the shoulders of giants" as the saying goes. Sally Ride stood just 5'5" tall, but she was a giant.
Hutchison, a Republican, is the senior U.S. senator from Texas.


text: OverviewFor freshman/sophomore, 2 semester/2-3 quarter courses covering finite mathematics and calculus for students in business, economics, social sciences, or life sciences departments. This accessible text is designed to help students help themselves excel in the course. The content is organized into three parts: (1) A Library of Elementary Functions (Chapters 1--2), (2) Finite Mathematics (Chapters 3--9), and (3) Calculus (Chapters 10--15). The book's overall approach, refined by the authors' experience with large sections of college freshmen, addresses the challenges of teaching and learning when your students' prerequisite knowledge varies greatly. Student-friendly features such as Matched Problems, Explore & Discuss questions, and Conceptual Insights, together with the motivating and ample applications, make this text a popular choice for today's students and instructors. The MyMathLab course for the text features thousands of homework exercises plus instructional videos for nearly every example in the book.


text:
Free Entry
In Cooloola, Great Sandy National Park you can experience the majesty of nature's sculpture in sand. Massive dunes, towering cliffs of coloured sands and wide ocean beaches have been etched by wind and water. Tall forests, fragrant wildflower heaths and paperbark swamps decorate the sands. Water features abound, including surf, freshwater lakes and the undisturbed upper Noosa River.
Walk one of the scenic tracks to highlights such as the historic Double Island Point lighthouse. Pack a tent for the two to four day Cooloola Wilderness Trail. Drive along the beach or take the Cooloola Way and Freshwater Road through tall open forests and heathlands. You will need a four wheel drive vehicle with high clearance to enjoy driving the sand tracks or the beach at low tide. Canoe the Noosa River.
Camp in a variety of areas: from formal campgrounds with facilities to wilderness camps. Visit information centres at Tewantin and Rainbow Beach.


text:
By Nick Cowen
Best games in 2013: T3's top games to look out for
Best games of 2013 for PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, 3DS and Vita owners
Best games of 2013 for PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, 3DS and Vita owners
Ubisoft's platformer is as brilliantly designed as it is awesomely beautiful. Boasting a gentle - but definitely ever-present - learning curve Rayman Legends's biggest strength is tied up in the fact that this game just doesn't run out of great ideas. Every single time players think they've seen it all, Legends tosses them a new puzzle, boss fight or series of obstacles that challenges them in a new and compelling fashion. This is arguably one of the best platformers this side of Mario - and fans of this genre know what an incredible accolade that is.
Platforms: PC, PS3, Wii U and Xbox 360
Release date: 30 August 2013
In Pikmin 3, players take on the role of a space traveller who has crash landed on an alien world filled with tiny extra-terrestrials called Pikmin, who help them gather fuel, food and ultimately help them get home. The game comes on like an open-world RTS cross between Animal Crossing and Lemmings; players need to find resources with the Pikmin during the day or they'll get chomped by a range of beautful, but deadly, alien animals. The level design is inspired, the visuals are gorgeous and the sense of fun taps into your inner-child, however old you are.
Platform: Wii U
Release date: 26 July 2013
The only superhero adventure big enough to compete with the sprawling Lego Marvel Superheroes comes courtesy of Osaka's Platinum Games. In it, players take control of a veritable army of superheroes that swarm over their targets, occasionally transforming into huge weapons capable of administering uber-powered attacks. An utterly unique offering and one of this year's best.
Platform: Wii U
Release: 24 August 2013
Animal Crossing: New Leaf may look adorable but don't be fooled: this is the digital equivalent to crack. In it players become the mayor of a town, build it up, populate it with cute little creatures and then share their creations with other. Furthermore, the game punches the players time clock; neglect your town and Animal Crossing will make you feel like the most uncaring, unfeeling so-and-so that ever walked. This isn't so much a game as it is an obligation.
Platform: 3DS
Release: 14 June 2013
This indie title may wrong-foot players initially as it bears all the hallmarks of a horror title: an empty, ornate house, a booming thunderstorm and a spooky atmosphere. But the story at its centre is both touching and very human. Part detective story, part memoir, Gone Home's biggest asset is its ability to enable players to recapture the emotional state of a teenager; when feelings can level mountains and falling in love can make your heart feel like it will burst.
Platform: PC
Release: 15 August 2013
Buy now: Steam
Assassin's Creed 4 is something of a return to form for Ubisoft's open-world series. The action shifts from gloomy Colonial US to the sunny Caribbean and swaps the po-faced teenager Conner Kenway for his grandad pirate, Edward. Players should expect tons of quests, targets and buildings to climb, but best of all, it furnishes them with their own galleon, The Jackdaw. Players can explore the seven seas, engaging in naval battles, hunting sharks and even diving to the bottom of the ocean in search of treasure. Utterly essential on any platform you happen to own - although on the next generation is looks just a little bit prettier.
Platforms: PC, PS3. PS4. Wii U, Xbox One and Xbox 360
Release date: 22 November 2013 | Read our Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag
One this year's most addictive games was actually released on PC last year. Fortunately for console owners, Blizzard has done a fantastic job in porting over its superb dungeon crawler for the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Controls are tight and intuitive, menus are easy to navigate and co-op play is seamless. There's never been a better time to go to hell. Bring some friends.
Platforms: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360
Release date: 3 September 2013
While it may look like a Skylanders rip-off, Disney Infinity is actually the video game equivalent of emptying a toy chest onto the floor and making your own magic with its contents. The game's campaign mode is positively anorexic, but its Toy Box mode is a veritable candy shop for those with imagination. Here, you can create your own races, obstacles courses, constructions and challenges. You can then share them online, as well as 'borrow' the toy sets of other players. The requirement to buy more plastic figurines to unlock content is a little bit of a kick in the teeth, but overall, this is a must-have for gamers with children.
Platforms: PS3 and Xbox 360
Released: 23 August 2013 | Read our Disney Infinity review
Traveller's Tales delivers yet another magical Lego title this time weaving its adorable spell over the Marvel universe. Iron Man, Spiderman, Captain America, Wolverine and more are available for players to take control of, and while the lion's share of the action adheres to the standard Lego gameplay template, there are enough new kinks to make every thing feel fresh. The story is pulpy, but dead funny, and contains enough in-jokes and references to keep True Believers happy. A fantastic video game for players of all ages.
Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox One, Xbox 360
Released: 15 November 2013
DICE's shooter looks every bit the part of a COD killer this year. While its campaign isn't the main draw here - although it's a substantial improvement on the one contained in Battlefield 3 - the game's online mode is a thing of beauty. Up to 64 players can wage pitched battles across a series of maps and match types, using a vast array of weapons, equipment and vehicles. There's even space for a couple of commanders to direct the troops on the field with second screen functionality. To top it all off, the game's destrcutible environments include massive set-pieces - such as dropping a skyscraper into the middle of a battlefield - which change both the map layout and the environmental dynamics. The new Frostbite 3 engine makes all the action look utterly eye-watering. Arguably one the best shooters from this or any year.
Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One
Release date: 1 November 2013 | Battlefield 4 review
This fantastic 3DS port of the rumbling, thundering Wii platformer arrives with both the game's eye-popping presentation and rock-hard difficulty in tact. Unlike fellow stablemate Mario, Donkey Kong's platforming is all about momentum and the player's correct timing owes as much to the character's weight as it does to his agility. The interface swaps motion sensors for face buttons and there's even an 'easy' difficulty for those intimidated by the game's steep learning curve. Rounding out the package are eight brand new levels for players to scrub through once they've finished the main game. A must have for 3DS owners.
Platform: 3DS
Release date: 24 May 2013
While its title may hint that Call of Duty: Ghosts is a quieter entry in this FPS series than its predecessors, don't be fooled. Set 10 years after the collapse of the USA as a superpower, Ghosts follows the fortunes of several spec ops soldiers as they pick their way through the wreckage of the West. Developed by the Modern Warfare creators, Infinity Ward, with a script from the writer behind the movie Traffic, Stephen Gaghan, Ghosts comes packaged with a frenetic multiplayer and a decent co-op mode in which players battle alien dogs. It may be a case of 'business as usual' with this franchise, but, hey, business is good.
Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One
Release date: 5 November 2013 | Call of Duty: Ghosts review
Ninja Theory's entry in Capcom's famed hack-'n-slash series may have dropped right at the beginning of the year, but what can we say? It made an impression. Rather than simply slavishly follow the stylistic dictates of the game's predecessors, the Cambridge-based developer has brought its own Western visual flare to the universe of Dante and demons. In this world, the forces of Hell caused the banking crisis, witches create inter-dimensional portals using street art, hackers are on the side of angels and soft drinks are literally made out of demon urine. Best of all, the series' fabled combat mechanics are present and correct - as is Dante's cocky arrogance. Unsheathe those swords, people
Platforms: PC, PS3, and Xbox 360
Release date: 15 January 2013 | Devil May Cry review
Buy now: Amazon | GAME | Zavvi | Tesco
FIFA 14 has tried to mould itself much closer into a more modern representation of the game putting the emphasis on simulation more than it has ever before. The tweaks and improved game engine mechanics feel more substantial and noticeable than they have done in the last few FIFA games and while it should make it a tougher game to master, it should still offer that same satisfying football feeling. We have to say, though, that if you have the option, pick this one up on a next generation console. The Ingnition engine makes FIFA 14 makes the on-pitch action look more realistic than ever.
Formats: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One
Released: 23 September 2013 | FIFA 14 review
Built using the in-game engine from Batman: Arkham City, Arkham Origins keeps most of the same gameplay as its predecessor, but bolts a brand new story and environment on. In Origins, the villain Black Mask has placed a $50m bounty on the Dark Knight's head, attracting every bounty hunter and assassin in Gotham to hunt Batman through the streets. Action is still the same satisfying cocktail of brutal combat, puzzle solving and terrorising bad guys in Predator rooms. There's even a rather interesting online mode to get stuck into - just try to avoid fighting over who has to play Robin.
Platforms: Xbox 360 and PS3
Release date: 25 October 2013 | Batman Arkham Origins review
Arguably the biggest curveball tossed out by the industry all year, this download title takes the template of Far Cry 3 and throws the trappings of an 80s action sci fi flick over the top of it. The plot is ridiculous, the writing is funny and the voice acting - most notably by Michael Biehn from Terminator and Aliens fame - is top notch throughout. One of the best - and most fun - shooters released all year.
Platforms: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360
Release date: 1 May 2013
Buy now: Amazon
Forza Motorsport 5 looks swoon-worthy, handles like a dream and offers the player the chance to pilot a range of fantasy cars. So far, so Forza, but Turn 10's racing sim is also the launch title that does the most to show off the next generation capabilities of the Xbox One. The rumble filters in the control pad give players an immediate sense of the power under the hood of the various cars, and thanks to the cloud, players don't ever race against an AI; instead, Forza 5 tosses Drivatars - the virtual constuctions of other Forza players - into each race you compete in. The next generation starts right here.
Platforms: Xbox One
Release date: 22 November 2013 | Read the Forza Motorsport 5 review
Trailer: Forza Motorsport 5
The expansion pack to last year's sleeper hit, XCOM: Enemy Within may look like its predecessor, but it's a different beast altogether. The turn-based, tactical gameplay is still there but developer Firaxis has tinkered with the game's template forcing players to take more risks and play more aggressively. Furthermore, they've introduced new enemies and new classes of warrior that make battles more varied and challenging at the same time. XCOM: Enemy Within lets players re-visit a modern classic with an entirely new way of playing it.
Platforms: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360
Release date: 15 November 2013
On the surface, BioShock Infinite is the story of a hired gun out to save a kidnapped beauty in a floating city. But with thinking-man's developer Ken Levine at the helm, it is so much more than that; it's plot delves into quantam physics, alternate realities and it even points an accusing finger at fans of shooters and questions the legitimacy of their form of entertainment. Between its high-minded plotting and its gorgeously presented world, this is arguably one of the best games made for this generation of console and a culturally important title for the medium.
Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC | Bioshock Infinite review
Release: 26 March 2013
Arguably the last great game for the last generation of consoles, Grand Theft Auto 5 is one of the most eye-popping technical achievements of this year. Set in a sprawling approximation of Los Angeles - Los Santos, to you - GTA 5 offers players myriad quests, activities, side missions and mini-games to enjoy. Players can take part in elaborate heists, street races, story quests or even the odd round of golf at a country club. In the tradition of the best open world games, GTA 5 plonks players into a believable and beautiful world and then gives them every reason to explore it - either through the eyes of its three protagonists, or with friends (and strangers) in the Online mode. Rockstar pretty much popularised the open world epic, and with GTA 5, they demonstrate their complete and utter mastery of it.
Platforms: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 | Read our Grand Theft Auto 5 review
Release date: 17th September 2013
Metal Gear Revengeance may bare the moniker of Hideo Kojima's celebrated stealth series, but the idea of sneaking about in this game was dumped at inception. Instead, players should prepare themselves for eye-watering combos, brutal melee combat and action that's so over the top it's already in orbit.
Platforms: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 | Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance review
Release date: Out now
EA's super-powered FPS is set in a New York that's been both wrecked and overgrown by jungle foliage, due to the city being encased in a biodome. The good news is, there's plenty of beasties and enemies to kill and a whole of weapons and powers to use to do this. Think Halo crossed with Predator, in which you play the Predator...
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 | Crysis 3 review
Release date: Out now
We must confess to being a little worried about this one as the fact it's a prequel to the stunning games that established God Of War as a Sony flagship franchise smacks of milking it just a bit. Still, a revamped combat system and fresh storytelling bodes well for this release and we have to admit to being tantalised somewhat by the multiplayer, in which players sell their souls to gods for unique abilities.
Platform: PS3 | God of War: Ascension review
Release date: Out now
If you're already a fan of Epic's phenomenally popular shooter series, you don't need us to put this one on your radar, but if you remain unconvinced, take heed: Judgement just may be your best gateway to the Gears Of War universe. The reasons being, mainly, is that it centres around the two best characters in the universe - the sarcastic Baird and the OTT Cole Train - and it's made by People Can Fly, the irreverant and sardonic creators of the hilarious FPS piss-take Bulletstorm. Expect a lot of blood-letting and wise-cracking from this one...
Platform: Xbox 360 | Gears of War: Judgment
Release date: Out now
This gritty reboot of the Tomb Raider pits a young Lara Croft against a gang of cult-like madmen on an island in the South China sea. The game borrows a couple of elements from the Uncharted series in terms of action-packed set pieces and cover-based shooter action, but it's set apart with some fantastic open-ended gameplay and nifty RPG features. The tone is also a hell of a lot darker, with plenty more in the way of nail-shredding tension and grisly violence.
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 | Tomb Raider review
Release date: Out now
Sam Fisher returns in this new tale of international espionage in which the gravel-throated operative is tasked with tracking down a list of terrorists who are targeting the United States. Previous games in the series put a premium on stealthily sneaking about in the dark, but Blacklist juggles this with burst of high-octane action. Blacklist allows players to use quick bursts of fluid run-and-gun action to compliment Sam's preternatural agility, and once again, Sam doesn't shy away from knocking confessions out of terrorist ne'er-do-wells. The real juice here, though, is in the multiplayer, which pits teams of players against each other in deadly games of cat-and-mouse... except the mice can attack from the shadows and the cats are armed to the teeth.
Platforms: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 | Splinter Cell: Blacklist review
Release date: 23rd August, 2013
"What's this?" we hear you cry, "yet another game set in a post-apocalyptic America?" Yes, yes, the genre is oversubscribed, but The Last Of Us is made by Naughty Dog, one of the most skilled developers in the business when it comes to story, characters and plunging players into worlds that are both foreign, yet utterly believable. Think Uncharted, but far more brutal and bloody, and equally unmissable. A strong contender for game of the year.
Platforms: PlayStation 3 | The Last of Us review
Release date: Out now
To be honest, Dead Space 3 one of the titles on this list we were a little concerned about, as adding a co-op element to EA's terrifying sci fi horror franchise could weaken its power to frighten audiences. If you're prepared to trade survival horror for action, Dead Space 3 is an enjoyable, action-packed romp.
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 | Dead Space 3 review
Release date: Out now
The first expansion pack for Blizzard's fantastic Real-Time-Strategy game focuses on the nightmarish Zerg alien race. The campaign kicks off with Kerrigan escaping the clutches of the Terran forces and moving to organise the Zerg in a counter-attack against her former tormentors. Players will be eager to get to grips with the new lore, new units and, as ever, one of the best RTS multiplayer modes money can buy. A fantastic expansion and a testament to the meticulous and balanced game design skills exhibited by developer Blizzard.
Platform: PC
Release date: Out now
Last Light is the second installment of the Metro series - set in a future where nuclear war has driven the population of Moscow into the underground Metro tunnels,where they're confronted with mutated horrors in the dark. There are certainly some technical issues players should be aware of going in and the absence of any multiplayer mode whatsoever may be a sticking point for some. But we'd recommend it alone for the way its decent storytelling gels admirably with its unique, dystopian world and its choking, gritty atmosphere. Like all great post-apocalyptic fictions, it's not the monsters that the player need concern themselves with... it's their fellow humans.
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 | Metro: Last Light review
Release Date: Out now
Brought to you by the guys who created Little Big Planet Media Molecule, this equally cutesy title for the PS Vita is being compared to a "buddie movie" by its makers. Players guide their cute avatar through a papery 3D universe, using the Vita's the touchscreen and rear touchpad to manipulate the environment. The Vita's built-in microphone and camera can also be used throughout the puzzler-platformer.
Platform: PS Vita
Release date: 22 November
Conceptually Payday 2 comes across like the illegitimate child of Left 4 Dead and Heat. In it, four players - controlling four masked criminals - are given a series of outlets to take down without incurring the wrath of the cops. Jobs vary from smashing up a department store to robbing a bank to ripping off an art gallery. Teamwork is paramount here; if you don't work together, you won't succeed. The learning curve is pretty steep - if you haven't been playing since launch you'll get booted from a lot of games - and the single-player mode is rubbish. But in four-player co-op, when everything comes together, Payday 2 shines brighter than most other titles on release this year.
Platforms: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360
Released: 14 August 2013 | Read our review of Payday 2
One of the better titles on the Xbox One, Dead Rising 3 is dark-hearted romp through a zombie apocalypse. Players take on the role of a a mechanic called Nick who finds himself smack bang in a sea of zombies, tasked with escaping a city before a bombing run destroys him and all of the other suvivors in it. Most of the fun in Dead Rising 3 comes from crafting amusing weapons and vehicles and then using them to reduce the undead to piles of goo. The tone is a little inconsistent but that's a small price to pay when you can craft a firearm out of a vacuum cleaner and a crate of dildos.
Platform: Xbox One
Release: 22 November 2013 | Read our Dead Rising 3 review
There are a ton of reasons we'd pick Saints Row 4 as one of our favourite games of this year. It's utterly and completely bonkers. You get to have superpowers and zany weapons. The soundtrack - which features Cypress Hill, Blur and Stan Bush - is awesome. But mostly, we love Saints Row because it's the closest we've been to feeling like we were back in a childhood gang. And when your gang features Keith David, it's better than anyone else's...
Platforms: PC, PS3 and Xbox 360
Released: 23 AUgust 2013 | Read our Saints Row 4 review
One of the many titles that spearheaded the Nintendo 3DS's renaissance this year, Luigi's Mansion 2 is one of 2013's best titles. In it, the lanky brother of Nintendo's portly plumber is tasked with tackling a haunted mansion with a re-purposed vacuum cleaner. The level design is impeccable and the presentation is lovely, but what really sells this game is the fanastic comedy performance given by the game's central character, which is amazing when you consider that Luigi's just a collection of pixels.
Platform: 3DS
Release date: 28 March 2013 | Read our review of Luigi's Mansion 2
A lush and beautiful collaboration between Level 5 and anime animatiors Studio Ghibli, Ni No Kuni tells the heart-breaking story of a young lad named Oliver who is led into a magical land after the tragic death of his mother. In this fantasy realm, Oliver's main companion - a toy that his mother gave him before her passing - tells him that he's a wizard and it's up to him to save the kingdom from an evil entity named Shadar. Ni No Kuni plays like an open-world adventure with a battle-system reminiscent of Pokemon titles, but it's the writing and the characters that ultimately sell this game. Like the best Pixar films, Ni No Kuni boast massive cross-generational appeal; youngsters will sign up for an engrossing adventure while older players will be impressed by the narrative parallels the story draws between the fantastical world Oliver has to save and the dark, tragic reality he runs from.
Platform: PS3
Released: 1 February 2013


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Style Rx: Halle Berry Appears to Have Caught Bieber (Pants) Fever
Paging style surgeons: Halle Berry's look needs our help, STAT!
Splash News Online
Who: Halle Berry
Where: Visiting the L.A. set of Jimmy Kimmel Live
Diagnosis: It's no secret that Bieber Fever is highly contagious, but we didn't know even red carpet pros like Berry could fall victim to it. Symptoms include screaming for joy every time "Beauty and the Beat" comes on the radio and hallucinating that extreme drop-crotch pants are a wise investment.
Prognosis: If something makes even Berry's butt look bad, that's a sign that it should be eliminated immediately. We'd prescribe an immediate switch to sleek leather leggings (we know she has these readily available), and while we're at it, we'd leave the French Cowboy boots in the closet and add a colorful pump to liven up the look a bit.
–Alex Apatoff
Tell us: How would you "cure" Berry's outfit?


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Glow In The Dark Assorted Colour Loom Bands. You Get 300pcs Of Loom Rubber Bands Per Pack With 12 S Clips And A knitting Tool.
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Why do I think that helping unauthorized immigrants secure college degree is a good idea? You might think my support is grounded in the fact that the state needs to produce more college graduates and can't afford to have more people living in the shadows.
But I, for one, thinks it's a good idea because Texas Gov. Rick Perry supported a similar policy in Texas.
More on the Romney Ad: Jerry Brown as GOP Straw Man
U.S. & World
Don't believe it? Well, it turns out that California liberals get all their bad ideas from Rick Perry.
Particularly bad ideas about treating immigrants humanely and in ways that allow them to work, educate themselves and otherwise contribute to society.
This is not a joke.
It's the argument that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney makes in the new web ad (below) attacking Perry.
The ad begins with photos of Perry and Gov. Jerry Brown, and the words, "Where did California liberals get all their bad ideas?"
The ad's answer is Rick Perry. It then suggests that Perry belongs in California. And he does -- this is a state full of swaggering, death-penalty-loving, climate-change-denying, Texas-twangin' dudes.
Just ask anyone.
Few Californians, of course, are willing to admit that they get their ideas from Perry. That's why I'm coming out of the closet. Perhaps others will join me.
In the meantime, someone might try to determine the source of the strange logic of presidential campaign attack ads. Perhaps Boston? Or maybe San Diego? Mitt Romney has homes in both places.
Let us know what you think. Comment below, send us your thoughts via Twitter @PropZero or add your comment to our Facebook page.


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Browsing Working papers by Author "Kaiser, Ulrich"
Now showing items 1-2 of 2
Kaiser, Ulrich; Grimpe, Christoph (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Determining the research and development (R&D) boundaries of the firm as the choice between internal, collaborative and external technology acquisition has since long been a major challenge for firms to secure a continuous stream of innovative products or processes. While research on R&D cooperation or strategic alliances is abundant, little is known about the outsourcing of R&D activities to contract research organizations and its implications for innovation performance. This paper investigates the driving forces of external technology sourcing through contract research based on arguments from transaction cost theory and the resource-based view of the firm. Using a large and comprehensive data set of innovating firms from Germany our findings suggest that technological uncertainty, contractual experience and openness to external knowledge sources motivate the choice for engaging in contract research activities. Moreover, we show that internal and external R&D sourcing are complements: the marginal contribution of internal (external) R&D is the larger the more firms spend on external (internal) R&D. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7690
Files in this item: 1dp 2008-02.pdf (227.6Kb)
Kaiser, Ulrich; Kongsted, Hans Christian; Rønde, Thomas (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: We measure the quantitative importance of labor mobility as a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge and skills across firms. For this purpose we create a unique data set that matches all applications of Danish firms at the European Patent Office to linked employer-employee register data for the years 1999-2002. The Danish workforce is split into "R&D workers", who hold a bachelor's or a master's degree in a technical field, and "non-R&D workers". We find that mobile R&D workers ("R&D joiners"') contribute more to patenting activity than immobile R&D workers. Furthermore, R&D workers who have previously been employed by a patenting firm ("patent exposed workers") have a larger effect on patenting activity than R&D workers without this experience. Patent exposed R&D joiners constitute the most productive group of workers: for firms that patented prior to 1999, one additional worker of this type relates to an increase in the number of patent applications of the new employer by 0.0646. This corresponds to a 14 percent increase in the mean number of yearly patent applications. We also find that mobility of R&D workers increases the joint patenting activity of the donor and recipient firms, confirming the importance of labor mobility for innovation in the economy. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7704
Files in this item: 1dp 2008-16.pdf (363.9Kb)
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