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Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenues.

The Entity Linking task consists in automatically identifying and linking the entities mentioned in a text to their URIs in a given Knowledge Base, e.g., Wikipedia. Entity Linking has a large im- pact in several text analysis and information retrieval related tasks. This task is very challenging due to natural language ambiguity. However, not all the entities mentioned in a document have the same relevance and utility in understanding the topics being dis- cussed. Thus, the related problem of identifying the most relevant entities present in a document, also known as Salient Entities, is attracting increasing interest. In this paper we propose SEL, a novel supervised two-step algo- rithm comprehensively addressing both entity linking and saliency detection. The first step is based on a classifier aimed at identi- fying a set of candidate entities that are likely to be mentioned in the document, thus maximizing the precision of the method with- out hindering its recall. The second step is still based on machine learning, and aims at choosing from the previous set the entities that actually occur in the document. Indeed, we tested two dif- ferent versions of the second step, one aimed at solving only the entity linking task, and the other that, besides detecting linked en- tities, also scores them according to their saliency. Experiments conducted on two different datasets show that the proposed algo- rithm outperforms state-of-the-art competitors, and is able to detect salient entities with high accuracy.

Diese Studie bespricht drei Arbeiten, die sich mit dem internen Arbeitsmarkt einer russischen Firma in den Jahren 1997 bis 2002 befassen und sich dabei auf drei Themenbereiche konzentrieren. Die Arbeiten analysieren bisher nicht zugängliche Personaldaten, die die Arbeitsgeschichte jedes einzelnen Beschäftigten sowie monatliche Löhne und Gesamtvergütung im Jahresdurchschnitt beinhalten. Da diese Arbeiten Teil eines größeren Forschungsprojektes über interne Arbeitsmärkte in Russland und der Ukraine sind, beginnt unsere Studie mit einer generellen Einschätzung, wie die Analyse von Personaldaten aus Transformationsländern zur allgemeinen Literatur über interne Arbeitsmärkte beitragen kann. Kurzen Beschreibungen der analysierten Firma und der benutzten Personaldaten folgen die Motivierung und ausschlaggebenden Resultate der drei Arbeiten. Die erste Arbeit untersucht die Frage, wie die Kosten der russischen Finanzkrise des Jahres 1998 auf die Beschäftigten innerhalb der Firma verteilt werden und ob langjährig beschäftigte Arbeitnehmer von negativen Schocks abgeschirmt werden. Das zweite Papier betrachtet die Diskussion über die Lohnbestimmung in Russland und analysiert die engere Fragestellung, ob lokale Arbeitsmarktbedingungen einen wichtigen Faktor im Lohnbestimmungsprozess darstellen oder ob stabile interne Arbeitsmarktstrukturen von vorrangiger Bedeutung für das Personalmanagement der Firma sind. Die letzte besprochene Arbeit liefert einen Beitrag zu der Literatur über die Arbeitsmarkterfahrungen von Frauen während der Transformation, indem sie die Entwicklung und die Determinanten des geschlechtsspezifischen Lohndifferentials innerhalb der Firma aufzeigt. This paper surveys three studies on the internal labor market of one Russian firm spanning the years 1997 to 2002 and focusing on three different issues. The studies use unique personnel data that were collected by us and that include the work history of each employee as well as annual averages of monthly wages and total compensation. Since the three studies are part of a larger project on internal labor markets in Russia and Ukraine during transition, the paper starts off with a general assessment of how the analysis of personnel data from transition countries can contribute to the general literature on internal labor markets. After short descriptions of the investigated firm and the personnel data at our disposal, the motivation and the pertinent results of the three studies are presented. While the first study looks at the question how the costs of a financial crisis are spread over the workforce and whether incumbent employees are sheltered from negative shocks in the economy, the second study is tied to the discussion of wage determination in Russia and analyzes the narrower question whether local labor market conditions are an important factor in the wage determination process of the firm at hand or whether stable internal labor market structures are of primary concern for its human resource managers. The third study contributes to the literature on the labor market experience of women in transition by analyzing the evolution and the determinants of the gender earnings gap in the firm. Historical Social Research Vol. 35, No. 2 (2010)

Since the beginning of the decade, numerous economic and monetary unification projects have aroused a lot of interest. The reinforcement of economic and monetary integration, especially in Europe, has set a trend for the creation of a monetary union in many others regions of the world. Since then, the debate has moved towards the study of the parameters that justify the creation of a single currency. However, another current of thought emphasized the fragility of the traditional theory and considered the criteria as incomplete, since this theory insists solely on a few elements concerning the adjustment process under various exchange regimes (Bogdan 2004). Also, many monetary unions have existed and lasted without meeting this theory’s criteria. Other economists recommend studying the history of these monetary unions so as to define the necessary conditions for the success of a monetary integration (Sharp 2005, Jonung 2002). Within Maghreb, the completion of the regional integration process, initiated in 1989 by the creation of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) and the establishment of the Maghreb monetary union would have a positive impact on economic growth, good governance and political stability. In this paper, we showed that the Maghreb Countries can not constitute a monetary block that satisfies the criteria of optimality. Moreover, the study of historical experiences also allowed us to verify that the MCs have to strengthen their political coordination and improve their budgetary and financial situations to establish a lasting monetary union. Finally, with the aim of a Maghreb monetary unification, we conclude with the idea that these countries have to make more efforts to gather economico-institutional conditions essential to the institution of one of the two preliminary proposed monetary systems, namely a pure float with inflation targeting or a currency board.