The State of the Art in Cartograms

Cartograms combine statistical and geographical information in thematic maps, where areas of geographical regions (e.g., countries, states) are scaled in proportion to some statistic (e.g., population, income). Cartograms make it possible to gain insight into patterns and trends in the world around us and have been very popular visualizations for geo-referenced data for over a century. This work surveys cartogram research in visualization, cartography and geometry, covering a broad spectrum of different cartogram types: from the traditional rectangular and table cartograms, to Dorling and diffusion cartograms. A particular focus is the study of the major cartogram dimensions: statistical accuracy, geographical accuracy, and topological accuracy. We review the history of cartograms, describe the algorithms for generating them, and consider task taxonomies. We also review quantitative and qualitative evaluations, and we use these to arrive at design guidelines and research challenges

Multi-Quality Auto-Tuning by Contract Negotiation

A characteristic challenge of software development is the management of omnipresent change. Classically, this constant change is driven by customers changing their requirements. The wish to optimally leverage available resources opens another source of change: the software systems environment. Software is tailored to specific platforms (e.g., hardware architectures) resulting in many variants of the same software optimized for different environments. If the environment changes, a different variant is to be used, i.e., the system has to reconfigure to the variant optimized for the arisen situation. The automation of such adjustments is subject to the research community of self-adaptive systems. The basic principle is a control loop, as known from control theory. The system (and environment) is continuously monitored, the collected data is analyzed and decisions for or against a reconfiguration are computed and realized. Central problems in this field, which are addressed in this thesis, are the management of interdependencies between non-functional properties of the system, the handling of multiple criteria subject to decision making and the scalability. In this thesis, a novel approach to self-adaptive software--Multi-Quality Auto-Tuning (MQuAT)--is presented, which provides design and operation principles for software systems which automatically provide the best possible utility to the user while producing the least possible cost. For this purpose, a component model has been developed, enabling the software developer to design and implement self-optimizing software systems in a model-driven way. This component model allows for the specification of the structure as well as the behavior of the system and is capable of covering the runtime state of the system. The notion of quality contracts is utilized to cover the non-functional behavior and, especially, the dependencies between non-functional properties of the system. At runtime the component model covers the runtime state of the system. This runtime model is used in combination with the contracts to generate optimization problems in different formalisms (Integer Linear Programming (ILP), Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (PBO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Multi-Objective Integer Linear Programming (MOILP)). Standard solvers are applied to derive solutions to these problems, which represent reconfiguration decisions, if the identified configuration differs from the current. Each approach is empirically evaluated in terms of its scalability showing the feasibility of all approaches, except for ACO, the superiority of ILP over PBO and the limits of all approaches: 100 component types for ILP, 30 for PBO, 10 for ACO and 30 for 2-objective MOILP. In presence of more than two objective functions the MOILP approach is shown to be infeasible

Феномен синкретизма в украинской лингвистике

У сучасній лінгвістиці вивчення складних системних зв’язків та динамізму мови навряд чи буде завершеним без урахування синкретизму. Традиційно явища транзитивності трактуються як поєднання різних типів утворень як результат процесів трансформації або відображення проміжних, синкретичних фактів, що характеризують мовну систему в синхронному аспекті.In modern linguistics, the study of complex systemic relations and language dynamism is unlikely to be complete without considering the transitivity. Traditionally, transitivity phenomena are treated as a combination of different types of entities, formed as a result of the transformation processes or the reflection of the intermediate, syncretic facts that characterize the language system in the synchronous aspect.В современной лингвистике изучение сложных системных отношений и языкового динамизма вряд ли будет полным без учета синкретизма. Традиционно явления транзитивности трактуются как совокупность различных типов сущностей, сформированных в результате процессов преобразования или отражения промежуточных синкретических фактов, которые характеризуют языковую систему в синхронном аспекте