Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature

Antifascist literature repurposed Nazi stereotypes to express opposition. These stereotypes became adaptable ideological signifiers during the political struggles in interwar Germany and Austria, and they remain integral elements in today’s cultural imagination.; Readership: Scholars and students of twentieth century German and Austrian culture and Nazi propaganda and ideology; antifascist literature , the production and reproduction of Nazi stereotypes, and gendered Nazi characters

Principles for museum documentation.

Abstract available in pdf file.Thesis in 2 volumes

Software engineering risk management : a method, improvement framework, and empirical evaluation

This dissertation presents a method for software risk management, its improvement framework, and results from its empirical evaluations. More specifically, our objectives were: Develop a comprehensive, theoretically sound, and practical method for software engineering risk management. Develop a framework and supporting software tools for the continuous improvement of software engineering risk management and for improving knowledge about risks. Evaluate the method in practice to provide information on its feasibility, effectiveness, advantages and disadvantages, and to improve it. Although risk management has been considered an important issue in software development and significant contributions to risk management have been made over the past decade, risk management is rarely actively and explicitly applied in practice. Furthermore, most risk management approaches in software engineering use simplistic approaches and fail to account for the biases common in risk perception. We have developed a method, called Riskit, that complements existing risk management approaches by supporting qualitative and structured analysis of risks through a graphical modeling formalism. The method supports multiple stakeholder views to risks by considering their potential utility losses. The Riskit method is comprehensive, i.e., it supports all aspects of risk analysis and risk management planning in a software development project. We propose that our method has a sound theoretical foundation, avoids common biases in risk evaluations, and results in a more thorough understanding of the risks than traditional approaches. Associated with the method, we have also developed a risk management improvement framework that supports continuous, systematic improvement of the risk management process. The improvement framework is based on the Quality Improvement Paradigm, and is supported by the eRiskit application. The eRiskit application supports the management of risks while simultaneously acting as a risk management repository that captures risk management data for improvement purposes. The eRiskit application also acted as a proof of concept for the correctness of the underlying concepts in the Riskit method. We have validated the feasibility and effectiveness of the Riskit method in a series of empirical studies. The empirical studies were designed to provide characterization information and feedback on the method, as well as to act as initial validation of the method. The empirical evaluations showed that the method is feasible in industrial context and it seemed to improve participants' confidence in risk management results. In addition, our research indicates that industry needs sound, systematic, yet cost effective methods for risk management, a common and customized approach to improve communications within an organization, and support and enforcement of the common approach.reviewe

Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature

Antifascist literature repurposed Nazi stereotypes to express opposition. These stereotypes became adaptable ideological signifiers during the political struggles in interwar Germany and Austria, and they remain integral elements in today’s cultural imagination.; Readership: Scholars and students of twentieth century German and Austrian culture and Nazi propaganda and ideology; antifascist literature , the production and reproduction of Nazi stereotypes, and gendered Nazi characters

The application of morpho-syntatic language processing to effective information retrieval

The fundamental function of an information retrieval system is to retrieve texts or documents from a database in response to a user’s request for information, such that the content of the retreived documents will be relevant to the user’s original information need. This is accomplished through matching the user’s information request against the texts in the database in order to estimate which texts are relevant. In this thesis I propose a method for using current natural language processing techniques for the construction of a text representation to be used in an information retrieval system. In order to support this proposal I have designed a matching algorithm specifically for performing the retrieval task of matching user queries against texts in a database, using the proposed text representation. Having designed this text representation and matching algorithm, I then constructed an experiment to investigate the effectiveness of the algorithm at matching phrases. This experiment involved the use of standard statistical methods to compare the phrase matching capabilities of the proposed matching algorithm to a sample of information retrieval users performing the same task. The results of this evaluation experiment allow me to comment first of all on the effectiveness of the phrase matching algorihtm that I have designed and more generally, on the usefulness of incorporating natural language processing techniques into information retrieval systems

The Dollar General: Continuous Custom Gesture Recognition Techniques At Everyday Low Prices

Humans use gestures to emphasize ideas and disseminate information. Their importance is apparent in how we continuously augment social interactions with motion—gesticulating in harmony with nearly every utterance to ensure observers understand that which we wish to communicate, and their relevance has not escaped the HCI community\u27s attention. For almost as long as computers have been able to sample human motion at the user interface boundary, software systems have been made to understand gestures as command metaphors. Customization, in particular, has great potential to improve user experience, whereby users map specific gestures to specific software functions. However, custom gesture recognition remains a challenging problem, especially when training data is limited, input is continuous, and designers who wish to use customization in their software are limited by mathematical attainment, machine learning experience, domain knowledge, or a combination thereof. Data collection, filtering, segmentation, pattern matching, synthesis, and rejection analysis are all non-trivial problems a gesture recognition system must solve. To address these issues, we introduce The Dollar General (TDG), a complete pipeline composed of several novel continuous custom gesture recognition techniques. Specifically, TDG comprises an automatic low-pass filter tuner that we use to improve signal quality, a segmenter for identifying gesture candidates in a continuous input stream, a classifier for discriminating gesture candidates from non-gesture motions, and a synthetic data generation module we use to train the classifier. Our system achieves high recognition accuracy with as little as one or two training samples per gesture class, is largely input device agnostic, and does not require advanced mathematical knowledge to understand and implement. In this dissertation, we motivate the importance of gestures and customization, describe each pipeline component in detail, and introduce strategies for data collection and prototype selection

Corporeal territories: the body in American narratives of the Vietnam war

Focusing upon American veterans' depictions of the US intervention in Vietnam and its aftermath, this thesis argues that bodies and issues concerning embodiment form the epicentre of these representations. Chapter One uses narratives by Ron Kovic, John Ketwig, Philip Caputo and others to illustrate that military training is a transformative process wherein the recruit's body serves both as index of, and vehicle for, his metamorphosis into a soldier. As these authors suggest, training inculcates a utilitarian attitude towards embodiment: the soldier's body is, primarily, a disciplined body whose value- and masculinity- resides in 'its' power to inflict injury upon the 'enemy'. As Chapter Two demonstrates, however, such machine-bodies (and the conceptualisation of embodiment which engendered them) were 'out of place' in-country. Veterans like W.O. Ehrhart, Nathaniel Tripp, Robert Mason, and Tim O'Brien portray the Vietnam environment as inherently threatening to the US soldier's corporeal integrity. Viet Cong and NVA strategies also disempowered the American soldier, challenging his faith in the innate superiority of the machine-body. Confronting injury further undermined the soldier's sense of corporeal invulnerability. Chapter Three considers the wounding, and treatment, of American casualties of Vietnam, arguing that narratives by Caputo, Kovic, and (ex-Navy surgeon) John Parrish 'recover' aspects of injury excluded from officially-sanctioned discourse. Chapter Four extends this scrutiny of wounding, exploring its interpretation both in-country and 'back home', and highlighting Kovic's depiction of injury and its consequences in Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Chapter Five demonstrates that encounters with irreparable corporeal damage are imbued with a sense of crisis: such wounding simultaneously demands and resists representation. Texts by O'Brien, Kovic and others are considered as 'trauma narratives' here, and a connection is made between writing-as-retrieval, and the potential of narrativisation to promote psychical recuperation, both for veterans themselves and also, perhaps, for US society generally