Impact of Mobility on Information Systems and Information System Design

The subject of this thesis is to analyse the impact of mobile hardware and software on information systems, to survey existing approaches for specifying mobile systems of computer science in general, and to provide suitable means for the formal design of information systems comprising such mobile units in particular. We consider a mobile unit to denote a mobile hardware or software entity, and a mobile system as a system comprising or being accessed by such mobile components. The various forms of mobile units occurring in computer science are explained and a taxonomy for them is developed, followed by a detailed discussion of their effects on computer and information systems. Several approaches for specifying mobile systems are presented and classified, with a particular emphasis on formal methods. As it turns out, these approaches do not allow to describe the set-up and release of communication links or to distinguish between the ever-mobile units of a compound system and those which provide the fixed subsystem as the context for the mobile entities, which are both important aspects to consider when developing information systems with mobile components. Therefore, corresponding constructs are then presented as an extension to the specification language Troll and its theoretical foundations, i.e. extended data signatures and the Module Distributed Temporal Logic Mdtl, both being interpreted over event structures. Finally, the application of the constructs is illustrated with the development of a system for accessing web services from mobile phones, which complements the ongoing example of information retrieval via mobile agents used to explain the constructs and concepts.Thema dieser Arbeit ist die Analyse der Auswirkungen von mobiler Hard- und Software auf Informationssysteme, die Untersuchung vorhandener Ansätze zur Spezifikation mobiler Systeme in der Informatik allgemein und für den formalen Entwurf von Informationssystemen mit mobilen Einheiten insbesondere. "Mobile Einheit" wird dabei als Oberbegriff für mobile Hardware- und Softwarekomponenten verwendet, und ein "mobiles System" ist ein System, das solche mobilen Komponenten beinhaltet oder auf das durch diese zugegriffen wird. Wir beschreiben die verschiedenen Formen, in denen mobile Einheiten in der Informatik auftreten, und entwickeln eine entsprechende Taxonomie, bevor wir deren Auswirkungen auf Computer- und Informationssysteme ausführlich diskutieren. Verschiedene Ansätze zur Spezifikation mobiler Systeme werden vorgestellt und eingeordnet, wobei das Augenmerk speziell auf formalen Methoden liegt. Es stellt sich heraus, dass es keiner dieser Ansätze ermöglicht, den Auf- und Abbau von Kommunikationsverbindungen zu beschreiben und zwischen den stets mobilen Einheiten und denjenigen zu unterscheiden, die das feste Teilsystem als Kontext für sie bilden. Beides sind aber wesentliche Aspekte, die in der Entwicklung von Informationssystemen mit mobilen Bestandteilen zu berücksichtigen sind. Daher stellen wir dann entsprechende Sprachkonstrukte als Erweiterung der Spezifikationssprache Troll inklusive der formalen Grundlagen vor. Diese Grundlagen beruhen auf erweiterten Datensignaturen und einer modularen verteilten temporalen Logik Mdtl, die beide über Ereignisstrukturen interpretiert werden. Schließlich wird die Verwendbarkeit der Sprachkonstrukte in der Entwicklung eines Systems zur Nutzung von Web-Diensten von Mobiltelefonen aus illustriert

De la nordicité au boréalisme

In recent years, through novels and television series ("Vikings", "Millennium", "Borgen" or "Occupied"), Nordic culture has become more visible internationally. At the same time, researchers are questioning what the North is, its conceptualisation, its cultural implications, its geographical characteristics, its social and political challenges. This volume is part of the current debate on the Nordic imaginary based on a notion, Nordicity, which intersects with borealism. Plural and mobile, the North inspires both scriptural and figurative production based on desire, dream, fascination or fantasy. The real, tangible and contingent North is only the apparent surface of a manufactured and invented North. How can we express northernness today? Is a theory of the North possible? This volume attempts to answer these questions by bringing together contributions from researchers in Nordic studies, literature, linguistics and the humanities: each is given the opportunity to define his own conception of Nordicity. Ces dernières années, à travers romans et sériés télévisées ("Vikings", "Millennium", "Borgen" ou "Occupied"), la culture nordique a gagné en visibilité internationale. Simultanément, les chercheurs s'interrogent sur ce qu’est le Nord, sa conceptualisation, ses implications culturelles, ses caractéristiques géographiques, ses enjeux sociaux et politiques. Ce volume s’insère dans le débat actuel sur l’imaginaire nordique à partir d’une notion – la nordicité – qui interagit tout particulièrement avec le boréalisme. Pluriel et mouvant, moteur constant de redéfinitions, le Nord inspire une fabrication tant scripturale que figurale fondée sur le désir, le rêve, la fascination ou le fantasme. Le Nord réel, tangible contingent, n’est que la surface apparente d’un Nord fabriqué et inventé. Comment dire aujourd’hui la nordicité? Une théorie du Nord est-elle possible? Ce volume s’attache à répondre à ces différentes questions en réunissant les contributions de chercheurs en études nordiques, littérature, linguistique ou sciences humaines: chacun dispose ici d’une carte blanche pour définir sa conception de la nordicité

A method for rigorous design of reconfigurable systems

Reconfigurability, understood as the ability of a system to behave differently in different modes of operation and commute between them along its lifetime, is a cross-cutting concern in modern Software Engineering. This paper introduces a specification method for reconfigurable software based on a global transition structure to capture the system's reconfiguration space, and a local specification of each operation mode in whatever logic (equational, first-order, partial, fuzzy, probabilistic, etc.) is found expressive enough for handling its requirements. In the method these two levels are not only made explicit and juxtaposed, but formally interrelated. The key to achieve such a goal is a systematic process of hybridisation of logics through which the relationship between the local and global levels of a specification becomes internalised in the logic itself.This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation – COMPETE 2020 Programme and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within projects POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016692 and UID/MAT/04106/2013. The first author is further supported by the BPD FCT Grant SFRH/BPD/103004/2014, and R. Neves is sponsored by FCT Grant SFRH/BD/52234/2013. M.A. Martins is also funded by the EU FP7 Marie Curie PIRSESGA-2012-318986 project GeTFun: Generalizing Truth-Functionality

Making Dance Modern: Knowledge, Politics, and German Modern Dance, 1890 – 1927

Between 1890 and 1927, a group of dancers, musicians, and writers converged in Germany, where they founded an artistic movement known as German modern dance. This dissertation provides a history of the origins of this movement and its central figures, including Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban, Hans Brandenburg, and Valeska Gert. These figures, I show, developed modern dance in an attempt to theorize and transform the social order. With the exception of Gert, this was a social order based upon principles of stability, unity, and consensus, which they developed in performance, pedagogy, and writing through inventive approaches to concepts from Western theatrical music, natural science, philosophy, and politics. Such order, they further demonstrated, could be displayed through the physical movements of the individual dancer, whose dancing body and the knowledge it contained formed a model for the coordinated movement of society. In contrast to many of their contemporaries in artistic and literary modernism, German modern dancers developed what this dissertation labels as “embodied conservatism,” which was an attempt to actively shape society according to principles of physical alignment, harmony, and order. Though embodied conservatism was not a discrete program for politics, by the First World War it became a platform for many issues, ideas, and values of the Weimar political right. Among these issues included questions of human agency and freedom, which dancers such as Wigman and Laban made central to their respective approaches to dance. Though these issues were central to modern dance beginning with Jaques-Dalcroze and Duncan, this dissertation shows how, particularly after 1919, questions about social sovereignty and individual capacity for creative genesis were transformed into questions of national identity perceived as vital to the maintenance of a strong, stable society. This dissertation concludes by arguing that embodied conservatism enabled German modern dancers to conceive of National Socialism as an organic extension of their original vision of social order and harmony

Maiden’s Fashion As Eternal Becomings: Victorian Maidens and Sugar Sweet Cuties Donning Japanese Street Fashion in Japan and North America

Lolita fashion is a youth street style originating from Japan that draws on Victorian-era children’s clothing, Rococo aesthetics, and Western Punk and Gothic subculture. It is worn by teenage girls and women of a wide range of ages, and through the flow of related media and clothing aided by the Internet, Lolita style has become a global phenomenon. Wearers of the style are known as Lolitas, and local, national, and global communities can be found around the world outside Japan from North American to Europe. This study is a cross-cultural comparison of Lolita fashion wearers in Japan and North America, examining how differences in constructions of place and space; conceptualizations about girlhood and womanhood; perceptions of beauty and aesthetics; and formation of social groups and actor-networks have bearing on how an individual experiences the fashion. This work deconstructs Lolita style by using Japanese cultural concepts like shōjo (‘girl’ as a genderless being), otome (maiden), kawaii (cuteness) to explore the underlying framework that informs Japanese Lolita’s use of the fashion as a form of subversive rebellion, creating personal spaces to celebrate their individuality and revive the affects and memories of girlhood that are distanced from gendered social expectations. English-speakers, not having the same social and cultural knowledge, attempt to recontexualize Lolita fashion along the lines of feminism, sisterhood, personal style, and escape from the ‘modern’ to give meaning and purpose to their involvement with the fashion. Lolita fashion allows wearers to travel in between the lines of becoming-girl and becoming-women by offering a way to access girl-feeling and its associated happiness objects

Salome's Dance: Literature and the Choreographic Imagination from Wilde to Beckett

This thesis considers representations of the biblical dancer Salome in the context of the broader choreographic imagination that formed across late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary cultures. Through interdisciplinary readings of plays and poems, silent films, dancers’ memoirs, newspaper reviews, and other sources, I show how Salome’s dance, reinvented by Oscar Wilde in his play 'Salomé' (1893), became the model for an array of responses to dance, creating new interplays between dramatic writing, choreography, and film aesthetics during this period. In light of the depictions of dancers associated with the late nineteenth-century schools of Decadence and Symbolism, the broad critical consensus regarding images of Salome has emphasised their misogyny, apparently precluding the opportunity for feminist interventions. However, I read Wilde’s landmark play as a departure from earlier formulations of the Salome myth, showing how his text imagines a space for female performance that was creatively redeployed by later playwrights and dancers. Across my five chapters, I consider the fascination for dance displayed in texts by Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett alongside the work of more commonly overlooked performers and filmmakers, including Loïe Fuller, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, and Germaine Dulac, suggesting fresh ways of reading the historical and intertextual connections between these figures. Drawing in particular on accounts of dance and aesthetic philosophy in the recent work of Jacques Rancière, I unveil problematic constructions of the dancing body in writing of this period in order to show how dancers engaged with issues of gender and creative individualism on their own terms. The interdisciplinary approach that I develop draws on debates across modernist studies, film studies, cultural history, and dance studies, bringing to light neglected collaborations between playwrights and dancers, and thereby challenging received wisdoms about the literary canon and the boundaries between different art forms