Differentiating views of inheritance: The free association task as a method to assess social representations of wealth, inherit, and bequeath

Inheritance and in particular inheritance taxes have emerged as topics of steadily increasing interest in public as well as scientific discourse and debate. The present study investigates laypeople’s differentiated social representations of inheritance with the aim of shedding light on distinct concepts of wealth, inherit, and bequeath. Furthermore, it comparatively discusses experts’ scientific discourse on inheritance and laypeople’s social representations of inheritance, with the aim to contribute to a clearer understanding of the roots of the conflictual dispute on inheritance tax. Overall, 75 Austrian taxpayers completed a free association task. Participants were asked to indicate their spontaneous associations with the stimuli wealth, inherit, and bequeath, and to evaluate their associations as positive, neutral, or negative. Polarity and neutrality indices were calculated to capture participants’ attitudes towards the stimuli. Lexicographical analyses as well as correspondence analyses were performed to map the social representations of the stimuli. The results show that the evaluations of the stimuli differ significantly. Furthermore, the semantic content of the social representations differs. Moreover, the comparative discussion of experts’ representations of inheritance, as revealed in the analyses of their scientific discourse, and laypeople’s social representations of inheritance shows that the core issues of the social representations of laypeople and the representations of experts differ not only in respect to their level of abstractness but also in their point of reference and in their content. Interestingly, taxation is a core issue for laypeople as well as experts. Hence, this study indicates that a differentiated use of the term inheritance is necessary in regard to reforms of legal regulations of inheritance and inheritance taxes as well as in research referring to inheritance

Experimental and Numerical Investigations of a Scramjet Model Tested in the H2K Blow Down Wind Tunnel at Mach 7

In the present paper the comparison between experiments and numerical simulations for a generic Scram- jet configuration are been presented. The experiments have been conducted for a Mach 7 condition at the hypersonic blow down wind tunnel H2K at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne. The cor- responding numerical simulations have been performed using two different numerical solvers. During the experiments, air was injected through central strut and wall-ramp injectors to simulate a combustion back- pressure. In order to generate a database for a comparison between numerical and experimental data, wall pressures were measured along the bottom and top side walls, Pitot pressure at the exit of the combustor, and heat ux on the sidewalls. The reasonable good agreement between the experiments and the numerical solutions show the feasibility of the numerical tools to predict complex ow structures in high-speed ows. Furthermore, an extrapolation of the numerical and experimental data to real ight conditions at an altitude of 30km was undertaken and the feasibility of the proposed Scramjet configuration is been shown

Pedestrian network extraction from fused aerial imagery (orthoimages) and laser imagery (Lidar)

A pedestrian network is a topological map that contains the geometric relationship between pedestrian path segments (e.g., sidewalk, crosswalk, footpath), which is needed in a variety of applications, such as pedestrian navigation services. However, current pedestrian networks are not widely available. In an effort to provide an automatic means for creating pedestrian networks, this paper presents a methodology for extracting pedestrian network from aerial and laser images. The methodology consists of data preparation and four steps: object filtering, pedestrian path region extraction, pedestrian network construction, and raster to vector conversion. An experiment, using ten images, was conducted to evaluate the performance of the methodology. Evaluation results indicate that the methodology can extract sidewalk, crosswalk, footpath, and building entrances; it collects pedestrian networks with 61 percent geometrical completeness, 67.35 percent geometrical correctness, 71 percent topological completeness and 51.38 percent topological correctness. © 2013 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing