533 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Inventing a Capitalist Region: Upper Silesia/Poland - Economic Transformations in Old-Industrial and Post-Socialist Spaces of Central and Eastern Europe
The thesis explores economic, political and social processes in former socialist countries with a case study in one of the biggest conurbations in Europe, Upper Silesia. The ongoing but selective economic processes of global and macro-regional economic integration have been identified as a main issue in geographical research. In particular the nexus between the global and the local seen as a dialectical relationship, composed of multiple and asymmetric interdependencies has stressed the necessity of utilising relational analysis in economic geography. The question emerges in what ways and to what extent increasing economic integration may lead to a socio-economic convergence of places or the development of 'indigenous capacities', spatial peculiarities and legacies to establish themselves in capitalist networks of production.
With empirical reference to the Polish conurbation of Upper Silesia and drawing on the analytical framework from Michael Storper's 'Holy Trinity' ("The Regional World", New York, 1997), this thesis analyses post socialist urban and regional transformations from three angles. 1. While Storper analysed mainly 'successful' regions in the West, the research tries to identify the main challenges that face any simple attempt to adapt western (theoretical) approaches within a post-socialist, Central East European context. 2. The thesis then identifies the fabric of political economic actors and the path dependent 'invention' of a region, here Upper Silesia, and analysis locally and regionally embedded and recombined informal institutions and their capacity for restructuring of an old industrial space. 3. While inter- and intra-regional competition is growing in an 'era of globalisation', the thesis finally investigates the scope for action and 'reflexive' interrelations between administrative, political and economic actors in an 'ordinary region' prior to the accession to the European Union
New criteria for the -calculus and the Stokes operator on bounded Lipschitz domains
We show that the Stokes operator A on the Helmholtz space Lp (Ω) for a bounded Lipschitz domain Ω ⊂ Rd, d ≥ 3, has a bounded H ∞- calculus if |1p − 1/2| ≤ 1/2d . Our proof uses a new comparison theorem A and the Dirichlet Laplace −∆ on Lp(Ω)d, which is based on “off-diagonal” estimates of the Littlewood-Paley decompositions of A and −∆. This comparison theorem can be formulated for rather general sectorial operators and is well suited to extrapolate the H ∞-calculus from L2(U ) to the Lp(U )-scale or part of it. It also gives some information on coincidence of domains of fractional powers
Real Estate Value and Growth Stocks - Evidence from Global Capital Markets
This dissertation provides comprehensive empirical evidence (three papers) on a global panel of real estate value and growth stocksfrom the most significant real estate operating companies (REOCs) and real estate investment trusts (REITs) in the world. The basic concept here is to categorize listed real estate stocks according to the deviations of their stock prices from their underlyingnet asset values (NAV spread). In this vein, the stocks are designated as either real estate value or growth stock. As a result, this dissertation empirically proves that these deviations can be exploited by investors to
achieve a value premium over growth stocks (value investing strategy). Furthermore the dissertation provides evidence on the link between NAV spreadsand idiosyncratic as well as systematic (e.g. interest rates) factors
Colorimetric Stimuli-Responsive Hydrogel Polymers for the Detection of Nerve Agent Surrogates
The threat of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) necessitates the development of functional materials that not only quickly detect the presence of CWAs but also actively protect against their toxicity. We have synthesized responsive units that exhibit colorimetric responses upon exposure to CWAs and incorporated them into a versatile detection platform based on copolymers prepared by ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP). The theoretical detection limits for CWA simulants in solution for these polymers are as low as 1 ppm. By incorporating hydrogel-promoting units as pendant chains, we are able to obtain polymers that instantly respond to CWA vapors and are easy to regenerate to the deactivated state by simple treatment with ammonium hydroxide vapor. We further demonstrate a collapse of the polymer gels in response to trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a strong acid that produces a more fully ionized state as a result of its more caustic nature.United States. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Chemical and Biological Technologies Department (Grant BA12PHM123
Temperature dependence of the hydrogen bond network in Trimethylamine N-oxide and guanidine hydrochloride - water solutions
We present an X-ray Compton scattering study on aqueous Trimethylamine
N-oxide (TMAO) and guanidine hydrochloride solutions (GdnHCl) as a function of
temperature. Independent from the concentration of the solvent, Compton
profiles almost resemble results for liquid water as a function of temperature.
However, The number of hydrogen bonds per water molecule extracted from the
Compton profiles suggests a decrease of hydrogen bonds with rising temperatures
for all studied samples, the differences between water and the solutions are
weak. Nevertheless, the data indicate a reduced bond weakening with rising TMAO
concentration up to 5M of 7.2% compared to 8 % for pure water. In contrast, the
addition of GdnHCl appears to behave differently for concentrations up to 3.1 M
with a weaker impact on the temperature response of the hydrogen bond
structure
« Britain’s best kept secret » : la machine Enigma et le décodage des messages durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale
L’Enigma et ses cylindres permutables (Coll. Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart) © et cliché Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart / Larissa Arlt Un des plus grands mystères de la Seconde Guerre mondiale fut le décodage réussi des messages radio que les Allemands avaient cryptés grâce à la machine à coder « Enigma » (voir ill. ci-dessus). Jürgen Rohwer, ancien directeur de la Bibliothèque d’histoire contemporaine (Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte–BfZ), s’est livré à des recherche..
Crystal Structure of the Hexamerization Domain of N-ethylmaleimide–Sensitive Fusion Protein
AbstractN-ethylmaleimide–sensitive fusion protein (NSF) is a cytosolic ATPase required for many intracellular vesicle fusion reactions. NSF consists of an amino-terminal region that interacts with other components of the vesicle trafficking machinery, followed by two homologous ATP-binding cassettes, designated D1 and D2, that possess essential ATPase and hexamerization activities, respectively. The crystal structure of D2 bound to Mg2PLUSPUSSIGN-AMPPNP has been determined at 1.75 Å resolution. The structure consists of a nucleotide-binding and a helical domain, and it is unexpectedly similar to the first two domains of the clamp-loading subunit δ′ of E. coli DNA polymerase III. The structure suggests several regions responsible for coupling of ATP hydrolysis to structural changes in full-length NSF
Multiversioning hardware transactional memory for fail-operational multithreaded applications
Modern safety-critical embedded applications like autonomous driving need to be fail-operational, while high performance and low power consumption are demanded simultaneously. The prevalent fault tolerance mechanisms suffer from disadvantages: Some (e.g. triple modular redundancy) require a substantial amount of duplication, resulting in high hardware costs and power consumption. Others, like lockstep, require supplementary checkpointing mechanisms to recover from errors. Further approaches (e.g. software-based process-level redundancy) cannot handle the indeterminism caused by multithreaded execution. This paper presents a novel approach for fail-operational systems using hardware transactional memory for embedded systems. The hardware transactional memory is extended to support multiple versions, enabling redundant atomic operations and recovery in case of an error. In our FPGA-based evaluation, we executed the PARSEC benchmark suite with fault tolerance on 12 cores. The evaluation shows that multiversioning can successfully recover from all transient errors with an overhead comparable to fault tolerance mechanisms without recovery
Thermoelectric Cooling to Survive Commodity DRAMs in Harsh Environment Automotive Electronics
Today, more and more commodity hardware devices are used in safety-critical applications, such as advanced driver assistance systems in automotive. These applications demand very high reliability of electronic components even in adverse environmental conditions, such as high temperatures. Ensuring the reliability of microelectronic components is a major challenge at these high temperatures. The computing systems of these applications rely on DRAMs as working memory, which are built upon bit cells that store charges in capacitors. These commodity DRAMs are optimized for cost per bit and not for high reliability. Thus, very high temperatures impose an enormous challenge for commodity DRAMs as the data retention time and reliability decrease largely, affecting the data correctness. Data correctness can be ensured up to certain temperatures by increasing the refresh rate to counterbalance the retention time reduction. However, this severely degrades the access latencies and the usable DRAM bandwidth. To overcome these limitations, we present for the first time a Thermoelectric Cooling (TEC) solution for commodity DRAMs in harsh-environments, such as automotive. Our TEC solution enables the use of commodity off-the-shelf DRAMs in safety-critical applications by reducing the temperature conditions to a range where they can operate reliably. This TEC solution is applied a posteriori to the DRAM chips without using high-cost package solutions. Thus, it maintains the low-cost targets of such devices, improves the reliability, and at the same time, counterbalances the adverse effects of increasing the refresh rate. To quantitatively evaluate the benefits of TEC on commodity DRAMs in harsh-environments, we performed system-level evaluations with several applications backed up by the measured data on commodity DRAMs. Our experimental results, using accurate multi-physics simulations that employ finite element method, demonstrate that the TEC-based cooling ensures that the maxim..
- …