76 research outputs found
Energy diplomacy: West Germany, the Soviet Union and the oil crises of the 1970s
This article analyzes West German energy policy and negotiations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Archival sources from the West German government show that long-term energy diplomacy became a carefully built link which guaranteed cooperation even during political crises,such as the one in 1980/81. This article argues that energy diplomacy catalyzed Brandtâs Ostpolitik. In particular, natural gas pipelines implied mutual trust within a stable relationship, which led to further collaborations, including cooperation
in nuclear power. It points out that, from this perspective, 1973 was not exactly a turning point, and some grandiose plans in the years after the
first oil crisis failed. Furthermore the article shows how the second oil crisis in 1979 increased cooperation cooperation between West Germany and the Soviet Union, although this strained West Germanyâs relationship with the United States. Archival documents reveal that energy policy matters remained wellcalculated and persistent. Thus, the Soviet Union became a more reliable partner than many Arab countries
Iran's Dissociation from Cooperation with the West between the 1960s and 1980s
Iran was one of the most important partners of the West in the post-War period. In particular, the governments of the US and West Germany supported the intense political, economic, and strategic cooperation with Iran under the regime of the Shah. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is known as a turning-point in Iranâs relations to the West. This article analyzes Iranâs dissociation processes from cooperation with the West and Western institutions in a long-term perspective. It argues that we cannot speak of a coherent dissociation process but of different changing forms of integration since the 1960s. While political cooperation decreased already in the 1970s, economic cooperation increased in this period. The nascent Islamic Republic also differentiated between different cases of cooperation with Western states and institutions. A clear break is figured out for institutions like the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), while Iran acted, especially in economic relations, with a certain revolutionary pragmatism that shaped political interactions. Although the conflict between Iran and Western states was highly ideational, it did not lead to a uniform pattern of dissociation. Our comparison of Iranâs post 1979 relations with the US and West Germany shows important differences
Reacting to anticipations: energy crises and energy policy in the 1970s ; an introduction
Changes in the energy sector cannot be
sufficiently described as reactions to past and present energy problems. Rather,
politicians and companies alike always react to the anticipation of future challenges.
Sharing this assumption, the articles in this HSR Special Issue reexamine
the energy crises of the 1970s. Their assessments broaden the temporal
and spatial scope of analysis and integrate various energy resources into
the picture, while examining how to situate the first and second oil crises within
the 1970s and the contemporary history of the industrialized world as a
whole
Using Searchable Encryption to Protect Privacy in Connected Cars
Providing vehicles with extended connectivity introduces new opportunities for services, and also security applications such as misbehavior detection. However, for many applications, personal data needs to be processed by the system providers, which impairs the privacy of the vehicle users. While focusing our research on new possibilities of connected car security, we follow privacy by design principles. We explore the utilisation of various privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) in order to provide advanced connected car applications, while preserving the personal data of the vehicle users. Specifically, we aim to develop practical schemes that utilise Searchable Encryption to provide a framework for secure and privacypreserving connected car applications
Zeitungsberichte im AlltagsgesprÀch : Mediennutzung, Medienwirkung und Kommunikation im Kaiserreich
Der Artikel untersucht Mediennutzung und Medienwirkung im Kaiserreich. Er prĂŒft anhand von Polizeiberichten, die heimlich in Kneipen angefertigt wurden, ob und wie Unter- und Mittelschichten ĂŒber die Zeitungsmeldungen kommunizierten. Eine Analyse von GesprĂ€chen ĂŒber ausgewĂ€hlte Skandale ergĂ€nzt und vertieft diesen Fokus, der in Beziehung zu unterschiedlichen AnsĂ€tzen der Medienwirkungsforschung gesetzt wird. Als Hauptergebnis lĂ€sst sich fĂŒr die Jahrzehnte um 1900 eine starke Medienwirkung ausmachen. Die KneipengĂ€ste griffen schnell und ausfĂŒhrlich Medienthemen auf und entwickelten daraus politische GesprĂ€che. Alle geprĂŒften SkandalfĂ€lle fanden sich in verschiedenen Unterhaltungen wieder. Aus den Spitzelberichten lassen sich erstaunlich detaillierte Kenntnisse bei den Mediennutzern nachweisen, selbst wenn die Ereignisse nicht unmittelbar ihrer Lebenswelt nahe standen. Insbesondere die Arbeiter ĂŒbernahmen zwar hĂ€ufig Positionen aus der sozialdemokratischen Presse, zeigten dabei aber zugleich eine eigensinnige Aneignung. Die Zeitungsmeldungen wurden mit persönlichen Erfahrungen verbunden, spielerisch-humorvoll gewendet oder mit emotionalen Affekten ĂŒbersteigert.The article analyses media use and media effects in the Wilhelmine empire. Based on secret police reports covering conversations in pubs, it tackles the question if and how the working and lower middle classes talked about newspaper stories. An analysis of conversations about selected scandals complements this focus, which is also discussed in relation to various theories of media effects. The study highlights the strong influence of the media in the decades around 1900. People in pubs quickly and extensively picked up topics covered in the press and used them in political conversations. All of the selected scandals were also debated in pubs. Newspaper readers had an astonishingly detailed knowledge even of events unrelated to their everyday life. Workers in particular often adopted the arguments presented in the Social Democratic press. However, they appropriated news quite often in a self-willed and unconventional way. News reports were connected with personal experiences, twisted in a playful and humorous way, or loaded with emotional exaggerations
Discovery of topological metamaterials by symmetry relaxation and smooth topological indicators
Robustness against small perturbations is a crucial feature of topological
properties. This robustness is both a source of theoretical interest and a
drive for technological applications, but presents a challenge when looking for
new topological systems: Small perturbations cannot be used to identify the
global direction of change in the topological indices. Here, we overcome this
limitation by breaking the symmetries protecting the topology. The introduction
of symmetry-breaking terms causes the topological indices to become
non-quantized variables, which are amenable to efficient design algorithms
based on gradient methods. We demonstrate this capability by designing discrete
and continuous phononic systems realizing conventional and higher-order
topological insulators
SwapCT: Swap Confidential Transactions for Privacy-Preserving Multi-Token Exchanges
Decentralized token exchanges allow for secure trading of tokens without a trusted third party. However, decentralization is mostly achieved at the expense of transaction privacy. For a fair exchange, transactions must remain private to hide the participants and volumes while maintaining the possibility for non-interactive execution of trades. In this paper we present a swap confidential transaction system (SwapCT) which is related to ring confidential transactions (e.g. used in Monero) but supports multiple token types to trade among and enables secure, partial transactions for non-interactive swaps. We prove that SwapCT is secure in a strict, formal model and present its efficient performance in a prototype implementation with logarithmic signature sizes for large anonymity sets. For our construction we design an aggregatable signature scheme which might be of independent interest. Our SwapCT system thereby enables a secure and private exchange for tokens without a trusted third party
Consistent regional fluxes of CH4 and CO2 inferred from GOSAT proxy XCH4âŻ:âŻXCO2 retrievals, 2010â2014
We use the GEOS-Chem global 3-D model of atmospheric chemistry and transport and an ensemble Kalman filter to simultaneously infer regional fluxes of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from GOSAT retrievals of XCH4:XCO2, using sparse ground-based CH4 and CO2 mole fraction data to anchor the ratio. This work builds on previously reported theory that takes advantage that: (1) these ratios are less prone to systematic error than either the full physics data products or the proxy CH4 data products; and (2) the resulting CH4 and CO2 fluxes are self-consistent. We show that a posteriori fluxes inferred from the GOSAT data generally outperform the fluxes inferred only from in situ data, as expected. GOSAT CH4 and CO2 fluxes are consistent with global growth rates for CO2 and CH4 reported by NOAA, and with a range of independent data including in particular new profile measurements (0â7âkm) over the Amazon basin that were collected specifically to help validate GOSAT over this geographical region. We find that large-scale multi-year annual a posteriori CO2 fluxes inferred from GOSAT data are similar to those inferred from the in situ surface data but with smaller uncertainties, particularly over the tropics. GOSAT data are consistent with smaller peak-to-peak seasonal amplitudes of CO2 than either a priori or the in situ inversion, particularly over the tropics and the southern extra-tropics. Over the northern extra-tropics, GOSAT data show larger uptake than the a priori but less than the in situ inversion, resulting in small net emissions over the year. We also find evidence that the carbon balance of tropical South America was perturbed following the droughts of 2010 and 2012 with net annual fluxes not returning to an approximate annual balance until 2013. In contrast, GOSAT data significantly changed the a priori spatial distribution of CH4 emission with a 40â% increase over tropical South America and tropical Asia and smaller decrease over Eurasia and temperate South America. We find no evidence from GOSAT that tropical South American CH4 fluxes were dramatically affected by the two large-scale Amazon droughts. However, we find that GOSAT data are consistent with double seasonal peaks in fluxes that are reproduced over the five years we studied: a small peak in January to April and a larger peak in June to October, which is likely due to superimposed emissions from different geographical regions
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