What is contemporary art?

The topic of the thesis is “What is contemporary art?”. While exploring contemporary art, its conceptions, characteristics and remarkable events related to it, I concentrate mainly on research of contemporary art as universal, particularly on such phenomena as multicultural art, postdramatic theater, audience interaction, as well as challenged aesthetics. This thesis also considers postmodern art, since contemporary art in its current form departed from postmodern art. I rely on and address the German language prose and drama, as well as visual arts. The work of Elfriede Jelinek, John von Düffel, Peter Handke, Kristof Magnusson, and multicultural artists Vladimir Kaminer, Feridun Zaimoglu are considered. This paper renders art as a blend of different arts, as well as synthesis of arts and different human activities. The thesis consists of five chapters. I rely in chapter I on the artwork of Rebecca Horn, Edith Meusnier, Andrea Polli as a sample of heterogeneity, appearing in unusual forms and places, blending together and erasing borders between different types of arts. Multicultural art as one of the forms of universal art is researched on samples of work by Vladimir Kaminer and Feridun Zaimoglu in chapter II. Chapter III concentrates on universal notions of postdramatic theater, supported by theoretical work of Hans-Thies Lehmann. In chapter IV, which is “Questioning Aesthetics”, I write about body fluids art, and include the work of Julia Kristeva, Rina Arya. Digital universality, one of the main characteristics of contemporary art, is a topic of chapter V. I render contemporary art as the pick of art evolution and cover such characteristics, events or occurrences in contemporary art as the inevitability of development, emergence of different mediums as a result of it, as well as more challenged aesthetics

Report on uncertainty methods

The issue of uncertainty is critical for climate change science and policy. A great deal of research analysis has gone into identifying the scope and character of uncertainty in climate change itself, in how analysts and assessment teams can and should communicate that uncertainty to policy- and decision-makers, and how policy- and decision-makers can then incorporate nowledge about the sources and magnitude of uncertainty in their choices. The primary purpose of this deliverable is to summarize that literature, and to synthesize it in a manner that is useful for the Mediation project, namely in improving the practice of assessing adaptaion needs and options, and in building a useful decision-support platform or system. The report starts with a user-driven focus, summarizing the literatures on both descriptive and normative models of decision-making under uncertainty, in order to identify the most effective and esential information inputs for each of these models. The report then summarizes some of the main guidance documents on communicating uncertanty, prepared for or in use by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United States government, and the Dutch government. Fially, the report synthesizes these previous studies for use in the Mediation project and its users by focusing on three essential characteristics of uncertainty communication: parsimony, personalization, and practicality. It identifies specific strategies for using these three criteria to ensure that assessments for climate adaptation are salient, credible, and legitimate, and thus ultimately construtive inputs into policy- and decision-making

Avoiding the avoidable: Towards a European heat waves risk governance

The death toll of recent heat waves in developed countries has been remarkably high, contradicting the common assumption that high levels of economic and technological development automatically lead to lower vulnerability to weather extremes. Future climate change may further increase this vulnerability. In this article we examine some recent evidence of heat wave-related mortality and we conclude that while economic wealth and technological capacity might be a necessary condition for adequately coping with adverse climate change effects, they are not sufficient. Questions of awareness, preparedness, organizational issues, and actor networks have to be addressed in a proactive and focused manner in order to avoid future heat wave damages. We propose some practical consequences for heat wave adaptation measures by adopting a risk governance framework that can be universally applied, as it is sufficiently flexible to deal with the multi-level and often fragmented reality of existing coping measures

Avoiding the avoidable: Towards a European heat waves risk governance

The death toll of recent heat waves in developed countries has been remarkably high, contradicting the common assumption that high levels of economic and technological development automatically lead to lower vulnerability to weather extremes. Future climate change may further increase this vulnerability. In this article we examine some recent evidence of heat wave-related mortality and we conclude that while economic wealth and technological capacity might be a necessary condition for adequately coping with adverse climate change effects, they are not sufficient. Questions of awareness, preparedness, organizational issues, and actor networks have to be addressed in a proactive and focused manner in order to avoid future heat wave damages. We propose some practical consequences for heat wave adaptation measures by adopting a risk governance framework that can be universally applied, as it is sufficiently flexible to deal with the multi-level and often fragmented reality of existing coping measures

Report on review of cross-sectoral impact of decisions and types of problems and contexts in which different dimensions of uncertainty play a role: An exploration of tipping points in climate policy responses

Adaptation to climate change is becoming increasingly necessary, with potentially severe climate-induced changes still ahead. Of key relevance for decision-making is the potential existence of points in time where the decision situation changes from one type to another because an impact threshold is exceeded. Such a change in the decision situation is, for instance, when the deciion shifts from being the concern of one actor or agency to multiple actors at multiple scales. We call these points adaptation crossroads. Their existence has important implications for adaptation decision support because they are where strategic and transformational adaptation decisions will have to be considered. We present three cases to explore adaptation crossroads and look at the implicatons fo scientific decision support. We draw some first conclusions, present a typology of adaptation crossoads, and lay groundwork for further inquiries into this area

The Sensor Test for Orion RelNav Risk Mitigation Development Test Objective

The Sensor Test for Orion Relative-Navigation Risk Mitigation (STORRM) Development Test Objective (DTO) ew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-134, and was designed to characterize the performance of the ash LIDAR being developed for the Orion. This ash LIDAR, called the Vision Navigation Sensor (VNS), will be the primary navigation instrument used by the Orion vehicle during rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking. This paper provides an overview of the STORRM test objectives and the concept of operations. It continues with a description of the STORRM's major hardware compo nents, which include the VNS and the docking camera. Next, an overview of crew and analyst training activities will describe how the STORRM team prepared for flight. Then an overview of how insight data collection and analysis actually went is presented. Key ndings and results from this project are summarized, including a description of "truth" data. Finally, the paper concludes with lessons learned from the STORRM DTO

Equilibrium distributions in thermodynamical traffic gas

We derive the exact formula for thermal-equilibrium spacing distribution of one-dimensional particle gas with repulsive potential V(r)=r^(-a) (a>0) depending on the distance r between the neighboring particles. The calculated distribution (for a=1) is successfully compared with the highway-traffic clearance distributions, which provides a detailed view of changes in microscopical structure of traffic sample depending on traffic density. In addition to that, the observed correspondence is a strong support of studies applying the equilibrium statistical physics to traffic modelling.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, changed content, added reference

A New Analysis of the Exoplanet Hosting System HD 6434

The current goal of exoplanetary science is not only focused on detecting but characterizing planetary systems in hopes of understanding how they formed, evolved, and relate to the Solar System. The Transit Ephemeris Refinement and Monitoring Survey (TERMS) combines both radial velocity (RV) and photometric data in order to achieve unprecedented ground-based precision in the fundamental properties of nearby, bright, exoplanet-hosting systems. Here we discuss HD 6434 and its planet, HD 6434b, which has a M_p*sin(i) = 0.44 M_J mass and orbits every 22.0170 days with an eccentricity of 0.146. We have combined previously published RV data with new measurements to derive a predicted transit duration of ~6 hrs, or 0.25 days, and a transit probability of 4%. Additionally, we have photometrically observed the planetary system using both the 0.9m and 1.0m telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, covering 75.4% of the predicted transit window. We reduced the data using the automated TERMS Photometry Pipeline, developed to ensure consistent and accurate results. We determine a dispositive null result for the transit of HD 6434b, excluding the full transit to a depth of 0.9% and grazing transit due to impact parameter limitations to a depth of 1.6%Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to A