The Present Past - a Middle Swabian Dialect in the 21st Century

Dialects throughout the Federal Republic of Germany not only vary greatly among themselves, but also tend to show internal variations with regard to dialect speaker groups, due to the influence of Standard German along with other regional factors. Medium-sized towns seem to be at the center of this dialect-standard continuum, as speakers from both rural and more urban areas come together in these towns. This study sought to investigate the state of the Middle Swabian dialect as spoken in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a medium-sized town in Southwestern Germany. Previous studies of this dialect have focused on rural areas and found only minor variation with regard to the age variable. Studies with a focus on a more urbanized area do not exist for this particular region. A group of 27 individuals currently living in and around this town volunteered to participate in this research. Each individual was asked to fill out a questionnaire and to partake in a 10 to 15 minute recorded interview. The data then underwent initial analyses for lexical, phonological and grammatical variations. The five variables that were thus found to be statistically significant, among them age and educational background, were chosen for further analyses. The results shothat the dialect is indeed changing and that several factors seem to be carriers of this change

When skillful participation becomes design : making clothes together

This dissertation investigates the intersection and fluidity of design, use and participation when participatory design (PD) extends its focus to new forms, spaces and community contexts. Whereas early PD aimed to enable user participation in the design of their workplaces, contemporary PD experiences new challenges by expanding to new contexts. These contexts are, for instance, “makerspaces” for “peer production”, dedicated to placing participants with varying knowledge and skill into dialogue while providing spaces, tools, materials, and guidance. When extending PD to such spaces, the roles of the designer/user become blurred, because over time they move along a spectrum of acts of design and use. I investigated this challenge by creating three exemplary sites for designing and making clothes together. By designing together I refer to enabling the garment user to participate in the design and production process through offering local spaces and means for shared making activities. I blend PD, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together activities with concepts from peer production, to explore how participants (designer and user) with different skills are “making clothes together”. Simultaneously, I sensitize the participants to sustainable alternatives to the global mass-production system in fashion, which is traditionally based on fast, cheap and high-volume production in low-labor-cost countries. I carried out three “research through design” experiments, creating different kinds of peer production makerspace settings in Finland, Germany and Italy. These spaces were distinctive in the social diversity of their participants; themes and engagement methods, and in their focus on clothing. This focus offered the participants a familiar repertoire of technical equipment (e.g. household sewing machines) and was thus beneficial for observing the blurring of roles between designer and user. Each experiment consisted of a series of participatory making workshops, each lasting three to six hours. During a total of about 60 workshops with hundreds of participants, I collected rich materials such as design diary notes, observations, photographs, and audio recordings of qualitative interviews. The experiments posed specific questions that led me to emergent conceptualizations of “stuff” (i.e. tools, materials, spaces) and “skills”. These stuff and skills were analyzed in terms of their evolving interdependence and their relation to participation and the blurring of roles. The dissertation is structured as the presentation of the main findings of four peer-reviewed journal articles and an introductory chapter. I outline five main contributions to extended PD research and practice. First, my research illustrated the fluid spectrum that spans design and use, through interrelating conceptions from literature with a substantial amount of materials documented through practice. Second, through systematic analysis of stuff and skills, the research explored the social and material considerations of design and “infrastructuring”. Third, I documented how the participants’ (designer and user) roles changed and how participation is a development process over time. The participants’ roles changed from categories such as beginner to advanced experts and allowed associations between those with different kinds of material engagements from operating to managing to designing. This was seen, for instance, by participants taking over responsibilities and becoming workshop facilitators; or a local visitor who turned out to be a sewing machine repair expert. Fourth, I propose that in the given context, participation can be understood as skillful acts of use. This perspective helped me recognize and document changes in the participants’ roles and types of participation when framed as acts of use, determined by skills. Finally, the developed categories documented the relation between participation and skill, by highlighting interesting dynamics emerging around skills development, materialized through evolving and changing stuff (i.e. social and material infrastructuring). For example, skilled participants developed or brought their own tools for facilitation. This further elucidated how skills are not static but interrelated, and that specific skills are required and can be developed through different social, material and designerly aspects, attuned to such extended PD contexts. The results, therefore, contribute to extended PD research by adding nuances extracted from practice, to highlight how skillful participation changes over time. This suggests a reconceptualization and broadening of traditional PD or co-design perspectives of roles. For practice, the perspective of framing participation as skillful acts of use allows designers to support participants’ skills (development) during participation. Further, my research identified that a focus on user or designer roles is limiting in such contexts. It advocates designing spaces for infrastructuring, which allow changes in participation and anticipate unexpected use: spaces that nourish skills development and encourage the sharing of responsibilities among very different participants which can potentially be sustained over time

Competing frogs on Z^d

A two-type version of the frog model on Z^d is formulated, where active type i particles move according to lazy random walks with probability pi of jumping in each time step (i = 1; 2). Each site is independently assigned a random number of particles. At time 0, the particles at the origin are activated and assigned type 1 and the particles at one other site are activated and assigned type 2, while all other particles are sleeping.When an active type i particle moves to a new site, any sleeping particles there are activated and assigned type i, with an arbitrary tie-breaker deciding the type if the site is hit by particles of both types in the same time step. Let G_i denote the event that type i activates infinitely many particles. We show that the events G_1 \cap G_2^c and G_1^c \cap G_2 both have positive probability for all 0< p_1, p_2 <=1. Furthermore, if p_1 = p_2, then the types can coexist in the sense that the event G_1 \cap G_2 has positive probability.We also formulate several open problems. For instance, we conjecture that, when the initial number of particles per site has a heavy tail, the types can coexist also when p_1 does not equal p_2

Water transport on infinite graphs

If the nodes of a graph are considered to be identical barrels – featuring different water levels – and the edges to be (locked) water‐filled pipes in between the barrels, consider the optimization problem of how much the water level in a fixed barrel can be raised with no pumps available, that is, by opening and closing the locks in an elaborate succession. This model is related to an opinion formation process, the so‐called Deffuant model. We consider the initial water profile to be given by i.i.d. unif(0,1) random variables, investigate the supremum of achievable water levels at a given node – or to be more precise, the support of its distribution – and ask in which settings it becomes degenerate, that is, reduces to a single value. This turns out to be the case for all infinite connected quasi‐transitive graphs, with exactly one exception: the two‐sided infinite path

Robust Chromium Precursors for Catalysis: Isolation and Structure of a Single-Component Ethylene Tetramerization Precatalyst

We have introduced a new class of stable organometallic Cr reagents (compounds 1–4) that are readily prepared, yet reactive enough to serve as precursors. They were used for ethylene tetramerization catalysis following stoichiometric activation by in situ protonation. This study highlights the importance of balancing stability with reactivity in generating an organometallic precursor that is useful in catalysis. Moreover, precursor 4 allowed for the isolation and crystallographic characterization of a room-temperature stable cationic species, (PNP)CrR_2+ (R = o-C_6H_4(CH_2)_2OMe, PNP = ^iPrN(PPh_2)_2). This complex (5) may be used as a single component precatalyst, without any alkylaluminum reagents. This result provides an unprecedented level of insight into the kind of structures that must be produced from more complicated activation processes