Entwicklungsperspektiven und -probleme eines prosperierenden ländlichen Zwischenraumes in Nordrhein-Westfalen: das Beispiel Südwestfalen

Während im Zuge der Europäisierung und Globalisierung der Raumentwicklung den Metropolregionen als Wachstums- und Innovationszentren immer größere Aufmerksamkeit und Bedeutung zuteil wurden, was sich durch die besondere Betonung von Wachstum und Innovation innerhalb der seit 2006 gültigen, neuen Leitbilder und Handlungsstrategien für die Raumentwicklung in Deutschland weiter verstärkte, fand die erfolgreiche Entwicklung kleinerer Wachstumsregionen außerhalb von Metropolregionen zunächst wenig Beachtung. Untersuchungen haben seitdem Determinanten und Erfolgsfaktoren für Wachstumsmotoren metropolferner ländlicher Räume herausgestellt. In Nordrhein-Westfalen zählt die Region Südwestfalen – und hier speziell Sauerland und Siegerland – zu den ländlich geprägten Zwischenräumen, in denen sich aufgrund endogener Wachstumsprozesse, die vor allem auf dem Erfolg innovativer klein- und mittelständischer Industrieunternehmen basieren, insbesondere in ökonomischer Hinsicht eine überdurchschnittliche dynamische Regionalentwicklung vollzogen hat. Demgegenüber bestimmen trotz einer prosperie- renden regionalwirtschaftlichen Gesamtsituation seit der Jahrtausendwende rückläufige Bevölkerungszahlen in immer mehr Kommunen Südwestfalens die soziodemographischen Rahmenbedingungen. Mit einem an den aktuellen Problemlagen orientierten Zugang soll der Frage nach der Zukunftsfähigkeit erfolgreicher Regionalentwicklung jenseits von Metropol- regionen nachgegangen und aus einer angewandt-geographischen Perspektive sollen zudem Handlungserfordernisse charakterisiert werden.The continuous Europeanization and globalization of spatial development has increased attention on and significance of metropolitan regions as spaces of growth and innovation, a notion which Germany has taken up in its latest conceptual framework for spatial development ("Leitbilder der Raumentwicklung") thereby reinforcing the emphasis on central metropolitan areas as primary nodes of growth and innovation. This singular urban focus has however largely neglected successful developments of smaller growth regions beyond those metropolitan regions. Since passing of the new spatial development guidelines in 2006, several studies were able to trace and determine reasons for growth engine effects in rural areas far removed from core urban areas. In the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia the South Westphalia region – especially the Sauerland and Siegerland – can be counted towards the number of rural areas whose endogenous growth has been spurred by the success of its highly innovative small and medium sized industries, leading to economic growth above average and a dynamic regional development. Despite the prospering regional economy, the socio-demographic situation has been defined by a continuing decrease in population numbers in more and more communes of since the new millennium. In using a problem-centered approach, the paper retraces the steps of successful regional rural development beyond metropolitan areas in order to assess future development trajectories and outline development recommendations from the stance of applied geography

Heart rate from face videos under realistic conditions for advanced driver monitoring

Abstract The role of physiological signals has a large impact on driver monitoring systems, since it tells something about the human state. This work addresses the recursive probabilistic inference problem in time-varying linear dynamic systems to incorporate invariance into the task of heart rate estimation from face videos under realistic conditions. The invariance encapsulates motion as well as varying illumination conditions in order to accurately estimate vitality parameters from human faces using conventional camera technology. The solution is based on the canonical state space representation of an Itô process and a Wiener velocity model. Empirical results yield to excellent real-time and estimation performance of heart rates in presence of disturbing factors, like rigid head motion, talking, facial expressions and natural illumination conditions making the process of human state estimation from face videos applicable in a much broader sense, pushing the technology towards advanced driver monitoring systems.</jats:p

Influence of the layer morphology on the electrical properties of sol-gel transparent conducting oxide coatings

Tranparent conducting coatings have been prepared by sol gel methods either by a conventional sol-gel process (Antimony doped Tin Oxide - ATO, Aluminium doped Zinc Oxide - AZO) or a new wet chemical process using fully dispersed crystalline nanoparticles (ATO, Indium Tin Oxide - ITO). The dip coating technique has been used as deposition technique with single coating thickness varying from a few nanometer to ca. 400 nm. The layers have been fired in a furnace. Structural properties have been determined by x-ray diffraction and TEM analysis and the electrical properties by the van der Pauw/Hall measurement. Three different coating procedures have been used to investigate the effect on the structure, morphology and the electrical properties of the coatings. It is shown that the individual layer thickness in multilayer coatings influences dramatically the mentioned properties. Very thin individual layers favour a heterogeneous nucleation with dense columnar growth of the crystallites leading to low electrical resistivity (&Omega; &asymp; 10 -³ &Omega; cm), while thick individual layers result in a porous morphology made of small crystallites leading to resistivities in the 10&asymp;2 &Omega; cm range

Properties of Feynman graph polynomials

In this talk I discuss properties of the two Symanzik polynomials which characterise the integrand of an arbitrary multi-loop integral in its Feynman parametric form. Based on the construction from spanning forests and Laplacian matrices, Dodgson's relation is applied to derive factorisation identities involving both polynomials. An application of Whitney's 2-isomorphism theorem on matroids is discussed.Comment: Talk given at the International Workshop 'Loops and Legs in Quantum Field Theory' (April 25-30, 2010, W\"orlitz, Germany