Management of Knowledge Workers

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Populism in in the Weimar Republic and in the USA today with a focus on Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump

Master's thesis in History didacticsThe main objective of this thesis is to investigate if Adolf Hitler used a populist style in his campaign for power during in the Weimar Republic. A contemporary understanding of populism has been used in this investigation. The thesis provides a review of recent scholarly literature on populism which is used as a reference in the investigation of Hitler and his agitation for the Nazi party. The basis for the investigation of Hitler is his book Mein Kampf and excerpts from some of his speeches. Excerpts from the leftist weekly magazine Die Weltbühne that was issued during the Weimar period has been used to provide some insight into how Hitler and the Nazis were viewed at the time. Some historical background for the events during the Weimar Republic is provided. The conclusion of this main objective of the thesis is that Hitler used a populist style to gain power in 1933. The secondary objective of the thesis is to provide a description of how populism has been expressed in the USA during the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency. The scholarly literature on populism is used to explain some background for Trump’s populist behaviour. Opinions from the liberal press, mainly The New York Times and The Washington Post and also from recent books on Trump’s presidency are used to illustrate the situation. Populism thrives in the tension which exists in a democracy between popular sovereignty and liberal democracy with its emphasis on human rights, individual liberties, a political discourse based upon expertise and facts and the rule of law. A third objective of the thesis is to provide some comments on how populist leadership has challenged liberal democracy, as exemplified by the presidency of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power as Reichskanzler in the Weimar Republic.updatedVersio

A Unification of Models of Tethered Satellites

In this paper, different conservative models of tethered satellites are related mathematically, and it is established in what limit they may provide useful insight into the underlying dynamics. An infinite dimensional model is linked to a finite dimensional model, the slack-spring model, through a conjecture on the singular perturbation of tether thickness. The slack-spring model is then naturally related to a billiard model in the limit of an inextensible spring. Next, the motion of a dumbbell model, which is lowest in the hierarchy of models, is identified within the motion of the billiard model through a theorem on the existence of invariant curves by exploiting Moser's twist map theorem. Finally, numerical computations provide insight into the dynamics of the billiard model

On the regularization of impact without collision: the Painlevé paradox and compliance

We consider the problem of a rigid body, subject to a unilateral constraint, in the presence of Coulomb friction. We regularize the problem by assuming compliance (with both stiffness and damping) at the point of contact, for a general class of normal reaction forces. Using a rigorous mathematical approach, we recover impact without collision (IWC) in both the inconsistent and indeterminate Painlev\'e paradoxes, in the latter case giving an exact formula for conditions that separate IWC and lift-off. We solve the problem for arbitrary values of the compliance damping and give explicit asymptotic expressions in the limiting cases of small and large damping, all for a large class of rigid bodies.Comment: Compared to previous version of the paper, we have: (a) Added a new theorem 2, (b) added a new discussion section with numerical computations, and (c) changed the overall exposition of the manuscrip

On a tropicalization of planar polynomial ODEs with finitely many structurally stable phase portraits

Recently, concepts from the emerging field of tropical geometry have been used to identify different scaling regimes in chemical reaction networks where dimension reduction may take place. In this paper, we try to formalize these ideas further in the context of planar polynomial ODEs. In particular, we develop a theory of a tropical dynamical system, based upon a differential inclusion, that has a set of discontinuities on a subset of the associated tropical curve. The development is inspired by an approach of Peter Szmolyan that uses the connection of tropical geometry with logarithmic paper. In this paper, we define a phaseportrait, a notion of equivalence and characterize structural stability. Furthermore, we demonstrate the results on several examples, including a(n) (generalized) autocatalator model. Our main result is that there are finitely many equivalence classes of structurally stable phase portraits and we enumerate these ($15$ in total) in the context of the generalized autocatalator model. We believe that the property of finitely many structurally stable phase portraits underlines the potential of the tropical approach, also in higher dimension, as a method to obtain and identify skeleton models in chemical reaction networks in extreme parameter regimes

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