Staged Swissness: iIdeologies of nationhood in Switzerland's Streichmusik

In 2014, Switzerland was ranked seventh among the most successful nations in exerting what political scientist Joseph Nye calls "soft power": the ability to exercise power by attracting favor through economic and cultural influence rather than through coercion. This ability is partly due to the way Switzerland redefined its national identity following an economic decline in the 1970s and rapidly changing demographics, resulting in its repositioning on the international market. Indicative of this shift is the adoption of the pseudo-English word "Swissness" into the Swiss-German language in the late 1990s. The notion of Swissness, initially used in marketing Swiss products, has become instrumental in reframing and reshaping the cultural landscape of the nation. This dissertation examines a particular case of cultural nation re-branding through an ethnographic analysis of the revival of Streichmusik (string music). Streichmusik, which was once a localized musical practice of the mountainous region of the Appenzell and the Toggenburg, has become identified as quintessentially Swiss. By considering the role of domestic cultural tourism, I ask how Streichmusik, a visual and sonic representation of Swissness, is promoted and at times commercialized, and how commodification of the musical practice has affected its performance, reception, and cultural significance locally and nationally. In my analyses, I focus particularly on two keywords, Heimat (homeland) and Heile Welt (ideal or idyllic world), as well as local terminology denoting authenticity to argue that Streichmusik and the region offer a restorative platform for Switzerland. The resultant notions of nostalgia and reclaiming a rural utopia, position Appenzell and Toggenburg as an embodiment of Swissness. Based on participant observation and interviews, this study focuses on the voices of performers, cultural institutions, and tourist organizations to demonstrate how the tensions between cultural preservation and marketing practices at a local and national level provide a reimagined heritage in their attempt to (re)brand both the region and the nation at large. I further argue that having found a new place in the cultural imaginary through Swissness, Streichmusik performers articulate differing relationships with domestic cultural tourism and globalizing market forces at a time of shifting discourses of Swiss national identity.2017-05-31T00:00:00

Public, Private, or Inter-Municipal Organizations: Actors’ Preferences in the Swiss Water Sector

To improve sustainable service provision, the public sector has been repeatedly subject to administrative reforms. Yet, the question arises of which types of organizations might be preferred. To address this, we systematically analyze which water supply organizations decision-makers and stakeholders, across different levels of government in Switzerland, prefer. We find that the actors prefer public organizations that involve coordination between municipalities and reject private organizations. Distinguishing between different actor levels reveals a distinct pattern, mainly related to the level of responsibility: the national (confederation) and regional (cantonal) actors only prefer coordination across municipalities, where local politicians lose a degree of control. In contrast, the local actors prefer those organizations where they can maintain democratic control the most. However, such organizations are not expected to perform sustainably, mainly because of lengthy decision-making processes, lack of access to external funds, and short-term financial planning. We, thus, conclude that, at the local level, there is potentially a trade-off between democratic values and performance

Optimal transport distances to characterise electronic excitations

Understanding the character of electronic excitations is important in computational and mechanistic studies, but their classification from numerical simulations remains an open problem despite significant progress in density-based and exciton wavefunction-based descriptors. We propose and investigate a new diagnostic based on the Sinkhorn divergence from optimal transport, which is highly sensitive to translations and hence promising for the identification of charge transfer excitations. In spite of this, we show through numerical simulations on a representative set of molecules that the new diagnostic is not able to separate charge transfer from Rydberg excitations in practice, which can be explained by its inability to distinguish between translational and diffusive processes. We trained a $k$-NN classification algorithm on the optimal transport diagonistic, the popular $\Lambda$ diagnostic as well as their combination, and assessed its performance in labelling excitations, finding that (i) The combination improves the classification, (ii) Rydberg excitations are not separated well in any setting, suggesting that key information on the diffusivity of the excited state is missing and (iii) the optimal transport diagnostic breaks down for charge transfer in small molecules.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Getting a grip on negotiation processes: Addressing trade-offs in mountain biking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland

Space for recreation is an important service provided by forests close to urban and rural areas alike. Mountain biking, as one recreational activity, is increasingly becoming widespread, which can lead to challenging trade-off situations, as some benefits from forests come at the cost of another forest benefit and vice versa. For instance, illegally constructed mountain bike trails lead to trade-offs between environmental protection and other forest utilizations such as wood production. We thus study how such trade-off situations can be negotiated to find an outcome, such as a legal mountain bike trail, which is accepted by stakeholders. In doing so, we select case studies where we expect to find similar trade-off situations that lead to the negotiation process about mountain bike trails. Specifically, we analyse the cases' negotiation processes (action situations) by applying Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. Our findings show the importance of collective actors, a clear delineation of responsibilities and of compensation and funding measures as well as structured workshops and collective site inspections for addressing trade-offs and for arriving at acceptable outcomes in our cases

A New Lower Bound on the Maximum Number of Satisfied Clauses in Max-SAT and its Algorithmic Applications

A pair of unit clauses is called conflicting if it is of the form $(x)$, $(\bar{x})$. A CNF formula is unit-conflict free (UCF) if it contains no pair of conflicting unit clauses. Lieberherr and Specker (J. ACM 28, 1981) showed that for each UCF CNF formula with $m$ clauses we can simultaneously satisfy at least \pp m clauses, where \pp =(\sqrt{5}-1)/2. We improve the Lieberherr-Specker bound by showing that for each UCF CNF formula $F$ with $m$ clauses we can find, in polynomial time, a subformula $F'$ with $m'$ clauses such that we can simultaneously satisfy at least \pp m+(1-\pp)m'+(2-3\pp)n"/2 clauses (in $F$), where $n"$ is the number of variables in $F$ which are not in $F'$. We consider two parameterized versions of MAX-SAT, where the parameter is the number of satisfied clauses above the bounds $m/2$ and $m(\sqrt{5}-1)/2$. The former bound is tight for general formulas, and the later is tight for UCF formulas. Mahajan and Raman (J. Algorithms 31, 1999) showed that every instance of the first parameterized problem can be transformed, in polynomial time, into an equivalent one with at most $6k+3$ variables and $10k$ clauses. We improve this to $4k$ variables and $(2\sqrt{5}+4)k$ clauses. Mahajan and Raman conjectured that the second parameterized problem is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT). We show that the problem is indeed FPT by describing a polynomial-time algorithm that transforms any problem instance into an equivalent one with at most $(7+3\sqrt{5})k$ variables. Our results are obtained using our improvement of the Lieberherr-Specker bound above