Witt kernels and Brauer kernels for quartic extensions in characteristic two

Let $F$ be a field of characteristic $2$ and let $E/F$ be a field extension of degree $4$. We determine the kernel $W_q(E/F)$ of the restriction map $W_qF\to W_qE$ between the Witt groups of nondegenerate quadratic forms over $F$ and over $E$, completing earlier partial results by Ahmad, Baeza, Mammone and Moresi. We also deduct the corresponding result for the Witt kernel $W(E/F)$ of the restriction map $WF\to WE$ between the Witt rings of nondegenerate symmetric bilinear forms over $F$ and over $E$ from earlier results by the first author. As application, we describe the $2$-torsion part of the Brauer kernel for such extensions

A Critical Look at Robert Penn Warren’s New (and old) Criticism on Satire

Although a father of New Criticism, Warren did not always restrict his analysis of a text to the text itself. In his work with John Marston’s satires, Warren appears to go against what will become key attributes of New Critical theory. This essay explores Warren’s work with Marston’s satires, in particular examining his historicizing of the text, arguing for a more complicated view of Warren’s New Criticism

Zaufanie do władz publicznych w warunkach kryzysu

The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the existing studies concerning the phenomenon of public trust in government. Low trust in government has been frequently defined as a key problem influencing the policy process in many countries. The economic crises reinforced the importance of trust and triggered public debates on the necessary reforms of the public sector. The paper examines the key theories and research conducted by social scientists with a particular emphasis on the role of trust in risk societies. The review of the existing literature concentrates on the drivers of trust, showing the importance of two interlinked logics: the logic of consequences (the performance approach) and the logic of appropriateness (the process approach). The first one explains trust as a result of outputs and outcomes of government policies and services. The logic of appropriateness claims that trust is built on values and identity and depends on the adoption by governments the rules of integrity, openness, responsiveness and transparency. Trust in government is also deeply rooted in a broader system of rules, norms and values known as the trust culture. The last part of the paper is an attempt to trace an impact of an economic crisis on public trust. Studies of public opinion do not fully confirm the opinions on low trust and a decline in trust in government and trust in public administration in times of crisis. Some studies reveal considerable fluctuations of public trust in selected countries. In other countries, the public evaluation of government and public administration is high and there are only slight modifications in citizens' perception of the government.Celem artykułu jest dokonanie przeglądu współczesnych badań poświęconych zjawisku publicznego zaufania do władz publicznych. W wielu państwach niski poziom tego zaufania jest często uznawany za kluczowy czynnik determinujący proces polityki publicznej. Kryzys ekonomiczny ukazał w pełni znaczenie zaufania, inicjując publiczne debaty na temat koniecznych reform sektora publicznego. Tekst przedstawia kluczowe teorie dotyczące roli zaufania w społeczeństwach ryzyka i wyniki prowadzonych przez przedstawicieli nauk społecznych badań koncentrujących się na tym właśnie temacie. W przeglądzie literatury szczególnie wyeksponowano zagadnienie uwarunkowań zaufania, ukazując znaczenie dwóch powiązanych ze sobą podejść; logiki konsekwencji (uwypuklającej znaczenie wyników działalności władz publicznych) oraz logiki stosowności (uwypuklającej proces działania). Pierwsze podejście wyjaśnia zaufanie jako efekt polityk i usług oferowany przez władze publiczne. Przy drugim zakłada się, że zaufanie jest budowane na wartościach i tożsamości oraz zależy od tego, w jakim stopniu władze publiczne realizują zasady uczciwości, otwartości, elastyczności i przejrzystości. Zaufanie do władz publicznych jest także głęboko zakorzenione w systemie norm i wartości, określanych jako kultura zaufania. W ostatniej części artykułu podjęto próbę analizy wpływu kryzysu ekonomicznego na zaufanie do władz publicznych. W wielu państwach badania opinii publicznej nie potwierdzają w pełni poglądów o niskim poziomie zaufania do rządu i administracji publicznej czy jego spadku w czasach kryzysu. W niektórych krajach badania wykazują znaczące fluktuacje zaufania, w innych mamy do czynienia z wysokimi ocenami rządu i administracji publicznej oraz jedynie niewielkimi zmianami w postrzeganiu władz publicznych przez obywateli

Ceny, opłaty i niektóre inne instrumenty regulowania spożycia usług społecznych

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej naukę

The ethos of conspiracy argument : character as persuader in conspiracy rhetoric.

Conspiracy theory has, as Timothy Melley states in Empire of Conspiracy (2000), “animated our political culture from the early Republican period to the present, at times powerfully swaying popular opinion” (vii). Though it has attracted attention from a wide range of disciplines, conspiracy theory has not received significant notice within rhetoric and composition. My dissertation adds to the interdisciplinary body of scholarship concerning conspiracy theory by examining it as rhetoric, focusing on how the construction of a conspiracy proponent’s ethos/character affects the persuasiveness of a conspiracy theory. I argue that ethos construction plays a much more significant role in conspiracy persuasion than typically considered. In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), Richard Hofstadter describes the importance played by “the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause” (such as an ex-Mormon or ex-nun) in American conspiracy argument. This dissertation examines the ethos of one prominent “renegade”— Charles Chiniquy (1809-1899), an ex-Catholic priest whose conspiracy charges were extensively used by anti-Catholics during America’s Gilded Age and into the twenty-first century. I use as a case study Chiniquy’s 1885 autobiography Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, in which he claims that President Lincoln spoke with him about the Catholic Church’s covert working for the Confederacy and the Church’s desire to assassinate Lincoln. With Lincoln as witness, Chiniquy’s conspiracy was widely circulated to promote anti-Catholicism. Belief in Chiniquy’s tale about the dead president ultimately depended on belief in the ex-priest; thus, my dissertation uses Chiniquy’s ethos construction as a means of examining the role ethos plays in persuading people to accept extreme claims. Chapter One reviews scholarship concerning ethos, anti-Catholicism, conspiracy rhetoric, and Chiniquy, my dissertation’s principal historical and theoretical approaches. Chapter Two explores how Fifty Years constructs ethos for Chiniquy. Chapter Three examines how the purported Catholic plot against the president and the Union were constructed in Fifty Years to support an anti-Catholic message, concentrating on three themes which have implications concerning ethos in conspiracy narratives. And Chapter Four describes the reception of Chiniquy’s conspiracy from the Gilded Age to the age of the World Wide Web

Das Verhalten von Differentialformen, bilinearen Formen und quadratischen Formen unter rein inseparablen Körpererweiterungen sowie unter mehrfachen Funktionenkörpererweiterungen von ρ-Formen

Bei der Betrachtung von über Körρer definierter algebraischer Objekte ist es ein zentrales ρroblem, das Verhalten eben dieser Objekte unter Körρererweiterungen zu beschreiben. Diese Fragestellung wird in dieser Arbeit für bilineare und quadratische Formen über Körρer der Charakteristik zwei und für Differentialformen über Körρer ρositiver Charakteristik ρ > 0 aufgegriffen. Dabei wird ρrimär die Frage beantwortet, welche bilinearen Formen b є W(F), welche nicht singulären quadratischen Formen φ є Wq(F) und welche Differentialformen ω є Ω n(F) unter einer gegebenen Körρererweiterung metabolisch bzw. hyρerbolisch bzw. trivial werden. Es sei Ω n(F) der Raum der Differentialformen über einem Körρer F der Charakteristik ρ > 0, sowie } : Ω n(F) -> Ω n(F)/ d Ω n−1(F) die auf den Raum der Differentialformen verallgemeinerte Artin-Schreier Abbildung, dessen Kern als νn(F) und dessen Kokern als Hn+1 ρ(E/F) bezeichnet wird. Ist E/F eine (nicht notwendigerweise endliche) rein inseρarable Körρererweiterung, so wird ein Erzeugendensystem der Gruρρe Hn+1 ρ(E/F) mit beliebiger Primzahl ρ > 0 konstruiert, mit dessen Hilfe man dann auch ein Erzeugendensystem des quadratischen Wittkerns Wq(E/F) erhält. Analog zu dieser Fragestellung werden zusätzlich in einigen Sρezialfällen rein inseρarabler Erweiterungen ebenfalls Erzeuger der Gruρρe νη(E/F) und damit auch Erzeuger des bilinearen Wittkerns W(E/F) bestimmt. Eines der Hauρtwerkzeuge, die dabei einführt und verwendet werden, sind Annullatoren in der Algebra Ω*(F). Diese werden gesondert untersucht und anschließend auch für die Analyse von Differentialformen und bilinearen Formen unter mehrfachen Funktionenkörρererweiterungen von ρ -Formen verwendet, da der Kern Ωn(F(φ1, . . . , φr)/F) mit ρ -Formen φ1, . . . , φr als ein bestimmter Annullator identifiziert wird. Zusätzlich werden mit Hilfe des Bloch-Kato-Gabber Theorems und des Bloch-Kato Theorems alle in dieser Arbeit bewiesenen Ergebnisse auch auf die Theorie der Milnor-K-Gruρρen und der Brauergruρρen übertragen

The effect of open innovation activities during unstable economic conditions on subsequent product innovation performance: an analysis of German SMEs

During the past decades, the business environment experienced vast changes and unstable economic conditions. The recent economic crisis had a pervasive influence on companies’ viability and inhibited them in their innovation efforts. As a matter of fact, SMEs that typically possess fewer resources are even more constrained and affected during recessions. Much literature highlighted the strategic importance of Open Innovation practices for innovation performance. Specifically, technological co-operation is assumed to be one of the most effective Open Innovation activity that brings in external resources and thus influences product innovation performance. Nonetheless, even though some literature examined what types of companies are able to maintain or increase innovative efforts during recessions, few studies investigated in how far economic recessions change the willingness of companies to open up their innovation practices and the effect of R&D co-operation on subsequent product innovation performance. This research study investigates if open innovation activities are a possible strategy for SMEs to weather economic recessions and positively impact subsequent product innovation performance. Consequently, is gradually opening up innovation activities and participating in R&D co-operation during crisis beneficial? Having analyzed data of German SMEs, the study confirms that a higher degree of openness, compared to a closed innovation system during crisis positively affects radical and incremental innovation performance. Furthermore, R&D co-operation is more likely to affect only incremental performance. However, only vertical co-operation is found to be significant, whereas engaging with multiple different co-operation partners even deteriorates innovation performance

Potentialities and limitations of research on VHRS data : Alexander the Great’s military camp at Gaugamela on the Navkur Plain in Kurdish Iraq as a test case

This paper presents a selected aspect of research conducted within the Gaugamela Project, which seeks to finally identify the location of one of the most important ancient battles: the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE). The aim of this study was to discover material remains of the Macedonian military camp on the Navkur Plain in Kurdish Iraq. For this purpose, three very high resolution satellite (VHRS) datasets from Pleiades and WorldView-2 were acquired and subjected to multi-variant image processing (development of different color composites, integration of multispectral and panchromatic images, use of principle component analysis transformation, use of vegetation indices). Documentation of photointerpretation was carried out through the vectorization of features/areas. Due to the character of the sought-after artifacts (remnants of a large enclosure), features were categorized into two types: linear features and areal features. As a result, 19 linear features and 2 areal features were found in the study area of the Mahad hills. However, only a few features fulfilled the expected geometric criteria (layout and size) and were subjected to field groundtruthing, which ended in negative results. It is concluded that no traces have been found that could be interpreted as remnants of an earthen enclosure capable of accommodating around 47,000 soldiers. Further research perspectives are also suggested

Eine verbesserte Präventionskultur in der EU - Forderung einer integrativen und prozessualen Betrachtung des Risikos von Naturgefahren

Anfang 2009 wurde von der EU-Kommission ein strategisches Gemeinschaftskonzept zur Verhütung von Naturkatastrophen und vom Menschen verursachten Katastrophen vorgeschlagen. Ziel ist es, auf der Basis bereits existierender EU-Rechtsinstrumente eine Gemeinschaftsstrategie zu entwickeln. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick zu den wichtigsten EU-Ansätzen mit Bezug zur Katastrophenprävention sowie eine Einordnung dieser Ansätze in das Konzept eines umfassenden Risikomanagements. Die von der EU erarbeiteten Handlungsbereiche, mit denen Katastrophenverhütung angestoßen werden soll, werden hinsichtlich des zu erreichenden Ziels einer verbesserten Präventionskultur und eines integrativen Risikoverständnisses bewertet.At the beginning of 2009, the EU Commission put forward a strategic concept for the Community for the prevention of both natural and man-made disasters. The aim is to develop a Community strategy based on existing legal instruments. This paper provides a survey of the most important approaches on the part of the EU in respect of the prevention of disasters, and it locates these approaches within the concept of comprehensive disaster management. In the context of the goal to be achieved, the areas for action identified by the EU as the targets for action to prevent disasters are evaluated in terms of their contribution to improving the culture of prevention and to achieving a more integration-oriented understanding of risk