Virtual Reality in Construction

Virtual Reality (VR) has a long history of its development, but it was popularized in 2016 with a boom of various VR-rigs (headsets, glasses, controllers). The work of VR is to create the illusion of being present in an environment that is virtual, i.e. computer generated. When transmitting information to various human senses, VR can simulate a stay in a certain environment, room or location, which allows the user to see, hear and interact with the environment through the use of a VR headset, headphones and controllers

Reforms, New Elites, and Old Structures: How to Win the Battle for a New Ukraine?

In the two years since its "Revolution of Dignity" - also known as Euromaidan - Ukraine has launched important reform initiatives. Most of them are still in the inception phase, however, and much remains to be done to ensure their sustainability. The past two years have made clear the enormity of the challenge Ukraine faces in its transformation. At the same time, it has also shown unprecedentedly strong determination on the part of new reform-minded actors to overhaul the old system. Ukraine today can best understood as a battlefield: the old system and its structures are fighting for their survival, as new actors - from both within the system and outside it - push for a new social contract. This struggle is taking place on an everyday basis at different levels, national and local, in a number of different reform areas. External actors can best contribute by giving stronger support to reformers while promoting development of institutions that limit the space for vested interests to persist. Special attention should be paid to enforcing and implementing already adopted decisions and new laws that change the rules of the game

Homogeneous hypersurfaces in Riemannian symmetric spaces

In this thesis, we study the geometry and congruence of homogeneous hypersurfaces in Riemannian symmetric spaces of compact and noncompact type and obtain a number of classification results.Firstly, we prove that every multiplicity-preserving automorphism of the restricted root system of a real semisimple Lie algebra admits a natural lift to an automorphism of that Lie algebra and show when it can be further lifted to an isometry of an associated noncompact symmetric space.Next, we extend the classification of homogeneous codimension-one foliations on irreducible Riemannian symmetric spaces of noncompact type obtained by Berndt and Tamaru to the reducible case, thus completing it for all noncompact symmetric spaces.After that, we obtain a complete and explicit classification, up to orbit-equivalence, of cohomogeneity-one actions (and thus homogeneous hypersurfaces) on a number of irreducible noncompact Riemannian symmetric spaces of rank 2, namely on SL(3, H)/Sp(3), SO(5, C)/SO(5), and Gr^∗(2, C^{n+4}) = SU(n + 2, 2)/S(U(n + 2)U(2)), n ≥ 1.Finally, we study homogeneous complex hypersurfaces in irreducible Hermitian symmetric spaces. In the compact case, we make some progress on classification of such hypersurfaces up to congruence by using Konno’s work on codimension-one embeddings of complex flag manifolds with b2 = 1. In the noncompact case, we obtain a partial classification result: given an irreducible noncompact Hermitian symmetric space M realized as a simply connected solvable Lie group, we classify those complex hypersurfaces that are also Lie subgroups of M

How western populism weakens democracy in Ukraine

What does the election of Donald Trump and the rise of ‘populist’ parties across Europe mean for Ukraine? Iryna Solonenko argues that populism in Europe, and in the West generally, plays into the hands of anti-democratic forces in the country, supporting Russia’s destabilising influence and threatening Ukraine’s democratic future

The spinor and Weierstrass representations of surfaces in space

In this paper, following Sullivan, Kusner, and Schmitt, we study conformal immersions of Riemann surfaces into the three-dimensional Euclidean space. Regarding such immersions as special bundle maps from the tangent bundle of the surface to the cotangent bundle of the 2-dimensional sphere, we generalize the classical Weierstrass representation of minimal surfaces to the case of arbitrary conformal immersions. We study how such an immersion gives rise to a spin structure on the surface together with a pair of spinors and how the immersion itself can be studied by means of these spinors.Comment: 43 page

Cementno betonski cestovni kolnici

The paper examines the impact on physical and mechanical properties of modified fine-grained concrete by adding into its composition C3 plasticizer, air-entraining additive РT-1 and polypropylene fibers MAPEFIBRE NS 12/ NS 18.U radu se razmatra utjecaj na fizikalno-mehaničke pokazatelje svojstva modificiranog sitnozrnatog betona, dodavanjem u njegov sastav plastifikatora C3, aditiva za stvaranje zračnih pora (aeranta) PT-1 i polipropilenskih vlakana MAPEFIBRE NS 12 / NS 18

Rule of Law Reform after Zelenskyi's First Year: a Return to Business as Usual in Ukraine

In 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyi won a strong mandate to fundamentally change Ukraine and make it less corrupt. One year into his presidency, however, there have been no significant breakthroughs. Powerful vested interests and a lack of strategic vision have fragmented Zelenskyi’s leadership. Progress in rule of law reform has again been held up by Ukraine’s old system heavily invested in preserving the status quo. Western pressure and financial conditionality are now the key remaining incentives for reform