Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War

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Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside : a research agenda

Over the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights

Algae Biorefinery – Material and energy use of algae

Algae offer as much as 30 times greater biomass productivity than terrestrial plants, and are able to fix carbon and convert it into a number of interesting products. The numerous challenges in algae production and use extend across the entire process chain. They include the selection of suitable algal phyla, cultivation (which takes place either in open ponds or in closed systems), extraction of the biomass from the suspension, through to optimal use of the obtained biomass. The basic suitability of aquatic biomass for material use and energy supply has been demonstrated in a large number of studies. Numerous research projects are concerned with identifying the optimal processes to enable its widespread implementation. [... aus der Einleitung

Efficiency evaluation of robust voice control for HMI systems in the industrial production

Cars, mobile phones and smart home devices already provide an automated speech recognition (ASR) by default to keep the drivers focus on the street, to reduce complex interactions on small touch screens or to control an automation system from different rooms. However not all the benefits of these ASR consumer applications have the same impact in an industrial scenario. Different conditions and aims of HMI systems in these two fields lead to different potentials and challenges. Robust voice control, as the most natural way of communication, opens the opportunity to shorten complex command sequences and menu structures to directly execute a final command. The quantitatively influence of these effects on the production process time is not known yet. Therefore, this contribution explores which HMI scenarios benefit most from replacing or complementing existing touch screen-based interaction with robust voice control. In this contribution different typical CNC commands from CNC milling machines and industrial robots are categorized by the complexity over the menu levels and number of interactions. Afterwards the interaction time for touch screen commands and voice control commands is compared to identify the break-even-point where the robust voice control is faster than a conventional touch screen control

Energiedispersive Untersuchung der Wechselwirkung schneller Neutronen mit Materie; Teilbericht : Auslegung des Neutronen-Produktionstargets

Der Aufbau und die erste Nutzung eines kompakten Flugzeitsystems zur energiedispersiven Untersuchung der Wechselwirkung von schnellen Neutronen mit Materialien sind Inhalt eines Vernetzungsprojektes des Forschungszentrums Rossendorf, an dem auch die Technische Universität Dresden im Rahmen eines gemeinsamen DFG-Projektes mitarbeitet. Die geplanten Flugzeit-Experimente mit gepulsten Neutronen werden an der Strahlungsquelle ELBE durchgeführt werden. Erste Ergebnisse zur Entwicklung eines Neutronen-Produktionstargets werden vorgestellt. Mit Hilfe von Strahlungstransport- und Finite-Elemente-Programmen wurden die Verteilungen der Energiefreisetzung des von der Strahlungsquelle ELBE genutzten Elektronenstrahls und der Temperatur im Neutronen-Radiator sowie die zu erwartenden Teilchenspektren und -flüsse am Messplatz berechnet. Überlegungen zur Entwicklung des Strahlfängers werden diskutiert

Book Review: The Global Political Economy of Raúl Prebisch

This edited volume by Matias Margulis examines Raúl Prebisch’s ideas, agency, and influence in an interdisciplinary manner, with a particular emphasis on his relevance for Global Political Economy (GPE). This interdisciplinary approach reminds the reader that Prebisch was indeed much more than just an economic theorist and that his influence on development policy was profound. An important contribution of this book is the emphasis on how Prebisch’s ideas changed over time, partly in result of the failure of his political projects, first in Argentina and later in ECLAC. With time, Prebisch became more acutely aware of the importance of political power, not just economic capabilities, for shaping institutions as well as for forming the rules of the world economy. This is important to emphasize, as Prebisch’s work is sometimes criticized for being overly economistic (see, for example, Palma 2016; Shivji 2016), which is not a valid critique for his work during the last part of his life. There is a clear parallel to be drawn between what Margulis calls the peripheralization of Prebisch in GPE and the role of Prebisch’s ideas in the Economics field (see, for example, Kufakurinani et al. 2017). With the term peripheralization, Margulis is referring to the transformation of Prebisch from providing intellectual leadership in international development in the 1950s–1970s, to being relegated to a “historical footnote” in the 1980s. Prebisch also disappeared from the Economics curricula in the 1980s as suddenly, and perhaps more completely, as he disappeared from GPE (Kvangraven 2017). Although his core ideas may be found in mainstream economic history literature such as Kenneth Pomeranz’s (2000) The Great Divergence or Sven Beckert’s (2014) Empire of Cotton, such authors tend to not cite Prebisch as a source, perhaps because they are unaware of the origin of the concepts they use in their analysis. ECLAC itself also explicitly abandoned Prebisch’s main ideas in 1994 in favor of a policy of “open regionalism” (ECLAC 1994). Furthermore, Margulis’s observation of Prebisch often being incorrectly portrayed in GPE (e.g., as an advocate for economic autarky) is also paralleled in Economics. This can partly be attributed to the rewriting of the intellectual history of these fields.1 Eurocentricism in both GPE and Economics is another possible reason for the exclusion of Prebisch from the field

What’s in a price? the American raw cotton market in Liverpool and the Anglo-American war

This article argues that an embryonic futures market was present in Liverpool during the Anglo-American war. The analysis of a previously unseen dataset of printed Prices Currents has facilitated not only a price series of raw cotton prices, but an in-depth analysis of the ‘construction’ of those raw cotton prices. By positing a definition of.an embryonic futures market and then analysing each of the features of a such a market in turn, this study demonstrates the existence of an embryonic futures market in early nineteenth-century Liverpool