Moving Up a Gear: The Impact of Compressing Instructional Time into Fewer Years of Schooling

Policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing administrative data on all high school graduates in 2002-2013 in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation in the implementation of the reform and study the overall effectiveness of this reform. We find that compressing the high school track by one year reduces the mean high school graduation age by about 10 months. The probability to repeat a grade level in the course of high school increases by 21 percent (3 percentage points), peaking in the final three years before graduation. However, the high school graduation rate is not affected. The results indicate the reform's success in reducing the graduation age, though it stays behind its potential benefits for labour markets and social security schemes because of higher grade repetition rates

BRICS as formation to study visual online communication?: A dialogue on historical origins, perspectives on theory and future directions

In this article, contributions from scholars working in the field of visual communication and/or online communication are gathered whose scholarly work falls into the BRICS countries realm. The interviews are framed by a brief sketch of the relevance of BRICS countries research in communication and media studies and some prospective comments on this novel field. The contributing scholars in this issue focus on China and Brazil in particular and work across the globe in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, PR China, the UK and Brazil. They shared their ideas on the subject even though their scholarly roots lie in fields as diverse as regional studies, political studies, communication and media studies and educational studies. Their thoughts were collected through email interviews and they are presented here in form of a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the issue of visual online communication in BRICS countries and the De-Westernization discourse. Gratefulness goes out to all the ones who have contributed and hopefully this project will have a say in many future dialogues between scholars from across the world.</p

In situ montitoring of rapid thermal processes RTP of Cu In,Ga SSe 2 by optical methods

Recent investigations of rapid thermal processing RTP of thin films using an in situ optical process control in conjunction with in situ energy dispersive X ray diffraction EDXRD are presented. The growth of Cu In,Ga S,Se 2 layers by sulfurization and selenization of sputtered Cu In Ga precursor layers was realized by a heating ramp from room temperature to temperatures between 550 and 700 C during which sulfur powder and or selenium was evaporated by radiative heating. White light scattered at the surface of the growing Cu In,Ga S,Se 2 layers was monitored by a CCD camera in order to record in situ the changing optical properties of the films. The reaction chamber was installed at a beam line of the synchrotron facility BESSY to enable the measurement of structural properties of the growing films by EDXRD simultaneously. During the sulfurization and selenization process the growing films pass through various phase transition which could be correlated with the white light scattering WLS signals. Samples made of Cu In,Ga S,Se 2 were grown and studied by means of EDXRD and WLS. Detailed analysis of the time evolution of both signals EDXRD and WLS allowed to determine specific signatures in the WLS signals indicating the influence of the process parameters on the growth process of Cu In,Ga S,Se