L'État-nation, Une forme de fermeture sociale

The study begins with a critical examination of two opposing, theories of nationalism. Next, the relationship between the State and nationalism in the form of the nation state is seen as a process of social formation during which a compromise is established between public and private elites, and the people: loyalty is exchanged for the right to participate in social rights. In the third part, the author considers the future of a number of Southern states in relation to the fundamentals of nation formatio

Produktmodelle im Finanzdienstleistungssektor - Entwicklung eines objektorientierten Meta-Modells

Der Finanzdienstleistungssektor befindet sich aktuell in einem nachhaltigen Struktur-wandel. Um im Spannungsfeld zwischen Kunden- und Effizienzorientierung die Befrie-digung individueller Kundenbedürfnisse mit der Realisierung von Economies of Scale verbinden zu können, wird in der Literatur das Konzept der Mass Customization vorge-schlagen. Dem Kunden wird dabei die Möglichkeit gegeben, selbst oder mit Hilfe eines Beraters Produkte gemäß seinen Präferenzen zu konfigurieren. Eine zentrale Rolle im Rahmen des Mass Customization kommt dem Instrument der Modularisierung zu. Die Modularisierung von Produkten ermöglicht es, kundenindivi-duell Produkte bzw. Produktbündel aus standardisierten Komponenten zusammenzuset-zen. Bei der betrieblichen Umsetzung dieses Konzepts ist eine Unterstützung durch geeignete Informations- und Anwendungssysteme nötig. Besondere Bedeutung kommt in diesem Zusammenhang der Abbildung von Produkten im Rahmen von Produktmo-dellen zu. Im Kern enthalten Produktmodelle eine Beschreibung der Produktstruktur, also die Zusammensetzung eines Produktes aus Produktkomponenten, der Eigenschaf-ten der Produktkomponenten und deren Beziehungen untereinander. Die im Produkt-modell zentral vorgehaltenen Produktinformationen können für unterschiedliche betriebliche Geschäftsprozesse und den sie unterstützenden Anwendungssystemen zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Schwerpunkt dieses Artikels ist es, einen objektorientierten Ansatz zur Beschreibung von Bankprodukten und ihrer Zusammensetzung aus modularen Komponenten vorzu-stellen und dessen Nutzungsmöglichkeiten im Rahmen vernetzter Geschäftsprozesse beispielhaft zu erläutern. Deregulation of markets and changing customer behavior are signs of a lasting structural change within the financial services sector. In particular, banks and other financial service providers are confronted with increased claims of their customers. They expect products and services tailored to their personal needs. At the same time, banks and insurance companies face an enormous pressure to increase the efficiency of their operations. One approach to combine the satisfaction of individual customer needs with the realization of economies of scale is the concept of mass customization. Mass customization means that customers have the opportunity to configure products according to their individual preferences with the help of personnel advisers, or on their own using configuration tools (e.g. Internet tools). A major role in the context of mass customization plays the concept of modularization. The concept of product modularization allows creating individual products or product bundles by using standardized modules or components. The implementation of mass customization and product modularization has to be supported by suitable application systems, like product management systems, electronic product catalogs, and configuration systems. A prerequisite for the realization of mass customization and product modularization is the description of financial products within product models. In general, the nucleus of a product model is a detailed description of the product structure, which arises from the composition of a product from product components, the properties (attributes) of the product components and its relations among each other. By using product models, the product information embodied in the models can be made accessible for different operational business processes and application systems. The main focus of this article is to illustrate an object-oriented approach which describes the structure of financial products and its composition by modular components. WeProduktgestaltung / Standardisierung ; Produktdarstellung ; Produktmodell; Produktmodell für Finanzdienstleistungen ; Produktmodularisierung; Mass Customization ; Product Model ; Standardization

Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis

Much of the quantitative literature on civil wars and ethnic conflict ignores the role of the state or treats it as a mere arena for political competition among ethnic groups. Other studies analyze how the state grants or withholds minority rights and faces ethnic protest and rebellion accordingly, while largely overlooking the ethnic power configurations at the state's center. Drawing on a new data set on Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) that identifies all politically relevant ethnic groups and their access to central state power around the world from 1946 through 2005, the authors analyze outbreaks of armed conflict as the result of competing ethnonationalist claims to state power. The findings indicate that representatives of ethnic groups are more likely to initiate conflict with the government (1) the more excluded from state power they are, especially if they have recently lost power, (2) the higher their mobilizational capacity, and (3) the more they have experienced conflict in the pas

Modeling Cycle-to-Cycle Variations of a Spark-Ignited Gas Engine Using Artificial Flow Fields Generated by a Variational Autoencoder

A deeper understanding of the physical nature of cycle-to-cycle variations (CCV) in internal combustion engines (ICE) as well as reliable simulation strategies to predict these CCV are indispensable for the development of modern highly efficient combustion engines. Since the combustion process in ICE strongly depends on the turbulent flow field in the cylinder and, for spark-ignited engines, especially around the spark plug, the prediction of CCV using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is limited to the modeling of turbulent flows. One possible way to determine CCV is by applying large eddy simulation (LES), whose potential in this field has already been shown despite its drawback of requiring considerable computational time and resources. This paper presents a novel strategy based on unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (uRANS) CFD in combination with variational autoencoders (VAEs). A VAE is trained with flow field data from presimulated cycles at a specific crank angle. Then, the VAE can be used to generate artificial flow fields that serve to initialize new CFD simulations of the combustion process. With this novel approach, a high number of individual cycles can be simulated in a fraction of the time that LES needs for the same amount of cycles. Since the VAE is trained on data from presimulated cycles, the physical information of the cycles is transferred to the generated artificial cycles

L'État-nation, Une forme de fermeture sociale

The study begins with a critical examination of two opposing, theories of nationalism. Next, the relationship between the State and nationalism in the form of the nation state is seen as a process of social formation during which a compromise is established between public and private elites, and the people: loyalty is exchanged for the right to participate in social rights. In the third part, the author considers the future of a number of Southern states in relation to the fundamentals of nation formatio

Estimation of Combustion Parameters from Engine Vibrations Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Gradient Boosting

An optimal control of the combustion process of an engine ensures lower emissions and fuel consumption plus high efficiencies. Combustion parameters such as the peak firing pressure (PFP) and the crank angle (CA) corresponding to 50% of mass fraction burned (MFB50) are essential for a closed-loop control strategy. These parameters are based on the measured in-cylinder pressure that is typically gained by intrusive pressure sensors (PSs). These are costly and their durability is uncertain. To overcome these issues, the potential of using a virtual sensor based on the vibration signals acquired by a knock sensor (KS) for control of the combustion process is investigated. The present work introduces a data-driven approach where a signal-processing technique, designated as discrete wavelet transform (DWT), will be used as the preprocessing step for extracting informative features to perform regression tasks of the selected combustion parameters with extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) regression models. The presented methodology will be applied to data from two different spark-ignited, single cylinder gas engines. Finally, an analysis is obtained where the important features based on the model’s decisions are identified

Sketching with Hardware: A Course for Teaching Interactive Hardware Prototyping to Computer Science Students

Sketching with Hardware is an undergraduate university course with the goal to teach students how to build prototypes for tangible user interfaces. Goals of this course are to create awareness for tangible interaction among students and prepare them to realize advanced projects like bachelor's and master's theses in this field. In this paper, authors share their experience teaching the concepts of tangible interaction, electronics and prototyping to computer science students in a two week course. The course's content, structure and goals are explained, and needed material and infrastructure are described. The long-term effect of the course has been evaluated by conducting a survey among former participants

Measuring the Latency of Graphics Frameworks on X11 Based Systems

Latency is an intrinsic property of all human-computer systems. As it can affect user experience and performance, it should be kept as low as possible for real-time applications. To identify the source of latency, measuring partial latencies is necessary. We present a new method for measuring the latency of graphics frameworks on X11-based systems. Our tool measures the time between an input event arriving at the kernel until a pixel is updated in graphics memory. In a systematic evaluation with 36 test applications, we found that our method delivers consistent results for most tested frameworks, and does not add a significant amount of additional end-to-end latency. Even though further investigation is required to explain inconsistencies with Qt-based frameworks, our method measures the latency of graphics frameworks reliably and accurately in all other cases