A limiter-based well-balanced discontinuous Galerkin method for shallow-water flows with wetting and drying: Triangular grids

A novel wetting and drying treatment for second-order Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG2) methods solving the non-linear shallow water equations is proposed. It is developed for general conforming two-dimensional triangular meshes and utilizes a slope limiting strategy to accurately model inundation. The method features a non-destructive limiter, which concurrently meets the requirements for linear stability and wetting and drying. It further combines existing approaches for positivity preservation and well-balancing with an innovative velocity-based limiting of the momentum. This limiting controls spurious velocities in the vicinity of the wet/dry interface. It leads to a computationally stable and robust scheme -- even on unstructured grids -- and allows for large time steps in combination with explicit time integrators. The scheme comprises only one free parameter, to which it is not sensitive in terms of stability. A number of numerical test cases, ranging from analytical tests to near-realistic laboratory benchmarks, demonstrate the performance of the method for inundation applications. In particular, super-linear convergence, mass-conservation, well-balancedness, and stability are verified

Education for everyone? Who participates in adult education courses and who doesn‘t

Niederschwelligkeit des Zugangs, Lebensweltorientierung des Bildungsangebotes bei hoher Qualität, Bildungsangebote nahe am Wohn- oder Arbeitsort und keine oder kaum formale Zugangsbeschränkungen – das kennzeichnet seit ihrer Gründung die Arbeit der österreichischen Volkshochschulen. Wer nimmt aber tatsächlich an den Volkshochschulkursen teil – sind es nach wie vor zumeist Frauen? Wie steht es um den Anteil an ArbeiterInnen und PensionistInnen? Ist die Frage der Wohnortnähe maßgeblich für eine Bildungs(nicht)teilnahme? Der vorliegende Beitrag wertet Ergebnisse der österreichischen Volkshochschulstatistiken aus, die – seit Mitte der 1980er Jahre lückenlos – ihre Teilnehmenden nach Geschlecht, Alter, sozialer Gruppe und formalem Bildungsgrad erfassen. Der ernüchternde Befund der Autoren: Die Zugangsmuster und Ausschlussmuster der Volkshochschulen gleichen heute im Wesentlichen denen anderer Bildungsinstitutionen. Für Nicht-AkademikerInnen, Frauen oder ArbeitnehmerInnen sind Volkshochschulen hingegen offener. Zu beobachten gilt es künftig, ob die zunehmende Orientierung der Volkshochschulen an formal anschlussfähiger Bildung, an Validierung und an (scheinbar) Aufstieg versprechender Bildung den Ausschluss bildungsferner Milieus verstärkt. (DIPF/Orig.)The low threshold for access, the orientation of educational offerings to living conditions along with high quality, educational offerings close to the home or workplace and no or hardly any formal restrictions to access—these have been characteristics of the work of the Austrian adult education centres since they were established. Yet who actually participates in courses at the adult education centres? Is it still mainly women? What about the share of blue-collar workers and retired people? Does proximity to one’s place of residence factor significantly in whether or not a person attends a course? This article evaluates findings from the statistics on the Austrian adult education centres that have recorded its participants according to gender, age, social group and level of formal education without a gap since the middle of the 1980s. The sobering discovery of the authors: the patterns of access to and exclusion from the adult education centres essentially resemble those of other educational institutions. For persons without a university degree, women or blue-collar workers, however, adult education centres are more accessible. In the future, it should be observed whether the growing orientation of adult education centres to formally accredited education, validation and education that (ostensibly) promises advancement increases the exclusion of people with low levels of education. (DIPF/Orig.

Triangular grids

A novel wetting and drying treatment for second‐order Runge‐Kutta discontinuous Galerkin methods solving the nonlinear shallow‐water equations is proposed. It is developed for general conforming two‐dimensional triangular meshes and utilizes a slope limiting strategy to accurately model inundation. The method features a nondestructive limiter, which concurrently meets the requirements for linear stability and wetting and drying. It further combines existing approaches for positivity preservation and well balancing with an innovative velocity‐based limiting of the momentum. This limiting controls spurious velocities in the vicinity of the wet/dry interface. It leads to a computationally stable and robust scheme, even on unstructured grids, and allows for large time steps in combination with explicit time integrators. The scheme comprises only one free parameter, to which it is not sensitive in terms of stability. A number of numerical test cases, ranging from analytical tests to near‐realistic laboratory benchmarks, demonstrate the performance of the method for inundation applications. In particular, superlinear convergence, mass conservation, well balancedness, and stability are verified

The dangerous others. Neoliberalism and the age of pandemics. A confrontation and escalation

Im Zentrum des vorliegenden Beitrags steht die These, dass Neoliberalismus und „Pandemie-Politik“ deutliche Parallelen aufweisen. Merkmale des Neoliberalismus wie radikaler Individualismus, die Beförderung von Isolation und Vereinsamung, ein kurzsichtiges, profitorientiertes Denken oder das Abtun von Krankheit oder Schwäche als selbstverschuldet kamen aus der Sicht des Autors auch im Pandemie-Management äußerst klar zum Vorschein. So geschehen etwa in der speziellen Eindringlichkeit des Rufs nach Social Distancing, in immer wieder aufgetauchten Forderungen nach einer Streichung der Sozialleistungen für Nicht-Geimpfte oder bei der Suche nach einzelnen „Unverantwortlichen“ und „Superspreadern“, die das Virus verbreiten. Die gesetzten Maßnahmen sollten zum Schutz »des Lebens« dienen. Dabei wurde aber nicht gefragt, wessen Leben geschützt werden soll, wer dabei vergessen wird und was der Preis für die gesetzten Maßnahmen ist. Resultat sind zahlreiche gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen und offene Fragen, die wiederum potenzielle Arbeitsfelder politischer Bildung sind: das „Auspressen“ der Welt, ein Lockdown der Kultur, der Freiheit und des Wohlfahrtsstaates, Solidarität als Bringschuld, radikale Individualisierung, Spaltung und nicht zuletzt eine Politik der Angst. (DIPF/Orig.)The thesis of this article is that neoliberalism and „pandemic politics“ have significant parallels. The author finds that features of neoliberalism such as radical individualism, the promotion of isolation and loneliness, shortsighted and profit-oriented thinking or the dismissal of illness or weakness as one‘s own fault also came to light very clearly in how the pandemic was managed. For example, this is what has happened in the special forcefulness of the call for social distancing, in the recurring demands for elimination of social benefits for the unvaccinated or in the search for „irresponsible“ individuals and „superspreaders“ who spread the virus. The measures should serve to protect „life.“ However, questions that have not been asked are whose life should be protected, who has been forgotten and what the price of the measures is. The result is that there are numerous social challenges and open questions, which in turn are potential fields of work for political education: the „squeezing dry“ of the world; a lockdown of culture, freedom and the welfare state; solidarity as an obligation; radical individualization; societal division and last but not least a politics of fear. (DIPF/Orig.

As if everything could be controlled by calculation. On the idea of the measurability of impacts in the field of education

„Tyranny is always better organized than Freedom!“ – mit diesem Zitat des Franzosen Charles Peguy (1959) schließt der vorliegende Beitrag in Anlehnung an Heinz-Dieter Meyers 2017 gehaltenen Vortrag „The Big Shift in Education“. Diese Verschiebung, die Evidenz und Messbarkeit zu den „neuen Kardinaltugenden“ im Bildungsbereich erhob, wird dabei nicht nur als von internationalen Konzernen und Agenturen befeuert skizziert. Hinterfragt wird vorliegend auch, warum wir vergleichen. Die Antwort scheint simpel: Weil wir es können oder glauben, es zu können, und weil wir Zahlen zur besseren Orientierung nutzen wollen. Jedoch: Was nicht messbar ist, bleibt dann auch unterbelichtet und unterfinanziert, existiert schlicht nicht oder bald nicht mehr und ist auch nicht so gut geeignet, um damit Geld zu verdienen. Für die verantwortlich gemachten Lehrenden bedeutet das oft eine Verschiebung vom „hast du verstanden?“ zu „wirst du den Test bestehen?“. Pädagogische Rationalität, so das Schlussplädoyer des Autors, ist aber nicht ausschließlich ziel- oder outputorientiert. Emanzipatorische Bildung ist ein Prozess ohne klares und immer gleiches Endziel. (DIPF/Orig.)„Tyranny is always better organized than Freedom!“ This quote by Frenchman Charles Peguy (1959) concludes this article in reference to Heinz-Dieter Meyer‘s lecture „The Big Shift in Education“ held in 2017. This shift that elevated evidence and measurability to the „new cardinal virtues“ in the field of education is not only sketched as being fuelled by international corporations and agencies. The question of why we compare is also examined. The answer seems simple: because we can or believe we can and because we want to use numbers to orient ourselves better. However: What cannot be measured remains underexposed and underfunded; it simply does not exist or will soon cease to exist and is also not good for making money. For the teachers and instructors made responsible for measurement, this often means a shift from „Did you understand?“ to „Will you pass the test?“ The author concludes by arguing that pedagogic rationality is not exclusively goal- or output-oriented. Emancipatory education is a process without a clear destination and the same old goal. (DIPF/Orig.

An adaptive discontinuous Galerkin method for the simulation of hurricane storm surge

Numerical simulations based on solving the 2D shallow water equations using a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretisation have evolved to be a viable tool for many geophysical applications. In the context of flood modelling, however, they have not yet been methodologically studied to a large extent. Systematic model testing is non-trivial as no comprehensive collection of numerical test cases exists to ensure the correctness of the implementation. Hence, the first part of this manuscript aims at collecting test cases from the literature that are generally useful for storm surge modellers and can be used to benchmark codes. On geographic scale, hurricane storm surge can be interpreted as a localised phenomenon making it ideally suited for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). Past studies employing dynamic AMR have exclusively focused on nested meshes. For that reason, we have developed a DG storm surge model on a triangular and dynamically adaptive mesh. In order to increase computational efficiency, the refinement is driven by physics-based refinement indicators capturing major model sensitivities. Using idealised numerical test cases, we demonstrate the model’s ability to correctly represent all source terms and reproduce known variability of coastal flooding with respect to hurricane characteristics such as size and approach speed. Finally, the adaptive mesh significantly reduces computing time with no effect on storm waves measured at discrete wave gauges just off the coast which shows the model’s potential for use as a robust simulation tool for real-time predictions

An Experimental and Numerical Study of Long Wave Run-Up on a Plane Beach

This research is to facilitate the current understanding of long wave dynamics at coasts and during on-land propagation, experimental and numerical approaches are compared against existing analytical expressions for the long wave run-up. Leading depression sinusoidal waves are chosen to model these dynamics. The experimental study was conducted using a new pump-driven wave generator and the numerical experiments were carried out with a one-dimensional discontinuous Galerkin non-linear shallow water model. The numerical model is able to accurately reproduce the run-up elevation and velocities predicted by the theoretical expressions. Depending on the surf similarity of the generated waves and due to imperfections of the experimental wave generation, riding waves are observed in the experimental results. These artifacts can also be confirmed in the numerical study when the data from the physical experiments is assimilated. Qualitatively, scale effects associated with the experimental setting are discussed. Finally, shoreline velocities, run-up and run-down are determined and shown to largely agree with analytical predictions

Rezensionen

Rezensionen zu: 1) Behringer, Friederike; Käpplinger, Bernd; Pätzold, Günter (Hrsg.): Betriebliche Weiterbildung - der Continuing Vocational Training (CVTS) im Spiegel nationaler und europäischer Perspektiven. Stuttgart: Steiner 2009. ISBN 978-3-515-09367-5. 2) Budde, Jürgen; Venth, Angela: Genderkompetenz für lebenslanges Lernen: Bildungsprozesse geschlechterorientiert gestalten. Bielefeld: W. Bertelsmann Verl. 2010. ISBN 978-3-7639-1978-9. 3) Derichs-Kunstmann, Karin; Kaschuba, Gerrit; Lange, Ralf; Schnier, Victoria (Hrsg.): Gender-Kompetenz für die Bildungsarbeit: Konzepte - Erfahrungen - Analysen - Konsequenzen. Recklinghausen: FIAB-Verl. 2009. ISBN 978-3-925724-57-2. 4) Klingovsky, Ulla: Schöne Neue Lernkultur. Transformationen der Macht in der Weiterbildung: eine gouvernementalitätstheoretische Analyse. Bielefeld: transcript Verl. 2009. ISBN 978-3-8376-1162-5. 5) Kronauer, Martin (Hrsg.): Inklusion und Weiterbildung: Reflexionen zur gesellschaftlichen Teilhabe in der Gegenwart. Bielefeld: W. Bertelsmann Verl. 2010. ISBN 987-3-7639-1964-2. 6) Maier-Gutheil, Cornelia: Zwischen Beratung und Begutachtung: pädagogische Professionalität in der Existenzgründungsberatung. Wiesbaden: VS Verl. f. Sozialwiss. 2009. ISBN 978-3-531-16588-2

Janus—a comprehensive tool investigating the two faces of transcription

Motivation: Protocols to generate strand-specific transcriptomes with next-generation sequencing platforms have been used by the scientific community roughly since 2008. Strand-specific reads allow for detection of antisense events and a higher resolution of expression profiles enabling extension of current transcript annotations. However, applications making use of this strandedness information are still scarce. Results: Here we present a tool (Janus), which focuses on the identification of transcriptional active regions in antisense orientation to known and novel transcribed elements of the genome. Janus can compare the antisense events of multiple samples and assigns scores to identify mutual expression of either transcript in a sense/antisense pair, which could hint to regulatory mechanisms. Janus is able to make use of single-nucleotide variant (SNV) and methylation data, if available, and reports the sense to antisense ratio of regions in the vicinity of the identified genetic and epigenetic variation. Janus interrogates positions of heterozygous SNVs to identify strand-specific allelic imbalance. Availability: Janus is written in C/C++ and freely available at http://www.ikmb.uni-kiel.de/janus/janus.html under terms of GNU General Public License, for both, Linux and Windows 64×. Although the binaries will work without additional downloads, the software depends on bamtools (https://github.com/pezmaster31/bamtools) for compilation. A detailed tutorial section is included in the first section of the supplemental material and included as brief readme.txt in the tutorial archive. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin

A comprehensive microarray-based DNA methylation study of 367 hematological neoplasms

Background: Alterations in the DNA methylation pattern are a hallmark of leukemias and lymphomas. However, most epigenetic studies in hematologic neoplasms (HNs) have focused either on the analysis of few candidate genes or many genes and few HN entities, and comprehensive studies are required. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here, we report for the first time a microarray-based DNA methylation study of 767 genes in 367 HNs diagnosed with 16 of the most representative B-cell (n = 203), T-cell (n = 30), and myeloid (n = 134) neoplasias, as well as 37 samples from different cell types of the hematopoietic system. Using appropriate controls of B-, T-, or myeloid cellular origin, we identified a total of 220 genes hypermethylated in at least one HN entity. In general, promoter hypermethylation was more frequent in lymphoid malignancies than in myeloid malignancies, being germinal center mature B-cell lymphomas as well as B and T precursor lymphoid neoplasias those entities with highest frequency of gene-associated DNA hypermethylation. We also observed a significant correlation between the number of hypermethylated and hypomethylated genes in several mature B-cell neoplasias, but not in precursor B- and T-cell leukemias. Most of the genes becoming hypermethylated contained promoters with high CpG content, and a significant fraction of them are targets of the polycomb repressor complex. Interestingly, T-cell prolymphocytic leukemias show low levels of DNA hypermethylation and a comparatively large number of hypomethylated genes, many of them showing an increased gene expression. Conclusions/Significance: We have characterized the DNA methylation profile of a wide range of different HNs entities. As well as identifying genes showing aberrant DNA methylation in certain HN subtypes, we also detected six genes—DBC1, DIO3, FZD9, HS3ST2, MOS, and MYOD1—that were significantly hypermethylated in B-cell, T-cell, and myeloid malignancies. These might therefore play an important role in the development of different HNs