Inventing a Capitalist Region: Upper Silesia/Poland - Economic Transformations in Old-Industrial and Post-Socialist Spaces of Central and Eastern Europe

The thesis explores economic, political and social processes in former socialist countries with a case study in one of the biggest conurbations in Europe, Upper Silesia. The ongoing but selective economic processes of global and macro-regional economic integration have been identified as a main issue in geographical research. In particular the nexus between the global and the local seen as a dialectical relationship, composed of multiple and asymmetric interdependencies has stressed the necessity of utilising relational analysis in economic geography. The question emerges in what ways and to what extent increasing economic integration may lead to a socio-economic convergence of places or the development of 'indigenous capacities', spatial peculiarities and legacies to establish themselves in capitalist networks of production. With empirical reference to the Polish conurbation of Upper Silesia and drawing on the analytical framework from Michael Storper's 'Holy Trinity' ("The Regional World", New York, 1997), this thesis analyses post socialist urban and regional transformations from three angles. 1. While Storper analysed mainly 'successful' regions in the West, the research tries to identify the main challenges that face any simple attempt to adapt western (theoretical) approaches within a post-socialist, Central East European context. 2. The thesis then identifies the fabric of political economic actors and the path dependent 'invention' of a region, here Upper Silesia, and analysis locally and regionally embedded and recombined informal institutions and their capacity for restructuring of an old industrial space. 3. While inter- and intra-regional competition is growing in an 'era of globalisation', the thesis finally investigates the scope for action and 'reflexive' interrelations between administrative, political and economic actors in an 'ordinary region' prior to the accession to the European Union

New criteria for the H∞H^\infty-calculus and the Stokes operator on bounded Lipschitz domains

We show that the Stokes operator A on the Helmholtz space Lp (Ω) for a bounded Lipschitz domain Ω ⊂ Rd, d ≥ 3, has a bounded H ∞- calculus if |1p − 1/2| ≤ 1/2d . Our proof uses a new comparison theorem A and the Dirichlet Laplace −∆ on Lp(Ω)d, which is based on “off-diagonal” estimates of the Littlewood-Paley decompositions of A and −∆. This comparison theorem can be formulated for rather general sectorial operators and is well suited to extrapolate the H ∞-calculus from L2(U ) to the Lp(U )-scale or part of it. It also gives some information on coincidence of domains of fractional powers

Real Estate Value and Growth Stocks - Evidence from Global Capital Markets

This dissertation provides comprehensive empirical evidence (three papers) on a global panel of real estate value and growth stocksfrom the most significant real estate operating companies (REOCs) and real estate investment trusts (REITs) in the world. The basic concept here is to categorize listed real estate stocks according to the deviations of their stock prices from their underlyingnet asset values (NAV spread). In this vein, the stocks are designated as either real estate value or growth stock. As a result, this dissertation empirically proves that these deviations can be exploited by investors to achieve a value premium over growth stocks (value investing strategy). Furthermore the dissertation provides evidence on the link between NAV spreadsand idiosyncratic as well as systematic (e.g. interest rates) factors

Colorimetric Stimuli-Responsive Hydrogel Polymers for the Detection of Nerve Agent Surrogates

The threat of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) necessitates the development of functional materials that not only quickly detect the presence of CWAs but also actively protect against their toxicity. We have synthesized responsive units that exhibit colorimetric responses upon exposure to CWAs and incorporated them into a versatile detection platform based on copolymers prepared by ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP). The theoretical detection limits for CWA simulants in solution for these polymers are as low as 1 ppm. By incorporating hydrogel-promoting units as pendant chains, we are able to obtain polymers that instantly respond to CWA vapors and are easy to regenerate to the deactivated state by simple treatment with ammonium hydroxide vapor. We further demonstrate a collapse of the polymer gels in response to trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), a strong acid that produces a more fully ionized state as a result of its more caustic nature.United States. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Chemical and Biological Technologies Department (Grant BA12PHM123

Temperature dependence of the hydrogen bond network in Trimethylamine N-oxide and guanidine hydrochloride - water solutions

We present an X-ray Compton scattering study on aqueous Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) and guanidine hydrochloride solutions (GdnHCl) as a function of temperature. Independent from the concentration of the solvent, Compton profiles almost resemble results for liquid water as a function of temperature. However, The number of hydrogen bonds per water molecule extracted from the Compton profiles suggests a decrease of hydrogen bonds with rising temperatures for all studied samples, the differences between water and the solutions are weak. Nevertheless, the data indicate a reduced bond weakening with rising TMAO concentration up to 5M of 7.2% compared to 8 % for pure water. In contrast, the addition of GdnHCl appears to behave differently for concentrations up to 3.1 M with a weaker impact on the temperature response of the hydrogen bond structure

« Britain’s best kept secret » : la machine Enigma et le décodage des messages durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale

L’Enigma et ses cylindres permutables (Coll. Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart) © et cliché Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart / Larissa Arlt Un des plus grands mystères de la Seconde Guerre mondiale fut le décodage réussi des messages radio que les Allemands avaient cryptés grâce à la machine à coder « Enigma » (voir ill. ci-dessus). Jürgen Rohwer, ancien directeur de la Bibliothèque d’histoire contemporaine (Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte–BfZ), s’est livré à des recherche..

Crystal Structure of the Hexamerization Domain of N-ethylmaleimide–Sensitive Fusion Protein

AbstractN-ethylmaleimide–sensitive fusion protein (NSF) is a cytosolic ATPase required for many intracellular vesicle fusion reactions. NSF consists of an amino-terminal region that interacts with other components of the vesicle trafficking machinery, followed by two homologous ATP-binding cassettes, designated D1 and D2, that possess essential ATPase and hexamerization activities, respectively. The crystal structure of D2 bound to Mg2PLUSPUSSIGN-AMPPNP has been determined at 1.75 Å resolution. The structure consists of a nucleotide-binding and a helical domain, and it is unexpectedly similar to the first two domains of the clamp-loading subunit δ′ of E. coli DNA polymerase III. The structure suggests several regions responsible for coupling of ATP hydrolysis to structural changes in full-length NSF

Venice through the canals of time: Mapping the physical evolution of the city

Venice is a city that has undergone many changes since it was first settled. Today, Venice is made up of 123 islands, but that has not always been the case; the islands themselves have evolved over time. This project sought to reconstruct the evolution of the city through analysis of maps, manuscripts, and archaeological records in order to rebuild the morphology of the islands. The reconstruction was then utilized to create three web-based applications to publicly display the information

Multiversioning hardware transactional memory for fail-operational multithreaded applications

Modern safety-critical embedded applications like autonomous driving need to be fail-operational, while high performance and low power consumption are demanded simultaneously. The prevalent fault tolerance mechanisms suffer from disadvantages: Some (e.g. triple modular redundancy) require a substantial amount of duplication, resulting in high hardware costs and power consumption. Others, like lockstep, require supplementary checkpointing mechanisms to recover from errors. Further approaches (e.g. software-based process-level redundancy) cannot handle the indeterminism caused by multithreaded execution. This paper presents a novel approach for fail-operational systems using hardware transactional memory for embedded systems. The hardware transactional memory is extended to support multiple versions, enabling redundant atomic operations and recovery in case of an error. In our FPGA-based evaluation, we executed the PARSEC benchmark suite with fault tolerance on 12 cores. The evaluation shows that multiversioning can successfully recover from all transient errors with an overhead comparable to fault tolerance mechanisms without recovery