The European Union and its efforts concerning the harmonisation of copyright law

The increasingly accelerating process of integration in the whole European area causes a tremendous amount of problems in different sections of social, economic and political life. The solutions to all these integration related problems have one thing in common: they all need to be based on a solid ground of EU-laws, which are applied and enforced in every Member State. This so important because otherwise the measures taken by the EU institutions are completely useless. That leads to the observation that in every area of conflicts due to the application of different domestic laws a harmonisation is required. Harmonising EU laws adopted by the competent EU institutions have a crucial key role in the achievement of complete integration of every Member State in every conflict area, whatever that might be. One of these areas is the protection of copyrights. The value of the protection of copyrights must not be underestimated. The EU Commission assessed that the contribution of the copyright-related products and services to the EU-wide gross national product is about 5 %. In contradiction to this great value of copyright-related products and services the EU institutions started very late to scrutinise the different issues which might have to be solved in this context. Especially the issues, which are due to different levels of protection of copyrights in different Member States, started being solved by the adoption of harmonising directives. The first directive was adopted on 14 May 1991. This dissertation intends to scrutinise the commencement and the continuity of the harmonisation process in the area of copyrights in the EU. This scrutiny shall be embedded in the context of the development of the European Union as a such and the functioning of its institutions and the harmonisation of laws in the EU in general. A sound overview about these different areas of the European Union and the process of harmonisation concerning the harmonisation of national copyright laws shall be given

Using the SkelCL Library for High-Level GPU Programming of 2D Applications

Application programming for GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) is complex and error-prone, because the popular approaches — CUDA and OpenCL — are intrinsically low-level and offer no special support for systems consisting of multiple GPUs. The SkelCL library offers pre-implemented recurring computation and communication patterns (skeletons) which greatly simplify programming for single- and multi-GPU systems. In this paper, we focus on applications that work on two-dimensional data. We extend SkelCL by the matrix data type and the MapOverlap skeleton which specifies computations that depend on neighboring elements in a matrix. The abstract data types and a high-level data (re)distribution mechanism of SkelCL shield the programmer from the low-level data transfers between the system’s main memory and multiple GPUs. We demonstrate how the extended SkelCL is used to implement real-world image processing applications on two-dimensional data. We show that both from a productivity and a performance point of view it is beneficial to use the high-level abstractions of SkelCL

High-level programming of stencil computations on multi-GPU systems using the SkelCL library

The implementation of stencil computations on modern, massively parallel systems with GPUs and other accelerators currently relies on manually-tuned coding using low-level approaches like OpenCL and CUDA. This makes development of stencil applications a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone task. We describe how stencil computations can be programmed in our SkelCL approach that combines high-level programming abstractions with competitive performance on multi-GPU systems. SkelCL extends the OpenCL standard by three high-level features: 1) pre-implemented parallel patterns (a.k.a. skeletons); 2) container data types for vectors and matrices; 3) automatic data (re)distribution mechanism. We introduce two new SkelCL skeletons which specifically target stencil computations – MapOverlap and Stencil – and we describe their use for particular application examples, discuss their efficient parallel implementation, and report experimental results on systems with multiple GPUs. Our evaluation of three real-world applications shows that stencil code written with SkelCL is considerably shorter and offers competitive performance to hand-tuned OpenCL code

LEADERSHIP AND DIGITALIZATION: CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TOWARDS LEADING IN THE MODERN DAY WORKPLACE

The objectives of this research article are to shed light on the recent developments in management in a digital environment as well as the related challenges and opportunities in this matter. Thus, transformational leadership as the basis for the current change processes will be described. Afterwards a theoretical review of the current developments towards an entirely new digital leadership approach will be conducted by reviewing the current state of research on this topic. These theoretical key findings will then finally result in an overview of the success factors and needed characteristics of today’s digital leaders

Study of structure and composition of micro arc lantanum-siliconincorporated calcium phosphate coatings

The lanthanum- silicon-incorporated calcium phosphate coatings on the titanium have porous X-Ray amorphous structure. The increase of the process voltage leads to the growth of thickness and structural elements and to the formation in the coatings of crystalline phases CaHPO4 and β-Ca2P2O7

Control concepts for articulatory speech synthesis

We present two concepts for the generation of gestural scores to control an articulatory speech synthesizer. Gestural scores are the common input to the synthesizer and constitute an or- ganized pattern of articulatory gestures. The first concept gen- erates the gestures for an utterance using the phonetic transcrip- tions, phone durations, and intonation commands predicted by the Bonn Open Synthesis System (BOSS) from an arbitrary in- put text. This concept extends the synthesizerto a text-to-speech synthesis system. The idea of the second concept is to use tim- ing informationextracted from ElectromagneticArticulography signals to generate the articulatory gestures. Therefore, it is a concept for the re-synthesis of natural utterances. Finally, ap- plication prospects for the presented synthesizer are discussed

Data Linking - Linking survey data with geospatial, social media, and sensor data (Version 1.0)

Survey data are still the most commonly used type of data in the quantitative social sciences. However, as not everything that is of interest to social scientists can be measured via surveys, and the self-report data they provide have certain limitations, such as recollection or social desirability bias, researchers have increasingly used other types of data that are not specifically created for research. These data are often called "found data" or "non-designed data" and encompass a variety of different data types. Naturally, these data have their own sets of limitations. One way of combining the unique strengths of survey data and these other data types and dealing with some of their respective limitations is to link them. This guideline first describes why linking survey data with other types of data can be useful for researchers. After that, it focuses on the linking of survey data with three types of data that are becoming increasingly popular in the social sciences: geospatial data, social media data, and sensor data. Following a discussion of the advantages and challenges associated with linking survey data with these types of data, the guideline concludes by comparing their similarities, presenting some general recommendations regarding linking surveys with other types of (found/non-designed) data, and providing an outlook on current developments in survey research with regard to data linking

La domination rationnelle.À propos d’une catégorie de Max Weber

Dans la première partie de l’article, il s’agit de montrer que la domination rationnelle ne procède pas de l’institutionnalisation de la rationalité téléologique, mais constitue une forme sui generis qui se caractérise par une combinaison de systématicité et de volontarisme. Dans la deuxième partie, on verra que cette combinaison est apparue dans un contexte historique spécifique : la percée du capitalisme moderne en Angleterre et les vagues de modernisation du système politico-administratif ..

Personalbezogene Herausforderungen in der Organisationsentwicklung von KMU : Die Mitarbeiterbefragung als Werkzeug in der Organisationsentwicklung am Beispiel eines deutschen mittelständischen Unternehmens

Die Unternehmensführung gilt aufgrund der immer dynamischer werdenden Entwicklungen in der Unternehmensumwelt heute als so herausfordernd wie niemals zuvor. Die hieraus resultierenden Anpassungs- und Veränderungsnotwendigkeiten in der Organisation der Unternehmen lassen dem wissenschaftlichen Themengebiet der Organisationsentwicklung eine immer stärker werdende Bedeutung zukommen. Da dieses Themenfeld maßgeblich von den Mitarbeitern der Unternehmen beeinflusst und getragen wird, steht das Erzielen von Erkenntnissen von und in Bezug auf die Mitarbeiter eines Unternehmens im zentralen Fokus der Unternehmensführung. Die Mitarbeiterbefragung gilt somit als wichtiges Werkzeug im Rahmen der Organisationsentwicklung. Die Ergebnisse einer Mitarbeiterbefragung sollen das Unternehmen und die Unternehmensführung in die Lage versetzen, Veränderungsnotwendigkeiten im Unternehmen zu erkennen und folglich entsprechende Veränderungsprozesse zu initiieren. Hierdurch wird die besondere Bedeutung von Mitarbeiterbefragungen deutlich. Der Mittelstand, welcher insbesondere in Zukunfts- und Wachstumsmärkten durch die zuvor beschriebene Dynamik vor besonderen organisatorischen Herausforderungen steht, gilt hier als betrachtungswürdig. Mittelständische Unternehmen gelten zwar grundsätzlich als wettbewerbsfähig, sind in Ihrer organisatorischen Entwicklung allerdings oftmals aufgrund der begrenzt zur Verfügung stehenden administrativen Ressourcen und der fehlenden strategischen Ausrichtung rückständig. In der vorliegenden Untersuchung wird der Einsatz der Mitarbeiterbefragung zum Zwecke der Organisationsentwicklung am Beispiel eines mittelständischen deutschen Unternehmens dargestellt