Unfinished revolutions: The post-Soviet crisis of governance in Ukraine

None of the three revolutions in Ukraine's modern history as an independent state has been able to both solve the problem of political representation and undertake the task of building sustainable democratic institutions. Ukraine's scores from the Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) between 2000 and 2019 show the ups and downs of state capacity and democratic accountability and illustrate not only how the revolutions remain unfinished but also how the country seems to be unable to consistently advance state formation. Ukraine has yet to find a stable developmental path. Accordingly, BGI scores show that Ukrainian politics and society continue to have difficulty advancing towards a corridor of good governance, where state capacity and accountability reinforce each other and enhance public goods provision. Instead, Ukraine is alternating between authoritarian and democratic development patterns. However, the Russian invasion that began on 24 February 2022 has contributed to uniting and consolidating Ukrainian society and politics and could considerably push the nation-building process forward

Debunking the autocratic fallacy? Improving public goods delivery in Russia

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not only deeply challenged Russia's international standing but has also endangered its fragile domestic order. Data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index reveals that overall state capacity has been stagnating at a fairly low level since the beginning of the millennium, while democratic accountability has been declining steadily and profoundly. In contrast, the provision of public goods has strongly increased during the same period. This puts the assumption of the ‘autocratic fallacy’—the idea that sustained public goods delivery relies on democratic accountability in the long run—to the test. We argue that Russia's resource abundance allowed for the maintenance of a regime-supporting social contract with the population. However, the basis of that contract has changed significantly due to economic decline, fired by, among other factors, several waves of sanctions and the costs of war and will press the Russian government to find urgent solutions to sustain a high level of public goods provision under such unfavourable conditions

Risk Measures and Upper Probabilities: Coherence and Stratification

Machine learning typically presupposes classical probability theory which implies that aggregation is built upon expectation. There are now multiple reasons to motivate looking at richer alternatives to classical probability theory as a mathematical foundation for machine learning. We systematically examine a powerful and rich class of alternative aggregation functionals, known variously as spectral risk measures, Choquet integrals or Lorentz norms. We present a range of characterization results, and demonstrate what makes this spectral family so special. In doing so we arrive at a natural stratification of all coherent risk measures in terms of the upper probabilities that they induce by exploiting results from the theory of rearrangement invariant Banach spaces. We empirically demonstrate how this new approach to uncertainty helps tackling practical machine learning problems

Tailoring to the Tails: Risk Measures for Fine-Grained Tail Sensitivity

Expected risk minimization (ERM) is at the core of many machine learning systems. This means that the risk inherent in a loss distribution is summarized using a single number - its average. In this paper, we propose a general approach to construct risk measures which exhibit a desired tail sensitivity and may replace the expectation operator in ERM. Our method relies on the specification of a reference distribution with a desired tail behaviour, which is in a one-to-one correspondence to a coherent upper probability. Any risk measure, which is compatible with this upper probability, displays a tail sensitivity which is finely tuned to the reference distribution. As a concrete example, we focus on divergence risk measures based on f-divergence ambiguity sets, which are a widespread tool used to foster distributional robustness of machine learning systems. For instance, we show how ambiguity sets based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence are intricately tied to the class of subexponential random variables. We elaborate the connection of divergence risk measures and rearrangement invariant Banach norms.Comment: Made multiple minor edit

Thermal Quantum Fields without Cut-offs in 1+1 Space-time Dimensions

We construct interacting quantum fields in 1+1 dimensional Minkowski space, representing neutral scalar bosons at positive temperature. Our work is based on prior work by Klein and Landau and Hoegh-KrohnComment: 48 page

Low-Cost Image Generation for Immersive Multi-Screen Environments

Rabe F, Fröhlich C, Latoschik ME. Low-Cost Image Generation for Immersive Multi-Screen Environments. In: Latoschik ME, Fröhlich B, eds. Virtuelle und Erweiterte Realität – 4. Workshop der GI-Fachgruppe VR/AR. Aachen, Germany: Shaker; 2007: 65-76.This paper describes the configuration of a cost-efficient monolithic render server aimed at multi-screen Virtual Reality display devices. The system uses common Of-The-Shelf (OTS) PC components and feeds up to 6 independent screens via 3 graphics pipes with the potential to feed up to 12 screens. The internal graphics accelerators each use at least 8 PCIe lanes which results in sufficient bandwidth. Performance measurements are provided for several benchmarks which compare the system's performance to well established network based render clusters

Semantische Modellierung virtueller Umgebungen auf Basis einer modularen Simulationsarchitektur

Fröhlich C. Semantische Modellierung virtueller Umgebungen auf Basis einer modularen Simulationsarchitektur. Bielefeld: Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld; 2014

In kleinen Schritten zur gesellschaftlichen Teilhabe? Die gegenwärtige Lage von Menschen mit Behinderungen in Russland

Menschen mit Behinderungen sind in Russland gesellschaftlich immer noch wenig integriert. Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt eine Bestandsaufnahme vor und zeigt, was sich für behinderte Menschen seit Russlands Ratifizierung der UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention (UN-BRK) im Jahr 2012 verändert hat und welche Barrieren der gesellschaftlichen Teilhabe immer noch bestehen. Zwar gibt es Gesetzesreformen und es entsteht sowohl auf staatlicher als auch auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene ein stärkeres Bewusstsein für die Lage von Menschen mit Behinderungen. Die praktische Umsetzung der Reformen ist jedoch weiterhin mangelhaft

Internationale Förderung und politische Kultur in der russischen Zivilgesellschaft: Das Beispiel der NGOs in der Behindertenhilfe

Am Beispiel von Hilfe für Menschen mit Behinderungen wird gezeigt, dass internationale Förderung russischer NGOs zwar ein wichtiges Standbein zivilgesellschaftlicher Entwicklung in Russland ist. Doch aufgrund eines selektiven Modus der Partnerwahl und des Transfers von inhaltlichen und strukturellen Charakteristika westlicher Institutionen spaltet sich die russische NGO-Gemeinschaft entlang der Bewerbungserfolge bei internationaler Unterstützung. Während westlich geförderte NGOs ihre Prioritäten hin zu Menschenrechtsaktivitäten und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit verschieben und damit den Widerstand staatlicher Strukturen heraufbeschwören, halten die nicht geförderten NGOs an einer sozialen Partnerschaft mit dem Staat fest, die aber wenig Erfolge bei der sozialen Integration marginalisierter Bevölkerungsgruppen verzeichnet

Sub-Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability?

The countries of the Sub-Saharan region have, on average, made significant progress in governance performance, especially in terms of democratic accountability and public goods provision—findings that seem to contradict patterns of state fragility and economic underdevelopment common in the region. This article explores this seeming contradiction and presents in more detail findings from the Berggruen Governance Index regarding the governance performance of five countries, namely Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Lagging state capacity and growing sovereign debt emerge as critical factors, and the article suggests that they may be responsible for the inability of many countries in the region to consolidate gains in governance as well as economic performance