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Since more and more business tasks are enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based techniques, the number of knowledge-intensive tasks increase as trivial tasks can be automated and non-trivial tasks demand human-machine interactions. With this, challenges regarding the management of knowledge workers and machines rise [9]. Furthermore, knowledge workers experience time pressure, which can lead to a decrease in output quality. Artificial Intelligence-based systems (AIS) have the potential to assist human workers in knowledge-intensive work. By providing a domain-specific language, contextual and situational awareness as well as their process embedding can be specified, which enables the management of human and AIS to ease knowledge transfer in a way that process time, cost and quality are improved significantly. This contribution outlines a framework to designing these systems and accounts for their implementation.
Process models are the basic ingredient for many attempts to improve business processes. The graphical depiction of otherwise not observable behavior in an enterprise is one of the most important techniques in the digital society. They help to enable decision making in the design of processes and workflows. Nevertheless it is not easy to correctly model business processes. Some approaches try to detect errors by an automated analysis of the process model. This contribution focuses on the creation of the first model from scratch. Which errors occur most frequently and how can these be avoided?
Faced with the triad of time-cost-quality, the realization of knowledge-intensive tasks at economic conditions is not trivial. Since the number of knowledge-intensive processes is increasing more and more nowadays, the efficient design of knowledge transfers at business processes as well as the target-oriented improvement of them is essential, so that process outcomes satisfy high quality criteria and economic requirements. This particularly challenges knowledge management, aiming for the assignment of ideal manifestations of influence factors on knowledge transfers to a certain task. Faced with first attempts of knowledge transfer-based process improvements [1], this paper continues research about the quantitative examination of knowledge transfers and presents a ready-to-go experiment design that is able to examine quality of knowledge transfers empirically and is suitable to examine knowledge transfers on a quantitative level. Its use is proven by the example of four influence factors, which namely are stickiness, complexity, competence and time pressure.
Industry 4.0, i.e. the connection of cyber-physical systems via the Internet in production and logistics, leads to considerable changes in the socio-technical system of the factory. The effects range from a considerable need for further training, which is exacerbated by the current shortage of skilled workers, to an opening of the previously inaccessible boundaries of the factory to third-party access, an increasing merging of office IT and manufacturing IT, and a new understanding of what machines can do with their data. This results in new requirements for the modeling, analysis and design of information processing and performance mapping business processes.
In the past, procedures were developed under the name of “process-oriented knowledge management” with which the exchange and use of knowledge in business processes could be represented, analyzed and improved. However, these approaches were limited to the office environment. A method that makes it possible to document, analyze and jointly optimize the new possibilities of knowledge processing by using artificial intelligence and machine learning in production and logistics in the same way and in a manner compatible with the approach in the office environment does not exist so far. The extension of the modeling language KMDL, which is described in this paper, will contribute to close this research gap.
This paper describes first approaches for an analysis and design method for a knowledge management integrating man and machine in the age of Industry 4.0.
Manufacturing companies still have relatively few points of contact with the circular economy. Especially, extending life time of whole products or parts via remanufacturing is an promising approach to reduce waste. However, necessary cost-efficient assessment of the condition of the individual parts is challenging and assessment procedures are technically complex (e.g., scanning and testing procedures). Furthermore, these assessment procedures are usually only available after the disassembly process has been completed. This is where conceptualization, data acquisition and simulation of remanufacturing processes can help. One major constraining aspect of remanufacturing is reducing logistic efforts, since these also have negative external effects on the environment. Thus regionalization is an additional but in the end consequential challenge for remanufacturing. This article aims to fill a gap by providing an regional remanufacturing approach, in particular the design of local remanufacturing chains. Thereby, further focus lies on modeling and simulating alternative courses of action, including feasibility study and eco-nomic assessment.
Since more and more production tasks are enabled by Industry 4.0 techniques, the number of knowledge-intensive production tasks increases as trivial tasks can be automated and only non-trivial tasks demand human-machine interactions. With this, challenges regarding the competence of production workers, the complexity of tasks and stickiness of required knowledge occur [1]. Furthermore, workers experience time pressure which can lead to a decrease in output quality. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have the potential to assist workers in knowledge-intensive work grounded on quantitative insights about knowledge transfer activities [2]. By providing contextual and situational awareness as well as complex classification and selection algorithms, CPS are able to ease knowledge transfer in a way that production time and quality is improved significantly. CPS have only been used for direct production and process optimization, knowledge transfers have only been regarded in assistance systems with little contextual awareness. Embedding production and knowledge transfer optimization thus show potential for further improvements. This contribution outlines the requirements and a framework to design these systems. It accounts for the relevant factors.
From employee to expert
(2021)
In the context of the collaborative project Ageing-appropriate, process-oriented and interactive further training in SME (API-KMU), innovative solutions for the challenges of demographic change and digitalisation are being developed for SMEs. To this end, an approach to age-appropriate training will be designed with the help of AR technology. In times of the corona pandemic, a special research design is necessary for the initial survey of the current state in the companies, which will be systematically elaborated in this paper. The results of the previous methodological considerations illustrate the necessity of a mix of methods to generate a deeper insight into the work processes. Video-based retrospective interviews seem to be a suitable instrument to adequately capture the employees' interpretative perspectives on their work activities. In conclusion, the paper identifies specific challenges, such as creating acceptance among employees, open questions, e.g., how a transfer or generalization of the results can succeed, and hypotheses that will have to be tested in the further course of the research process.
The authors propose that while tacit knowledge is a valuable resource for developing new business models, its externalization presents several challenges. One major challenge is that individuals often don’t recognize their tacit knowledge resources, while another is the reluctance to share one’s knowledge with others. Addressing these challenges, the authors present an application-oriented serious game-based haptic modeling approach for externalize tacit knowledge, which can be used to develop the first versions of business models based on tacit knowledge. Both conceptual and practical design fundamentals are presented based on elaborated theoretical approaches, which were developed with the help of a design science approach. The development of the research process is presented step by step, whereby we focused on the high accessibility of the presented research. Practitioners are presented with guidelines for implementing their serious game projects. Scientists benefit from starting points for their research topics of externalization, internalization, and socialization of tacit knowledge, development of business models, and serious games or gamification. The paper concludes with open research desiderata and questions from the presented research process.
Business processes are regularly modified either to capture requirements from the organization’s environment or due to internal optimization and restructuring. Implementing the changes into the individual work routines is aided by change management tools. These tools aim at the acceptance of the process by and empowerment of the process executor. They cover a wide range of general factors and seldom accurately address the changes in task execution and sequence. Furthermore, change is only framed as a learning activity, while most obstacles to change arise from the inability to unlearn or forget behavioural patterns one is acquainted with. Therefore, this paper aims to develop and demonstrate a notation to capture changes in business processes and identify elements that are likely to present obstacles during change. It connects existing research from changes in work routines and psychological insights from unlearning and intentional forgetting to the BPM domain. The results contribute to more transparency in business process models regarding knowledge changes. They provide better means to understand the dynamics and barriers of change processes.
With the latest technological developments and associated new possibilities in teaching, the personalisation of learning is gaining more and more importance. It assumes that individual learning experiences and results could generally be improved when personal learning preferences are considered. To do justice to the complexity of the personalisation possibilities of teaching and learning processes, we illustrate the components of learning and teaching in the digital environment and their interdependencies in an initial model. Furthermore, in a pre-study, we investigate the relationships between the learner's ability to (digital) self-organise, the learner’s prior- knowledge learning in different variants of mode and learning outcomes as one part of this model. With this pre-study, we are taking the first step towards a holistic model of teaching and learning in digital environments.
As AI technology is increasingly used in production systems, different approaches have emerged from highly decentralized small-scale AI at the edge level to centralized, cloud-based services used for higher-order optimizations. Each direction has disadvantages ranging from the lack of computational power at the edge level to the reliance on stable network connections with the centralized approach. Thus, a hybrid approach with centralized and decentralized components that possess specific abilities and interact is preferred. However, the distribution of AI capabilities leads to problems in self-adapting learning systems, as knowledgebases can diverge when no central coordination is present. Edge components will specialize in distinctive patterns (overlearn), which hampers their adaptability for different cases. Therefore, this paper aims to present a concept for a distributed interchangeable knowledge base in CPPS. The approach is based on various AI components and concepts for each participating node. A service-oriented infrastructure allows a decentralized, loosely coupled architecture of the CPPS. By exchanging knowledge bases between nodes, the overall system should become more adaptive, as each node can “forget” their present specialization.
Time to change
(2020)
Industry 4.0 leads to a radical change that is progressing incrementally. The new information and communication technologies provide many conceivable opportunities for their application in the context of sustainable corporate management. The combination of new digital technologies with the ecological and social goals of companies offers a multitude of unimagined potentials and challenges. Although companies already see the need for action, there was in the past and currently still is a lack of concrete measures that lever the potential of Industry 4.0 for sustainability management. During the course of this position paper we develop six theses (two from each sustainability perspective) against the background of the current situation in research and practice, and policy.
Focusing on forest policy and urban climate politics in Brazil and Indonesia, the primary objective of this chapter is to identify domestic pioneers and leaders who, compared to other sectors, governmental levels or jurisdictions within the same nation-state, move ‘ahead of the troops’ (Liefferink and Wurzel, 2017: 2-3). The chapter focuses especially on the role of multilevel governance in bringing about pioneership and leadership and on the different types of that have emerged. It also explores whether and, if so, to what extent domestic pioneers and leaders attract followers and whether there are signs of sustained domestic leadership. The chapter identifies the actors that constitute pioneers and leaders and assesses the processes which lead to their emergence. The chapter authors take up Wurzel et al.’s (2019) call to open up the black box of the nation-state. But instead of stressing the role of non-state actors, the chapter authors focus on vertical interactions among different governmental levels within nation states. The main argument put forward is that international and transnational processes, incentives, and ideas often trigger the development of domestic pioneership and leadership. Such processes, however, cannot be understood properly if domestic politics and dynamics across governmental levels within the nation-state are not taken into account.
Dispersing the fog
(2020)
Countries in the Middle East generally fare poorly in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. One of the biggest challenges for the anti-corruption-regime in the Middle East are the many forms of corruption that are not being recognised as such on the local level, if assessed against a culturally relativistic benchmark. Our paper seeks to establish a unifying ground by providing a functional analysis of corruption which is both, normatively guiding and culturally sensitive. We demarcate our work as follows: (1) our reference point will be the phenomenon of institutional corruption, whereas (2) our working definition of corruption will conceive of corruption as a violation of role-specific norms that is motivated by the role-occupier’s private motives. In an attempt to offer a comprehensive approach, corruption will be viewed on two differing levels. On the external level, we will begin with an investigation of features within a norm-order that typically instantiate corruption. We will argue that corruption is externally conditioned by an authority’s inability to enforce and (re)establish the norms of conduct that ought to be action-guiding in office. This changes the expectation-structure within a norm-order and erodes public trust in the authorities, giving rise to willing perpetrators. Complementing this, the internal level of our framework will emphasize the motivational deficits of corrupt acts. It will be argued that this deficit can typically be found in societies that lack civic virtues. This, we suspect, is the functional reason why corrupt societies have such a hard time to overcome the problem: they lack both features and are, as a consequence, caught in a vicious circle as they struggle to strengthen civil society and consolidate institutional structures – whereas corruption increasingly disappears from the radar as it becomes accepted reality.
Back in 1949, and thus only one year after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted, providing a strong signal for a new world order created after 1945 with the United Nations at their centre and combining as their goals both the maintenance of peace and security and the protection of human rights, but also recognising, realistically, that succeeding generations had so far not yet been saved from the scourge of war. Hence, the continued need for rules governing, and limiting, the means and methods of warfare once an armed conflict has erupted. At the same time, the international community has unfortunately not been able so far to fully safeguard individual human rights, its efforts to that effect and the continuous development of international human rights law over the years notwithstanding.
Article 15ter Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression (Security Council referral)
(2022)
Article 15bis. Exercise of jurisdiction over the crime of aggression (State referral, proprio motu)
(2022)
Would the world be a better place if one were to adopt a European approach to state immunity?
(2021)
This chapter argues not only that there is no European Sonderweg (or ‘special way’) when it comes to the law of state immunity but that there ought not to be one. Debates within The Hague Conference on Private International Law in the late 1990s and those leading to the adoption of the 2002 UN Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States, as well as the development of the EU Brussels Regulation on Jurisdiction and Enforcement, as amended in 2015, all demonstrate that state immunity was not meant to be limited by such treaties but ‘safeguarded’. Likewise, there is no proof that regional European customary law limits state immunity when it comes to ius cogens violations, as Italy and (partly) Greece are the only European states denying state immunity in such cases while the European Court of Human Rights has, time and again, upheld a broad concept of state immunity. It therefore seems unlikely that in the foreseeable future a specific European customary law norm on state immunity will develop, especially given the lack of participation in such practice by those states most concerned by the matter, including Germany. This chapter considers the possible legal implications of the jurisprudence of the Italian Constitutional Court for European military operations (if such operations went beyond peacekeeping). These implications would mainly depend on the question of attribution: if one where to assume that acts undertaken within the framework of military operations led by the EU were to be, at least also, attributable to the troop-contributing member states, the respective troop-contributing state would be entitled to enjoy state immunity exactly to the same degree as in any kind of unilateral military operations. Additionally, some possible perspectives beyond Sentenza 238/2014 are examined, in particular concerning the redress awarded by domestic courts ‘as long as’ neither the German nor the international system grant equivalent protection to the victims of serious violations of international humanitarian law committed during World War II. In the author’s opinion, strengthening the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals, bringing interstate cases for damages before the International Court of Justice, as well as providing for claims commissions where individual compensation might be sought for violations of international humanitarian law would be more useful and appropriate mechanisms than denying state immunity.
When does life end?
(2019)
If you look at the question of the end-of-life legislation, one – or rather THE basic question – is particularly interesting: What is the "end of life"? What is death? Ofcourse, one can approach this question theologically or philosophically, but alsolegally and especially medically. Since the 1960 s, medical progress has made itpossible to distinguish between different individual points of time within the na-tural dying process. However, this raises the question as to which of these pointsof time is relevant for criminal law. This question, which is usually onsideredvery emotionally, will be examined in more detail in the paper.
Pride is linked to conviviality, to the practice of life-with-an-other, and to an awareness of the limitations of the life forms and life norms which guide and regulate the life of culturally, socially, and historically defined communities. Assuming this link, pride in living-together and conviviality appear as concepts creating a framework for future perspectives. But these concepts need a space in which they can unfold critically and confidently with a view to the future. For millennia, the literatures of the world have created this space of simulation and experimentation in which knowledge of how-to-live-with-an-other has been put down on paper through the open-ended tradition of writing. It is the space of the life forms and life norms of conviviality: it offers us prospective knowledge for the future by translating the imaginable into the thinkable, and the readable into the livable.
Education
(2019)
Vives emphasizes needlework as an appropriate occupation for all women, even for ‘a princess or a queen’. A wide variety of schools run by individual tradesmen or women offered instruction in certain fields, such as writing and calculus, while schools erected or licensed by the authorities concentrated on religious education. A large group of orphanages founded during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provided a sound education for boys and girls. Authorities, parents and educational thinkers of the time were much less concerned with girls’ education than with that of boys. Private tutoring at home concentrated on the same subjects but, when boys were instructed at home, some girls had a chance to participate in a more academically oriented education. In most educational settings, be it at day schools, boarding schools or in private homes, teachers, mothers and governesses were expected to raise good housewives, pious mothers and obedient spouses.
This introductory essay is structured as follows: First of all, several forms of urbanisation (I.) are introduced and the processes of urbanisation and dis-urbanisation (II.) are defined. Then four fields of law which are deeply affected by urbanisation are put into the focus. These are, local government law (III.), but also public building law (IV.), civil service law (V.) and public finance law (VI.). Afterwards the effects of the corona pandemic on these fields of law are contemplated, taking account of the process of urbanisation (VII.). Finally, the main results are summarised (VIII.).
The chapter explores aspects of ‘memory games’ in postcommunist Poland vis-à-vis the country’s authoritarian communist past. In particular, it is interested in the populist moments of lustration and de-communization, and also after October 2015 when the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) won the parliamentary and presidential elections in Poland. The main argument is that even though legitimate considerations of lustration and de-communization play a role, a number of policies dealing with transitional justice are related to populist mobilization by the PiS. Against this background, the chapter discusses how far the transitional justice has been accompanied by the process of reframing the political memory about the guilt, suffering, and righteousness during communism. Populist legitimation aims at reconfiguring the public discourse on the transitional justice in a way that it is used to justify controversial public policies in tune with the interest of the groups currently in power, which present themselves as the true voice of the people. The core of the article deals with three main aspects of Polish memory games: (1) the meandering of lustration (mainly with regard to the position of the PiS/Law and Justice and PO/Civic Platform – the largest Polish political parties since 2005), (2) the lustration as the function of power, and (3) the role of the Institute of National Remembrance as a case of institutionalized memory games.
Smend, Rudolf
(2021)
The ability to reflect is considered an essential element of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and a key competence for learners and educators in ESD (UNECE Strategy for ESD, 2012). In contrast to its high importance, little is known about how reflective thinking can be identified, influenced or increased in the classroom. Therefore, the objective of this study is to address this need by developing an empirical multi-stage model designed to help educators diagnose different levels of reflective thinking and to identify factors that influence students’ reflective thinking about sustainability. Based on a 4–8-week project with grade 10 and 11 students studying sustainability, reflective thinking performance using weblogs as reflective journals was analysed. In addition, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teachers to comprehend the learning environment and the personal value they assigned to ESD in their geography class. To determine the levels of reflective thinking achieved by the students, the study built on the work of Dewey (1933) and pre-existing multi-stage models of reflective thinking (Bain, Ballantyne, & Packer, 1999; Chen, Wei, Wu, & Uden, 2009). Using a qualitative, iterative data analysis, the study adapted the stage models to be applicable in ESD and found great differences in the students’ reflection levels. Furthermore, the study identified eight factors that influence students’ reflective thinking about sustainability. The outcomes of this study may be valuable for educators in high school and higher education, who seek to diagnose their students’ reflective thinking performance and facilitate reflection about sustainability.
This chapter aims to analyse whether and how democracy is actually threatened by big-data-based operations and what role international law can play to respond to this possible threat. It shows how big-data-based operations challenge democracy and how international law can help in defending it. The chapter focuses on both state and non-state actors may undermine democracy through big data operations; although democracy as such is a rather underdeveloped concept in international law, which is often more concerned with effectivity than legitimacy – international law protects against these challenges via a democracy-based approach rooted in international human rights law on the one hand, and the principle of non-intervention on the other hand. Thus, although democracy does not play a major role in international law, international law nevertheless is able to protect democracy against challenges from the inside as well as outside.
The chapter describes the German procedure for obtaining compensation for wrongful convictions. Besides specific cases of compensation for convictions based on subsequently repealed legislation and claims arising from general official liability, German law provides a mechanism for compensation, insofar as a conviction is eliminated or mitigated in a retrial in criminal proceedings. Still within this retrial, the criminal court is called upon to determine whether a claim exists for compensation of material and/or non-material damages on the merits. The amount of compensation is assessed in a judicial administrative procedure at the request of the person concerned. The compensation for non-material harm is calculated on the basis of a lump sum of currently €75 per day of imprisonment; the extent of material harm must be submitted and proven by the person concerned. She has the right to take legal action in the civil courts against the decision on the amount, she has the right to take legal action in the civil courts.
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the most important multilateral institutions having the ambition to shape global governance and the only organ of the global community that can adopt legally binding resolutions for the maintenance of international peace and security and, if necessary, authorize the use of force. Created in the aftermath of World War II by its victors, the UNSC’s constellation looks increasingly anachronistic, however, in light of the changing global distribution of power. Adapting the institutional structure and decision-making procedures of the UNSC has proven to be one of the most difficult challenges of the last decades, while it is the institution that has probably been faced with the most vociferous calls for reform. Although there have been changes to the informal ways in which outside actors are drawn into the UNSC’s work and activities, many of the major players in the current international system seem to be deprived from equal treatment in its core patterns of decision-making. Countries such as Brazil, Germany, India and Japan, alongside emerging African nations such as Nigeria and South Africa, are among the states eager to secure permanent representation on the Council. By comparison, selected BRICS countries, China and Russia - in contrast to their role in other multilateral institutions - are permanent members of the UNSC and with this, have been “insiders” for a long time. This renders the situation of the UNSC different from global institutions, in which traditionally, Western powers have dominated the agenda.
The chapter explores how the Security Council has reacted to the changing global order in terms of institutional reform and its working methods. First, we look at how the Security Council’s setup looks increasingly anachronistic against the tremendous shifts in global power. Yet, established and rising powers are not disengaging. In contrast, they are turning to the Council to address growing challenges posed by the changing nature of armed conflict, the surge of terrorism and foreign fighters, nuclear proliferation and persistent intra-state conflicts. Then, we explore institutional and political hurdles for Council reform. While various reform models have been suggested, none of them gained the necessary global support. Instead, we demonstrate how the Council has increased the representation of emerging powers in informal ways. Potential candidates for permanent seats and their regional counterparts are committed as elected members, peacekeeping contributors or within the Peacebuilding Commission. Finally, we analyze how innovatively the Council has reacted to global security challenges. This includes working methods reform, expansion of sanctions regimes and involvement of non-state actors. We conclude that even though the Council’s membership has not yet been altered, it has reacted to the changing global order in ways previously unaccounted for.
Tanakh, Mishnah and Talmud
(2022)
The Tetrarchy as Ideology
(2023)
Language contact and the linguistic coding of evidentiality in varieties of Spanish in Latin America
(2022)
Introduction
(2020)
In 1932, Grace Harriet Macurdy, Professor of Greek at Vassar College, wrote about Cleopatra’s and Marc Antony’s lifestyle in Egypt: In a manner of living as though taken from the Arabian Nights Entertainment, they gambled, drank, hunted and fished together, and wandered about Alexandria by night in disguise. . . Even Macurdy – the author of a pioneering study on Hellenistic queens and ‘woman-power’, in which she stressed the necessity of evaluating powerful women by the same standards as their male counterparts – could not avoid using an Orientalist flair when describing the most famous Ptolemaic queen. It is the aim of this book to show that Macurdy was and is anything but alone, and that discourses and images developed by the Orientalist imagination have dominated the ways in which powerful ancient women have been represented in modern reception. The reason for this, we argue, is...
The following article deals with the question under which conditions a patientdecree is possible in German law. A patient decree can, within certain limits, define the will of the patient at the stage of legal capacity to determine whatshould happen in certain situations when the patient is later under care and acaregiver there-fore takes over his or her representation in certain decisions.Thisapplies in particular to the termination of life-sustaining measures in case ofillness.
To ensure political survival, autocrats must prevent popular rebellion, and political repression is a means to that end. However, autocrats face threats from both the inside and the outside of the center of power. They must avoid popular rebellion and at the same time share power with strategic actors who enjoy incentive to challenge established power-sharing arrangements whenever repression is ordered. Can autocrats turn repression in a way that allows trading one threat off against the other? This chapter first argues that prior research offers scant insight on that question because it relies on umbrella concepts and questionable measurements of repression. Next, the chapter disaggregates repression into restrictions and violence and reflects on their drawbacks. Citizens adapt to the restriction of political civil liberties, and violence backfires against its originators. Hence, restrictions require enforcement, and violence requires moderation. When interpreted as complements, it becomes clear that restrictions and violence have the potential to compensate for their respective weaknesses. The complementarity between violence and restrictions turns political repression into a valuable addition to the authoritarian toolkit. The chapter concludes with an application of these ideas to the twin problems of authoritarian control and power-sharing.
In recent years, urban and rural flash floods in Europe and abroad have gained considerable attention because of their sudden occurrence, severe material damages and even danger to life of inhabitants. This contribution addresses questions about possibly changing environmental conditions which might have altered the occurrence frequencies of such events and their consequences. We analyze the following major fields of environmental changes.
Altered high intensity rain storm conditions, as a consequence of regionalwarming; Possibly altered runoff generation conditions in response to high intensity rainfall events; Possibly altered runoff concentration conditions in response to the usage and management of the landscape, such as agricultural, forest practices or rural roads; Effects of engineering measures in the catchment, such as retention basins, check dams, culverts, or river and geomorphological engineering measures.
We take the flash-flood in Braunsbach, SW-Germany, as an example, where a particularly concise flash flood event occurred at the end of May 2016. This extreme cascading natural event led to immense damage in this particular village. The event is retrospectively analyzed with regard to meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology and damage to obtain a quantitative assessment of the processes and their development.
The results show that it was a very rare rainfall event with extreme intensities, which in combination with catchment properties and altered environmental conditions led to extreme runoff, extreme debris flow and immense damages. Due to the complex and interacting processes, no single flood cause can be identified, since only the interplay of those led to such an event. We have shown that environmental changes are important, but-at least for this case study-even natural weather and hydrologic conditions would still have resulted in an extreme flash flood event.
According to Plessner, both adaptation and selection can be conceived not just as requested by the environment but also as actively proceeding from the organism. In this respect, Plessner finds in Uexküll’s new biology a powerful counterweight to the constraints of Darwinism. However, despite all the points in common in their respective understanding of the problem, Plessner reproaches to Uexküll to have entirely missed the intermediate layer of the lived body [Leib] between the organism and its environment. Unlike Uexküll, concerning the more developed animals, Plessner took up elements of animal psychology from Wolfgang Köhler and Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk. Finally, Plessner finds insufficiencies also in Uexküll’s distinction between the notion of world and the notion of environment, which would lead to the parallel positing of different environments. In reaction to Uexküll’s leveling of all environments, Plessner drafted a philosophical-anthropological spectrum between the intelligent way of living observed in the great apes, whose intelligence had been demonstrated, and the co-wordly life of the symbolic mind as seen in the personal sphere of human life.
Preface
(2017)
Birds migrating across the Himalayan region fly over the highest peaks in the world, facing immense physiological and climatic challenges. The authors show the different strategies used by birds to cope with these challenges. Many wetland avian species are seen in the high-altitude lakes of the Himalayas and the adjoining Tibetan Plateau, such as Bar-Headed Geese. Ringing programmes have generated information about origins and destinations, and this book is the first to present information on the bird's exact migratory paths. Capitalising on knowledge generated through satellite telemetry, the authors describe the migratory routes of a multitude of birds flying over or skirting the Himalayas. The myriad of threats to migratory birds and the wetland system in the Central Asian Flyway are discussed, with ways to mitigate them. This volume will inform and persuade policy-makers and conservation practitioners to take appropriate measures for the long-term survival of this unique migration
Vienna's resilience
(2022)
This chapter provides a synthesis of the volume, bringing together the aspects that characterise each of the single policy domains analysed throughout and highlighting their synergic effects on the output. In particular, it addresses the dualisation tendencies between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Vienna’s urban transformation in the changing dimensions of social stratification, on the one hand; and the mechanisms of institutional resilience, on the other hand. Despite the inclusive welfare system, emerging vulnerabilities currently pose new challenges for Vienna’s redistributive capacity in the key policy areas. Existing institutional arrangements and their regulatory capacities are a good starting point to answer the question: is Vienna still a just city?
Singles in the city
(2021)
More people than ever are living in cities, and in these cities, more and more people are living alone. Using the example of Vienna, this paper investigates the subjective well-being of single households in the city. Previous research has identified positive and negative aspects of living alone (e.g., increased freedom vs. missing social embeddedness). We compare single households with other household types using data from the Viennese Quality of Life Survey (1995–2018). In our analysis, we consider overall life satisfaction as well as selected dimensions of subjective wellbeing (i.e., housing, financial situation, main activity, family, social contacts, leisure time). Our findings show that the subjective well-being of single households in Vienna is high and quite stable over time. While single households are found to have lower life satisfaction than two-adult households, this result is mainly explained by singles reporting lower satisfaction with family life. Compared to households with children, singles are more satisfied with their financial situation, leisure time and housing, which helps to offset the negative consequences of missing family ties (in particular with regard to single parents).
Conclusion
(2020)
Does political repression work for authoritarian rule? On the one hand, repression is a hallmark of authoritarian governance. It denotes any action governments take to increase the costs of collective action. Autocrats consciously apply repression to curb popular opposition within their territorial jurisdiction. They repress in order to protect their policies, personnel, or other interests against challenges from below. Repression is, thus, a means to the end of political survival in non-democratic contexts. A useful means lives up to its promises. Does repression do that? This project started on the suspicion that we do not yet know the answer. This concluding chapter recalls the key theoretical ideas developed along the way, highlights the main findings of the book, and concludes with opportunities for future research.
Tone and intonation in Akan
(2017)
This chapter provides an account of the intonation patterns in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo). Tonal processes such as downstep, tonal spreading and tonal replacement influence the surface tone pattern of a sentence. In general, any Akan utterance independent of sentence type shows a characteristic down-trend in pitch. This chapter proposes that Akan employs a simple post-lexical tonal grammar that accounts for the shapes of an intonation contour. The unmarked post-lexical structure is found in simple declaratives. The downward trend of an intonation contour is shaped by local tonal interactions (downstep), and sentence-final tonal neutralization. In polar questions, an iota-phrase-final low boundary tone (L%) accounts for the intensity increase and lengthening of the final vowel compared to a declarative. Complex declaratives and left-dislocations show a partial pitch reset at the left edge of an embedded iota-phrase. Underlying lexical tones are not affected by intonation with the exception of sentence-final H-tones.
Introduction
(2022)
The rising standard language in Early New High German (1350–1650) provides particularly interesting cases for the question of missing heads on all levels of language structure. A well-known example are subordinate clauses lacking a finite auxiliary verb, traditionally called Afinite Constructions. Based on new data, drawn from two treebanks of Early New High German, the present paper will briefly sketch the distribution of ACs, before establishing that they are in fact a type of ellipsis and do not cluster with other non-finite clauses in German. The remainder of the paper addresses the question what kind of information is missing in ACs and how this information is retrieved. Obviously, auxiliary drop in ENHG represents a type of ellipsis rarely attested in present-day German.
Boyle, T.C.
(2022)
T.C. Boyle, or Thomas Coraghessan Boyle, is probably best known for his 1995 novel Tortilla Curtain , which quickly became a staple of high school and college syllabi. Tortilla Curtain deftly illustrates what Boyle does best: acerbically tracing the irrationality that governs human thought and the resulting contradictory and often unethical behavior (mostly in relation to xenophobia, environmentalism, and the intersections of gender). Despite often casting a critical eye over US American society, Boyle's works are accessible reads with fast-paced and eventful plots. This combination has produced a number of international bestsellers. In fact, Boyle is so popular in Germany that translations of his works have been published before the original versions came out in English. However, his talent for depicting the impotence of reason in the face of base desires, selfishness, group dynamics, and indoctrinated ideologies is also a weakness: at times, Boyle's satire reproduces what it means to criticize, coming close to naturalizing the hedonistic, prejudiced, and emotionally charged behavior of his characters.
While academic mobility has generally been positioned in the literature as a ready, at-will movement of people and ideas, this chapter demonstrates how the conditions of mobility and immobility “all at once” impact knowledge production and exchange. By offering a more nuanced window into the experiences of scholars in exile, this chapter challenges dominant discourses of academic mobility and draws on lessons learned from within liminal spaces of knowledge production to elicit more response within higher education communities. Context-rich examples reveal the interpersonal tensions and cultural shifts—including gender, ethnic and race-based stereotypes and discrimination—that affect intellectual outputs, further problematizing the conceptualization of knowledge production in human capital terms. Lessons gleaned from Scholars at Risk (SAR) and related programmes suggest support structures that amplify scholars’ agency; more broadly, higher education should consider ways of adapting to its diverse knowledge producers, rather than supporting the acclimation to its current environment.
This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading.
Idolatry
(2021)
Many universities record the lectures being held in their facilities to preserve knowledge and to make it available to their students and, at least for some universities and classes, to the broad public. The way with the least effort is to record the whole lecture, which in our case usually is 90 min long. This saves the labor and time of cutting and rearranging lectures scenes to provide short learning videos as known from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), etc. Many lecturers fear that recording their lectures and providing them via an online platform might lead to less participation in the actual lecture. Also, many teachers fear that the lecture recordings are not used with the same focus and dedication as lectures in a lecture hall. In this work, we show that in our experience, full lectures have an average watching duration of just a few minutes and explain the reasons for that and why, in most cases, teachers do not have to worry about that.
This book brings together case studies dealing with historical as well as recent phenomena in former socialist nations, which testify the transfer of knowledge about religion and atheism. The material is connected on a semantic level by the presence of a historical watershed before and after socialism as well as on a theoretical level by the sociology of knowledge. With its focus on Central and Eastern Europe this volume is an important contribution to the research on nonreligion and secularity.
The collected volume deals with agents and media within specific cultural and historical contexts. Theoretical claims and conceptions by single agents and/or institutions in which the imparting of knowledge about religion and atheism was or is a central assignment, are analyzed. Additionally, procedures of transmitting knowledge about religion and atheism and of sustaining related institutionalized norms, interpretations, roles and practices are in the focus of interest.
The book opens the perspective for the multidimensional and negotiating character of legitimation processes, being involved in the establishment or questioning of the institutionalized opposition between religion and atheism or religion and science.
The will of the masses
(2020)
This article describes the way of Conrado Balweg from the Tingguian-tribe in the Cordillera mountains/Philippines, who was educated in Catholic seminaries, entered a missionary congregation, was ordained priest and joined the communist insurgency New People’s Army. There he quickly attained the rank of a political officer and military commander. Balweg held teachings on Marxism in remote villages, he organized several ambushes on government troops and conducted people’s courts against traitors. Over time he developed a special indigenous Maoism and broke away from the party-line and, which was the reason why he was killed by the NPA in 1999. In a contextualized biographical portrait we track the question: How did Maoist thought become part of Balweg’s conviction? As a hypothesis we assumed, that Maoist thought was integrated in Catholic tenets (e.g. interpreting God’s will as the will of the masses). After a close analysis of intellectual backgrounds and political events it turned out, that Maoist ideology superseded religious motives instead. This is crucial to understand if violence was justified in the name of God or in the name of the people.
Connecting worlds
(2020)
This chapter considers the benefits of working with linguistic landscapes for language education curriculum. It shows how introducing linguistic landscape exploration into the curriculum can support learners to read beyond words and to build critical understandings of intersections between words and worlds. The chapter explores data from two case studies in different educational contexts. The first study shows the effects of scaffolding in-service languages teachers to learn to read their worlds from multiple perspectives. The second study illustrates the types of insights that can emerge from school EFL learners when they explore the linguistic landscapes of worlds beyond their classrooms.
Recollecting bones
(2020)
Buber vs. Weber
(2020)
Introduction
(2020)
Renormalisation and locality
(2020)
Geleitwort
(2020)
The present paper looks into the grammaticalization of the definite article in the history of German. Starting with the well-known emergence of the definite article from a demonstrative pronoun over the course of Old High German (750–1050), I will consider the rise of so-called weak definites in Early New High German (1350–1650) as a new piece of evidence for the grammaticalization process. Here, the subclass of possessive weak definites is of particular interest for the grammaticalization of the definite article in German, because of a word order change affecting the position of possessor phrases. As soon as the possessor systematically follows the head noun (except for proper names), we observe three alternatives for the prenominal determiner slot: it may remain empty, or it may be filled either by the indefinite or the definite article in Early New High German. In Present-Day German, the definite article is used in the unmarked case, thus pointing to a second stage in the grammaticalization process of the definite article in German, which has so far not been acknowledged in the literature.
Introduction
(2019)