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Multipliers of Change
(2020)
Higher Education Leadership and Management have become increasingly important throughout the years due to the complexities that have to be addressed by universities worldwide. This can be seen not only in professionalisation in fields such as faculty management or in areas of quality assurance and internationalisation, but also in the need for exchange and training in academic leadership, such as that of deans or study deans, or of university leadership in general.
The Dialogue on Innovative Higher Education Strategies (DIES) is addressing this need in emerging countries by building platforms of exchange and offering training courses. Not only is the programme supporting capacity building of human resources, but it is also specifically focusing on inducing change within the universities, such as introducing new instruments or tools in the area of quality assurance and internationalisation, and addressing specific challenges or setting up new structures in the form of projects in the frame of the training. The ‘National Multiplication Trainings’ Programme under DIES is further addressing the sustainability and multiplication of the DIES Programme, that is, alumni are enabled to implement capacity building in higher education leadership and management in their national context.
The articles within this volume of the “Potsdamer Beiträge zur Hochschulforschung” (Potsdam Contributions to Higher Education Research) analyse and share the experiences of such training programmes held in Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Malaysia, Kenya, and Uganda. They all revolve around the best ways to address the needs and challenges in higher education leadership and management, and in building capacities in these areas.
Of Trees and Birds
(2019)
Gisbert Fanselow’s work has been invaluable and inspiring to many researchers working on syntax, morphology, and information structure, both from a theoretical and from an experimental perspective. This volume comprises a collection of articles dedicated to Gisbert on the occasion of his 60th birthday, covering a range of topics from these areas and beyond. The contributions have in common that in a broad sense they have to do with language structures (and thus trees), and that in a more specific sense they have to do with birds. They thus cover two of Gisbert’s major interests in- and outside of the linguistic world (and perhaps even at the interface).
We analyse different Gibbsian properties of interactive Brownian diffusions X indexed by the lattice $Z^{d} : X = (X_{i}(t), i ∈ Z^{d}, t ∈ [0, T], 0 < T < +∞)$. In a first part, these processes are characterized as Gibbs states on path spaces of the form $C([0, T],R)Z^{d}$. In a second part, we study the Gibbsian character on $R^{Z}^{d}$ of $v^{t}$, the law at time t of the infinite-dimensional diffusion X(t), when the initial law $v = v^{0}$ is Gibbsian.
Industrial policy measures can be a reasonable supplement to economic and social policy actions during the period of transformation of centrally planned economies. This paper shows the interplay between industrial and social policy. Special attention is given to the timing and sequencing of the transformation process. This approach is closely modeled on the example of New Zealand.
This dissertation contains theoretical investigations on the morphology and statistical mechanics of vesicles. The shapes of homogeneous fluid vesicles and inhomogeneous vesicles with fluid and solid membrane domains are calculated. The influence of thermal fluctuations is investigated. The obtained results are valid on mesoscopic length scales and are based on a geometrical membrane model, where the vesicle membrane is described as either a static or a thermal fluctuating surface. The thesis consists of three parts. In the first part, homogeneous vesicles are considered. The focus in this part is on the thermally induced morphological transition between vesicles with prolate and oblate shape. With the help of Monte Carlo simulations, the free energy profile of these vesicles is determined. It can be shown that the shape transformation between prolate and oblate vesicles proceeds continuously and is not hampered by a free energy barrier. The second and third part deal with inhomogeneous vesicles which contain intramembrane domains. These investigations are motivated by experimental results on domain formation in single or multicomponent vesicles, where phase separation occurs and different membrane phases coexist. The resulting domains differ with regard to their membrane structure (solid, fluid). The membrane structure has a distinct effect on the form of the domain and the morphology of the vesicle. In the second part, vesicles with coexisting solid and fluid membrane domains are studied, while the third part addresses vesicles with coexisting fluid domains. The equilibrium morphology of vesicles with simple and complex domain forms, derived through minimisation of the membrane energy, is determined as a function of material parameters. The results are summarised in morphology diagrams. These diagrams show previously unknown morphological transitions between vesicles with different domain shapes. The impact of thermal fluctuations on the vesicle and the form of the domains is investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations.
Graph queries have lately gained increased interest due to application areas such as social networks, biological networks, or model queries. For the relational database case the relational algebra and generalized discrimination networks have been studied to find appropriate decompositions into subqueries and ordering of these subqueries for query evaluation or incremental updates of query results. For graph database queries however there is no formal underpinning yet that allows us to find such suitable operationalizations. Consequently, we suggest a simple operational concept for the decomposition of arbitrary complex queries into simpler subqueries and the ordering of these subqueries in form of generalized discrimination networks for graph queries inspired by the relational case. The approach employs graph transformation rules for the nodes of the network and thus we can employ the underlying theory. We further show that the proposed generalized discrimination networks have the same expressive power as nested graph conditions.
openHPI
(2022)
On the occasion of the 10th openHPI anniversary, this technical report provides information about the HPI MOOC platform, including its core features, technology, and architecture.
In an introduction, the platform family with all partner platforms is presented; these now amount to nine platforms, including openHPI. This section introduces openHPI as an advisor and research partner in various projects.
In the second chapter, the functionalities and common course formats of the platform are presented. The functionalities are divided into learner and admin features. The learner features section provides detailed information about performance records, courses, and the learning materials of which a course is composed: videos, texts, and quizzes. In addition, the learning materials can be enriched by adding external exercise tools that communicate with the HPI MOOC platform via the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard. Furthermore, the concept of peer assessments completed the possible learning materials.
The section then proceeds with further information on the discussion forum, a fundamental concept of MOOCs compared to traditional e-learning offers. The section is concluded with a description of the quiz recap, learning objectives, mobile applications, gameful learning, and the help desk.
The next part of this chapter deals with the admin features. The described functionality is restricted to describing the news and announcements, dashboards and statistics, reporting capabilities, research options with A/B testing, the course feed, and the TransPipe tool to support the process of creating automated or manual subtitles. The platform supports a large variety of additional features, but a detailed description of these features goes beyond the scope of this report.
The chapter then elaborates on common course formats and openHPI teaching activities at the HPI. The chapter concludes with some best practices for course design and delivery.
The third chapter provides insights into the technology and architecture behind openHPI. A special characteristic of the openHPI project is the conscious decision to operate the complete application from bare metal to platform development. Hence, the chapter starts with a section about the openHPI Cloud, including detailed information about the data center and devices, the used cloud software OpenStack and Ceph, as well as the openHPI Cloud Service provided for the HPI.
Afterward, a section on the application technology stack and development tooling describes the application infrastructure components, the used automation, the deployment pipeline, and the tools used for monitoring and alerting. The chapter is concluded with detailed information about the technology stack and concrete platform implementation details. The section describes the service-oriented Ruby on Rails application, inter-service communication, and public APIs. It also provides more information on the design system and components used in the application. The section concludes with a discussion of the original microservice architecture, where we share our insights and reasoning for migrating back to a monolithic application.
The last chapter provides a summary and an outlook on the future of digital education.
The new interactive online educational platform openHPI, (https://openHPI.de) from Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), offers freely accessible courses at no charge for all who are interested in subjects in the field of information technology and computer science. Since 2011, “Massive Open Online Courses,” called MOOCs for short, have been offered, first at Stanford University and then later at other U.S. elite universities. Following suit, openHPI provides instructional videos on the Internet and further reading material, combined with learning-supportive self-tests, homework and a social discussion forum. Education is further stimulated by the support of a virtual learning community. In contrast to “traditional” lecture platforms, such as the tele-TASK portal (http://www.tele-task.de) where multimedia recorded lectures are available on demand, openHPI offers didactic online courses. The courses have a fixed start date and offer a balanced schedule of six consecutive weeks presented in multimedia and, whenever possible, interactive learning material. Each week, one chapter of the course subject is treated. In addition, a series of learning videos, texts, self-tests and homework exercises are provided to course participants at the beginning of the week. The course offering is combined with a social discussion platform where participants have the opportunity to enter into an exchange with course instructors and fellow participants. Here, for example, they can get answers to questions and discuss the topics in depth. The participants naturally decide themselves about the type and range of their learning activities. They can make personal contributions to the course, for example, in blog posts or tweets, which they can refer to in the forum. In turn, other participants have the chance to comment on, discuss or expand on what has been said. In this way, the learners become the teachers and the subject matter offered to a virtual community is linked to a social learning network.
This technical report presents the results of student projects which were prepared during the lecture “Operating Systems II” offered by the “Operating Systems and Middleware” group at HPI in the Summer term of 2020. The lecture covered ad- vanced aspects of operating system implementation and architecture on topics such as Virtualization, File Systems and Input/Output Systems. In addition to attending the lecture, the participating students were encouraged to gather practical experience by completing a project on a closely related topic over the course of the semester. The results of 10 selected exceptional projects are covered in this report.
The students have completed hands-on projects on the topics of Operating System Design Concepts and Implementation, Hardware/Software Co-Design, Reverse Engineering, Quantum Computing, Static Source-Code Analysis, Operating Systems History, Application Binary Formats and more. It should be recognized that over the course of the semester all of these projects have achieved outstanding results which went far beyond the scope and the expec- tations of the lecture, and we would like to thank all participating students for their commitment and their effort in completing their respective projects, as well as their work on compiling this report.
This issue of Linguistics in Potsdam contains a number of papers that grew out of the workshop Descriptive and Empirical Adequacy in Linguistics held in Berlin on December 17-19 December, 2005. One of the goals of this meeting was to bring together scholars working in various frameworks (with emphasis on the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory) and to discuss matters concerning descriptive and empirical adequacy. Another explicit goal was to discuss the question whether Minimalism and Optimality Theory should be considered incompatible and, hence, competing theories, or whether the two frameworks should rather be considered complementary in certain respects (see http://let.uvt.nl/deal05/call.html for the call for papers). Five of the seven papers in this volume directly grew out of the oral presentations given at the workshop. Although Vieri Samek-Lodovici’s paper was not part of the workshop, it can also be considered a result of the workshop since it pulls together some of his many comments during the discussion time. The paper by Eva Engels and Sten Vikner discusses a phenomenon that received much interest from both minimalist and optimality theoretic syntax in the recent years, Scandinavian object shift. The paper may serve as a practical example for a claim that is repeatedly made in this volume: minimalist and OT analyses, even where they might be competing, can fruitfully inform each other in a constructive manner, leading to a deeper understanding of syntactic phenomena.
The economy in Poland has changed tremendously in recent years. Agricultural enterprises can defend their market share only if they are able to adjust quickly and efficiently to new circumstances. The most effective strategy to cope with changing operating conditions is a strategy of permanent development of human resources. This strategy must embrace a constant improvement of professional entrepreneurial skills and of management structures within organizations. Only such a strategy will allow businesses to hold on to or to increase their market standing despite strong competition. It will also allow them to meet, for instance, the newly introduced standardisation procedures for goods produced and supplied. This challenge holds especially true for agricultural enterprises that operate in highly competitive markets; markets which are currently characterised by a permanent surplus of supply over demand and a great number of businesses, mainly of small or medium size. Demand in the agricultural market is exerted by millions of consumers, all of different consumption habits with idiosyncratic consumption preferences. Agricultural producers as a group are extremely sensitive to any kind of change in their environment. This is especially true in the current transition period when a worsening of economic conditions can be observed: an economic downturn caused by the price of inputs increasing at a faster rate than agricultural product prices and an ineffective agricultural policy. One of the agricultural production factors which allows for quick adjustment to change and which can thus be used to improve one’s market position is the human factor. It is a wellknown fact that a good level of professional skills in combination with ongoing means of furthering and updating professional qualifications of workers can help to facilitate coping with market challenges. The aim of this study is first to determine specific quality and quantity features of human resources in agricultural production, looking, inter alia, at changes in employment, specific employment structures and the number of recruitments and dismissals in a given period. A further aim was to undertake an efficiency analysis of limited partnerships which leased their agricultural real estate from the Agricultural Property Agency (APA) in the Voivodeship of Gorzów between 1995 and 1997. The first analysis was carried out using data which were collected from surveys amongst the owners of 36 privately owned farms and the managers of 14 limited partnerships. The data cover the period between 1994 and 1997. The incentive to conduct research on large farms in the Gorzów Voivodeship using the Data Envelopment Analysis method (DEA) lay in the outcome of various earlier studies on the financial standing of limited partnerships leasing real estate from APA in the Gorzów Voivodeship in 1996 and 1997. Apart from general adjustment processes, these inquiries proved that, in 1997, the economic condition of the farms analysed was worse when compared to the situation in 1996; the following ratios worsened: the financial support ratio, the liquidity ratio, the turnover ratio, the profitability ratio and the cost level ratio (see Świtłyk, 1998, 1999). These results determined the focus of our research, namely input efficiency in particular limited partnerships. The base of our calculations was a research model which consisted of efficiency measures focusing on firms’ inputs The analysis was carried out on a sample of 90 firms in the years between 1995 and 1997 (30 firms every year). Other data material was collected from national statistical office reports on incomes, costs and financial results (F-O1) and statistics about land usage, crop area and yields (R-O5). In the next section we briefly discuss privatisation in agriculture. Sections 3 and 4 present results from our survey. Section 5 concludes.
Parts without a whole?
(2015)
This explorative study gives a descriptive overview of what organizations do and experience when they say they practice design thinking. It looks at how the concept has been appropriated in organizations and also describes patterns of design thinking adoption. The authors use a mixed-method research design fed by two sources: questionnaire data and semi-structured personal expert interviews. The study proceeds in six parts: (1) design thinking¹s entry points into organizations; (2) understandings of the descriptor; (3) its fields of application and organizational localization; (4) its perceived impact; (5) reasons for its discontinuation or failure; and (6) attempts to measure its success. In conclusion the report challenges managers to be more conscious of their current design thinking practice. The authors suggest a co-evolution of the concept¹s introduction with innovation capability building and the respective changes in leadership approaches. It is argued that this might help in unfolding design thinking¹s hidden potentials as well as preventing unintended side-effects such as discontented teams or the dwindling authority of managers.
Pattern matching is a well-established concept in the functional programming community. It provides the means for concisely identifying and destructuring values of interest. This enables a clean separation of data structures and respective functionality, as well as dispatching functionality based on more than a single value. Unfortunately, expressive pattern matching facilities are seldomly incorporated in present object-oriented programming languages. We present a seamless integration of pattern matching facilities in an object-oriented and dynamically typed programming language: Newspeak. We describe language extensions to improve the practicability and integrate our additions with the existing programming environment for Newspeak. This report is based on the first author’s master’s thesis.
Peter Huckauf
(2014)
Die Gedichte und Texte Peter Huckaufs in dem vorliegenden Band 11 der „Potsdamer Beiträge zur Sorabistik” sind eine Hommage an die Lausitz, an ihre Menschen und Landschaften. In Wortspielen, visueller Poesie und Prosatexten samt Fotographien und Einblicken in seine Lebensgeschichte stellt sich der Autor als Liebhaber dieses Landstrichs vor. Er lässt den Leser teilhaben an einer Entdeckungsreise durch die verloren gegangene Heimat der Kindheit, die er sich als Rückkehrer neu erschließt. Seine Reminiszenzen sind nachhaltig sowohl für den deutschen als auch sorbischen/wendischen Rezipienten, was Peter Huckauf zu einem für die Lausitz und darüber hinaus interessanten Schriftsteller und Künstler macht. Den sprachlichen Aspekt beachtend, wurden ausgewählte Gedichte der Sammlung in die obersorbische und vor allem in die niedersorbische Sprache übertragen.
Switches between political and administrative positions seem to be quite common in today’s politics, or at least not so unusual any longer. Nevertheless, up-to-date empirical studies on this issue are lacking. This paper investigates the presumption, that in recent years top bureaucrats have become more politicised, while at the same time more politicians stem from a bureaucratic background, by looking at the career paths of both. For this purpose, we present new empirical evidence on career patterns of top bureaucrats and executive politicians both at Federal and at Länder level. The data was collected from authorized biographies published at the websites of the Federal and Länder ministries for all Ministers, Parliamentary State Secretaries and Administrative State Secretaries who held office in June 2009.
Privatisation and ownership : the impact on firms in transition survey evidence from Bulgaria
(1999)
Previous papers in this Special Series, have described in detail the theoretical background and development patterns, along with some empirical results, for the privatisation processes in Bulgaria and Poland. A range of issues have been raised which demand closer empirical investigation. For this purpose, the research group has developed questionnaire studies for Bulgaria and Poland. In Bulgaria, the National Statistical Institute (NSI) carried out the case studies between February and April 1998. The problems of the questionnaire set-up were identified in apre-test study, but unlike the Polish case, they led to only minor differentiation. Since financial limitations prevented a larger sample size, a sample size of 61 mid-sized and large Bulgarian enterprises was selected. Failure to respond was not a serious problem, unlike with the Polish questionnaire; this is because the NSI has maintained good links to the enterprise sector and management were prepared to give detailed answers, even on questions of their firms' financial status. However, as the Polish experience suggests, it has become obvious that the privatisation process is also associated with management's increasing reluctance to answer comparatively 'intimate' questions. Thus, future questionnaire studies must take a much higher rate of refusals into consideration. The pre-selection procedure in Bulgaria was determined by the project target, which sought to analyse the effects of the privatisation process on firm' s behaviour during the transition process, and hence only firms which had already existed before the changes were included. For small and medium-size enterprises (SME's), most of which were founded after the changes, partly due to the legal processes of spontaneous privatisation, some empirical, as weIl as analytical, studies were carried out. Thus, the research group limited the scope of investigation to enterprises with more than 250 employees. The underlying hypothesis is that employment problems are concentrated in larger firms, in particular amongst those still (partly) state owned. Because of the former ownership structures and relatively slower capacity for management change, the assumption is that state-owned enterprises (SOE's) which have only been recently privatised might still have traditional links to government even after privatisation. On the one hand, the SME's are obviously more prone to, and linked with, market processes. As a result, they don't have the financial potential and incentives to follow job-hoarding strategies. On the other hand, there are almost no SME's which are still stateowned. Hence, the prevailing opinion in the literature is that 'larger industrial firms were apt to be least efficient, most often producing inadequate and non-competitive products, with a high degree ofunder-utilisation oflabour and most inflexible to change' (lones & Nikolov 1997, p. 252). Thus, as mentioned above, though there may be some limitations with regard to firm representation, our sample characterises a number of enterprises that offer fertile ground for the analysis of firms' adjustment to the newly established market realities in a transition economy. Our study is unique in the sense that existing empirical studies on privatisation and enterprise restructuring generally cover the time period just before and after the initial stages of transition, e.g. 1988/89 to 1992. In those studies, samples of firms in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria recognise that behavioural adaptations at the enterprise level had taken place just before the actual privatisation process materialised. Therefore, almost all of the firms under examination were still state-owned. The firms were usually divided according to their performance as 'good', 'average' and 'bad' enterprises. The main findings of those early studies have shown that the macroeconomic adaptations (i.e., macro-level changes which induced micro-level adjustment by the firms), as well as emerging market structures, have created enormous pressures which in turn have influenced firms' economic behaviour, reallocation of resources and consequent restructuring. This evidence supports the hypothesis that the SOE's started restructuring and adjusting their behaviour and performance, in response to the harsh realities of more open markets, before privatisation actually started. In this paper, we seek to present some results on these developments in Bulgaria, at the later stages of transition and privatisation (1992-1996). The aim of our questionnaire study is therefore to show the effects of the privatisation process and ownership on the behavioural adaptations of firms which had once been state-owned or continue to be owned by the state. The period under investigation is 1992 to 1996. For 1990 and 1991, the number of missing values is reactively high and, where relevant, we partly exclude these observations from our analysis. The paper contains seven sections. Section 11 outlines the macroeconomic environment in which our sample firms operate, provides some specifics of the Bulgarian privatisation process, and discusses data quality. Section 111 concentrates on the analysis of privatisation, the specific forms of ownership that resulted from it, and firm size. In Section IV, we describe the trends of the main economic variables within firms (such as employment, wages, labour productivity, etc), and a number of proxies of firm viability, while Section V presents some regression results to corroborate the discussion of the previous section. Section VI gives an overview of survey results of the impact of enterprise determined wage policy, trade union activity and membership, government control, and social benefits on enterprise restructuring. Section VII is a summary of our findings.
Privatisation in Central and Eastern Europe can be defined as the transfer of property rights from the State to private owners. The transfers are carried out so as to vest the new private owners with the full property rights of use and disposal over their property, these rights being guaranteed by the legal framework established by the rule of law. In Bulgaria, one can distinguish between three main stages in the process of privatisation. Each was shaped by the conflicting resolutions of frequently changing governments and meant to serve different political goals. The first stage (1990-1993) is characterised by the blockade of legal privatisation, as ‘spontaneous privatisation’ was accorded high priority. As in other former socialist countries, great emphasis was placed on the so-called commercialisation of state-owned enterprises. This did not involve the actual transfer of State property into private hands, but rather the independent transformation of state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies, as well as the establishment of subsidiary companies.1 The goals of introducing more efficient structures and applying modern methods of production by transferring property to a more suitable management were not achieved. The second stage (1993-1995) is a cash privatisation, which laid the foundation for an employee/management buy-out, aided by the legal provisions granting concessions in the payment of instalments. The most important factor in the third stage of the process of privatisation in Bulgaria was the adoption of the mass privatisation model as an alternative method of procedure. In 1996, legal regulations for mass privatisation were introduced and a privatisation fund was established. In the meantime, the process has evolved into its fourth stage, during which a strategy of privatisation has been formulated under the supervision of a monetary council, and various agreements with the IMF and the World Bank are being adhered to. Privatisation is the decisive factor in the structural reforms of East European countries. The problem of converting State property into more effective forms of property management has been exacerbated by the additional demand of carrying out the far-reaching structural changes as swiftly as possible. The expectation that a large part of State property would be privatised within a short time in Bulgaria, has not been met for a number of reasons. When the reforms began, the private sector was too weakly developed to become a catalyst for structural changes. Until 1995 there were no laws regulating the stock exchange or securities and bonds - the capital market was practically non-existent. Moreover, the various political parties could not agree upon the various models and objectives of privatisation. The population itself had no capital. The restitution of private ownership which will not be discussed in further detail was limited to the smallest businesses, traders and workshops. Furthermore, the Privatisation Agency and State authorities employed to initiate the privatisation process lacked experience. Another problem hindering privatisation was that the laws passed lacked precision and were constantly subject to change.
Cyber-physical systems often encompass complex concurrent behavior with timing constraints and probabilistic failures on demand. The analysis whether such systems with probabilistic timed behavior adhere to a given specification is essential. When the states of the system can be represented by graphs, the rule-based formalism of Probabilistic Timed Graph Transformation Systems (PTGTSs) can be used to suitably capture structure dynamics as well as probabilistic and timed behavior of the system. The model checking support for PTGTSs w.r.t. properties specified using Probabilistic Timed Computation Tree Logic (PTCTL) has been already presented. Moreover, for timed graph-based runtime monitoring, Metric Temporal Graph Logic (MTGL) has been developed for stating metric temporal properties on identified subgraphs and their structural changes over time.
In this paper, we (a) extend MTGL to the Probabilistic Metric Temporal Graph Logic (PMTGL) by allowing for the specification of probabilistic properties, (b) adapt our MTGL satisfaction checking approach to PTGTSs, and (c) combine the approaches for PTCTL model checking and MTGL satisfaction checking to obtain a Bounded Model Checking (BMC) approach for PMTGL. In our evaluation, we apply an implementation of our BMC approach in AutoGraph to a running example.