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Student misbehavior and its treatment is a major challenge for teachers and a threat to their well-being. Indeed, teachers are obliged to punish student misbehavior on a regular basis. Additionally, teachers’ punishment decisions are among the most frequently reported situations when it comes to students’ experiences of injustice in school. By implication, it is crucial to understand teachers’ treatment of student misbehavior vis-à-vis students’ perceptions. One key dimension of punishment behavior reflects its underlying motivation and goals. People generally intend to achieve three goals when punishing misbehavior, namely, retribution (i.e., evening out the harm caused), special prevention (i.e., preventing recidivism of the offender), and general prevention (i.e., preventing imitation of others). Importantly, people’s support of these punishment goals is subject to hierarchy and power, implying that teachers’ and students’ punishment goal preferences differ. In this dissertation, I present three research projects that shed first light on teachers’ punishment and its goals along with the students’ perception of classroom intervention strategies pursuing these goals. More specifically, I first examined students’ (i.e., children’s) general support of each of the three punishment goals sketched above. Furthermore, I applied an attributional approach to understand and study the goals teachers intend to achieve when punishing student misbehavior. Finally, I investigated teachers’ and students’ support of the punishment goals regarding the same student misbehavior to directly compare their views on these goals and reactions pursuing them. In sum, the findings show that students generally prefer retribution and special prevention to general prevention, whereas teachers prefer general prevention and special prevention to retribution. This ultimately translates into a "mismatch" of teachers and students in their preferences for specific punishment goals, and the findings suggest that this may indeed enhance students’ perception of injustice. Overall, the results of the present research program may be valuable for the development of classroom intervention strategies that may reduce rather than enhance conflicts in student-teacher-interactions.
Software systems have an increasing impact on our daily lives. Many systems process sensitive data or control critical infrastructure. Providing secure software is therefore inevitable. Such systems are rarely being renewed regularly due to the high costs and effort. Oftentimes, systems that were planned and implemented to be secure, become insecure because their context evolves. These systems are connected to the Internet and therefore also constantly subject to new types of attacks. The security requirements of these systems remain unchanged, while, for example, discovery of a vulnerability of an encryption algorithm previously assumed to be secure requires a change of the system design. Some security requirements cannot be checked by the system’s design but only at run time. Furthermore, the sudden discovery of a security violation requires an immediate reaction to prevent a system shutdown. Knowledge regarding security best practices, attacks, and mitigations is generally available, yet rarely integrated part of software development or covering evolution.
This thesis examines how the security of long-living software systems can be preserved taking into account the influence of context evolutions. The goal of the proposed approach, S²EC²O, is to recover the security of model-based software systems using co-evolution.
An ontology-based knowledge base is introduced, capable of managing common, as well as system-specific knowledge relevant to security. A transformation achieves the connection of the knowledge base to the UML system model. By using semantic differences, knowledge inference, and the detection of inconsistencies in the knowledge base, context knowledge evolutions are detected.
A catalog containing rules to manage and recover security requirements uses detected context evolutions to propose potential co-evolutions to the system model which reestablish the compliance with security requirements.
S²EC²O uses security annotations to link models and executable code and provides support for run-time monitoring. The adaptation of running systems is being considered as is round-trip engineering, which integrates insights from the run time into the system model.
S²EC²O is amended by prototypical tool support. This tool is used to show S²EC²O’s applicability based on a case study targeting the medical information system iTrust.
This thesis at hand contributes to the development and maintenance of long-living software systems, regarding their security. The proposed approach will aid security experts: It detects security-relevant changes to the system context, determines the impact on the system’s security and facilitates co-evolutions to recover the compliance with the security requirements.
Small headwater streams comprise most of the total channel length and catchment area in fluvial networks. They are tightly connected to their catchments and, thus, are highly vulnerable to changes in catchment hydrologic budgets and land use. Although these small, often fishless streams are of little economic interest, they are vital for the ecological and chemical state of larger water bodies. Although numerous studies investigate the impact of various anthropogenic stressors or altered catchment conditions, we lack an in-depth understanding of the natural conditions and processes in headwater streams. This natural state, however, largely affects how a headwater stream responds to anthropogenic or climatic changes. One of the major threats to aquatic ecosystems is the excessive anthropogenic input of nutrients leading to eutrophication. Nutrients exert a bottom-up effect in the food web, foremost affecting primary producers and their consumers, i.e. periphyton and benthic grazers in headwater streams. The periphyton-grazer link is the main path of autochthonous (in-stream) production into the stream food web and the strength of this link largely determines the effectiveness of this pathway. Therefore, this thesis aims at elucidating important biological processes with the explicit focus on periphyton-grazer interactions. I assessed different aspects of periphyton-grazer interactions using laboratory experiments to solve methodological problems, and using a field study to compare the benthic communities of three morphologically similar, phosphorus-limited, near-natural headwater streams. With the results of the laboratory experiments, I was able to show that periphyton RNA/DNA ratios can be used as proxy for periphyton growth rates in controlled experiments and that the fatty acid composition of grazing mayfly nymphs responds to changes in fatty acids provided by the diet after only two weeks. The use of the RNA/DNA ratio as a proxy for periphyton growth rate allows a comparison of these growth rates even in simple experimental set-ups and thereby permits the inclusion of this important process in ecotoxicological or ecological experiments. The observed fast turnover rates of fatty acids in consumer tissues show that even short-term changes in available primary producers can alter the fatty acid composition of primary consumers with important implications for the supply of higher trophic levels with physiologically important polyunsaturated fatty acids. With the results of the field study, I revealed gaps in the understanding of the linkages between catchment and in-stream phosphorus availability under near-natural conditions and demonstrated that seemingly comparable headwater streams had significantly different benthic communities. These differences most likely affect stream responses to environmental changes.
Grapevine growers have struggled with defending their crops against pests and diseases since the domestication of grapevine over 6000 ears ago. Since then, new growing methods paired with a better nderstanding of the ecological processes in the vineyard ecosystem continue to improve quality and quantity of grape harvests. In this thesis I am describing the effects of two recent innovations in viticulture on pest and beneficial arthropods in vineyards; Fungus-resistant grapevine cultivars (PIWIs) and the pruning system semi-minimal pruned hedge (SMPH). The SMPH pruning system allows for a drastic reduction of manual labor in the vineyard, and PIWIs are resistant to two of the most common fungal diseases of grapevine and therefore allow a drastic reduction of fungicide applications compared to conventional varieties. Heavy use of pesticides is linked to a number of problems, including pollution of waterways, negative effects on human health, and biodiversity loss. Here, I studied the effects of fungicide reduction and minimal pruning on arthropods that are beneficial for natural pest suppression in the vineyard ecosystem such as predatory mites, spiders, ants, earwigs, and lacewings. All of these groups either benefitted from the reduction of fungicide sprayings or were not significantly affected. Structural changes in the canopy of SMPH grapevines altered the microclimate in the canopy which in turn influenced some of the arthropods living in it. Overall, my findings suggest that PIWIs and SMPH, both in combination or separately, improve conditions for natural pest control. This adds to other advantages of these innovative management practices such as a reduction in production cost and a smaller impact on the environment.
Nanotemplates for the combined structural and functional analysis of membrane-associated proteins
(2019)
Plasma membranes are essential for life because they give cells an identity. Plasma membranes are almost impermeable to fluids and substances. Still, transport between inside and outside needs to be possible. An important transport way is endocytosis. This mechanism relies on membrane-associated proteins that sense and induce curvature to the plasma membrane. However, the physics and structural dynamics behind proteins acting on membranes is not well understood. There is a standard method in vitro to investigate membrane-associated proteins sensing spherical geometries: They are incubated on unilamellar vesicles. This procedure allows to analyze these proteins in their bound state. This approach is inappropriate for GRAF1 (GTPase Regulator Associated with Focal Adhesion Kinase-1), a key player in endocytosis because it senses tubular geometries instead. However, GRAF1 extrudes lipid tubes from vesicles that can be analyzed. Still, this is a limited method because these tubes suffer from inhomogeneity and they do not enable the observation of intermediate and lower concentration binding states. To overcome this issue they can be incubated on pre-tubular structures called nanotemplates. There have been studies using carbon nanotubes and Galactosylceramide lipid tubes as nanotemplates. These approaches require complex chemical modifications or expensive components and they are not necessarily flexible. In this work we present a simple and easy new approach to prepare nanotemplates using Folch lipid mixture. We show on the basis of BPG, a truncate of GRAF1, that our nanotemplates are suitable for Cryo-EM and that it is possible to use IHRSR (Iterative Helical Real Space Reconstruction) to analyze the structure of BPG in its bound state. Moreover, the qualification for Cryo-EM allows to use plunge freezing to interrupt the incubation on our nanotemplates abruptly. This enables the analysis of intermediate binding states to understand the binding process.
The bio-insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti) has worldwide become the most commonly used agentin mosquito control programs that pursue two main objectives: the control of vector-borne diseases and the reduction of nuisance, mainly coming frommosquitoes that emerge in large quantities from seasonal wetlands. The Upper Rhine Valley, a biodiversity hotspot in Germany, has been treated withBti for decades to reduce mosquito-borne nuisance and increase human well-being.Although Btiis presumed to be an environmentally safe agent,adverse effects on wetland ecosystems are still a matter of debate especially when it comes to long-term and indirect effects on non-target organisms. In light of the above, this thesis aims at investigating direct and indirect effects of Bti-based mosquito control on non-target organisms within wetland food chains.Effects were examinedin studies with increasingeco(toxico)logical complexity, ranging from laboratory over mesocosm to field approaches with a focus on the non-biting Chironomidae and amphibian larvae (Rana temporaria, Lissotriton sp.).In addition, public acceptance of environmentally less invasive alternative mosquito control methods was evaluated within surveys among the local population.
Chironomids were the most severely affected non-target aquatic invertebrates. Bti substantially reduced larval and adult chironomid abundances and modified their species composition. Repeated exposures to commonly used Bti formulations induced sublethal alterations of enzymatic biomarkers activityin frog tadpoles. Bti-induced reductions of chironomid prey availability indirectly decreased body size of newts at metamorphosis and increased predation on newt larvae in mesocosm experiments. Indirect effects of severe reductions in midge biomassmight equally be passed through aquatic but also terrestrial food chains influencing predators of higher trophic levels. The majority ofaffectedpeople in the Upper Rhine Valley expressed a high willingness to contributefinancially to environmentally less harmful mosquito control.Alternative approaches could still include Bti applications excepting treatment of ecologically valuable areas. Potentially rising mosquito levels could be counteracted with local acting mosquito traps in domestic and urban areas because mosquito presence was experienced as most annoying in the home environment.
As Bti-based mosquito control can adversely affect wetland ecosystems, its large-scale applications, including nature conservation areas, should be considered more carefully to avoid harmful consequences for the environmentat the Upper Rhine Valley.This thesis emphasizesthe importance to reconsiderthe current practice of mosquito control and encourage research on alternative mosquito control concepts that are endorsed by the local population. In the context ofthe ongoing amphibian and insect declinesfurther human-induced effects onwetlands should be avoided to preserve biodiversity in functioning ecosystems.
Lakes and reservoirs are important sources of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Although freshwaters cover only a small fraction of the global surface, their contribution to global methane emission is significant and this is expected to increase, as a positive feedback to climate warming and exacerbated eutrophication. Yet, global estimates of methane emission from freshwaters are often based on point measurements that are spatio-temporally biased. To better constrain the uncertainties in quantifying methane fluxes from inland waters, a closer examination of the processes transporting methane from sediment to atmosphere is necessary. Among these processes, ebullition (bubbling) is an important transport pathway and is a primary source of uncertainty in quantifying methane emissions from freshwaters. This thesis aims to improve our understanding of ebullition in freshwaters by studying the processes of methane bubble formation, storage and release in aquatic sediments. The laboratory experiments demonstrate that aquatic sediments can store up to ~20% (volumetric content) gas and the storage capacity varies with sediment properties. The methane produced is stored as gas bubbles in sediment with minimal ebullition until the storage capacity is reached. Once the sediment void spaces are created by gas bubble formation, they are stable and available for future bubble storage and transport. Controlled water level drawdown experiments showed that the amounts of gas released from the sediment scaled with the total volume of sediment gas storage and correlated linearly to the drop in hydrostatic pressure. It was hypothesized that not only the timing of ebullition is controlled by sediment gas storage, but also the spatial distribution of ebullition. A newly developed freeze corer, capable of characterizing sediment gas content under in situ environments, enabled the possibility to test the hypothesis in a large subtropical lake (Lake Kinneret, Israel). The results showed that gas content was variable both vertically and horizontally in the lake sediment. Sediment methane production rate and sediment characteristics could explain these variabilities. The spatial distribution of ebullition generally was in a good agreement with the horizontal distribution of depth-averaged (surface 1 m) sediment gas content. While discrepancies were found between sediment depth-integrated methane production and the snapshot ebullition rate, they were consistent in a long term (multiyear average). These findings provide a solid basis for the future development of a process-based ebullition model. By coupling a sediment transport model with a sediment diagenetic model, general patterns of ebullition hotspots can be predicted at a system level and the uncertainties in ebullition flux measurements can be better constrained both on long-term (months to years) and short-term (minutes to hours) scales.
This dissertation deals with the opportunities and restrictions that parties face in an election campaign at the supranational level of the EU. Using communication science concepts of agenda-setting (focus: media) and agenda-building (focus: political parties), the first part of the study is based on the election campaign for the European Parliament (EP) in 2014. It analyses to what extent political parties put the EU on the agenda. Second, it is examined whether parties have used their structural advantage of being able to influence the media agenda at the supranational level during the election campaign in the context of the EP election campaign. Third, it is examined whether parties can gain an advantage for the visibility of their campaigns by rejecting EU integration and the associated conflictual communication. Fourth and final, it will be explored whether agenda-building can influence the rankings of specific policy issues on the media agenda in the European context.
First, the analyses show that a European political focus of election campaign communication can no longer be found only on the part of the small (eurosceptic) parties. Second, parties have a good chance of being present in media coverage if the they pursue a European political focus in their campaign communication. Third, a negative tone in party communication turns out not to be decisive for the parties' visibility in the election campaign. Fourth, a clear positioning on political issues also prepares parties for restrictions of the further development of a European thematic agenda. After a discussion of these results, the paper concludes with an assessment of the analysis limitations and an outlook on further research approaches.
Engineering criminal agents
(2019)
This PhD thesis with the title "Engineering Criminal Agents" demonstrates the interplay of three different research fields captured in the title: In the centre are Engineering and Simulation, both set in relation with the application field of Criminology - and the social science aspect of the latter. More precisely,
this work intends to show how specific agent-based simulation models can be created using common methods from software engineering.
Agent-based simulation has proven to be a valuable method for social science since decades, and the trend to increasingly complex simulation models is apparent, not at least due to advancing computational and simulation techniques. An important cause of complexity is the inclusion of 'evidence' as basis of simulation models. Evidence can be provided by various stakeholders, reflecting their different viewpoints on the topic to model.
This poses a particular burden by interrelating the two relevant perspectives on the topic of simulation: on the one hand the user of the simulation model who provides the requirements and is interested in the simulation results, on the other hand the developer of the simulation model who has to program a verified and validated formal model. In order to methodically link these two perspectives, substantial efforts in research and development are needed, where this PhD thesis aims to make a contribution.
The practical results - in terms of software - were achieved by using the multi-faceted approach mentioned above: using methods from software engineering, in order to become able to apply methods from computational social sciences, in order to gain insights into social systems, such as in the internal dynamics of criminal networks.
The PhD thesis shows the research involved to create these practical results, and gives technical details and specifications of the developed software.
The frame for research and development to achieve these results was provided mainly by two research projects: OCOPOMO and GLODERS.
Ecological assessment approaches based on benthic invertebrates in Euphrates tributaries in Turkey
(2019)
Sustainable water management requires methods for assessing ecological stream quality. Many years of limnological research are needed to provide a basis for developing such methods. However, research of this kind is still lacking in Turkey. Therefore, the aim of this doctoral thesis was to provide basic research in the field of aquatic ecology and to present methods for the assessment of ecological stream quality based on benthic invertebrates. For this purpose, I selected 17 tributaries of the Euphrates with a similar typology/water order and varying levels of pollution or not affected by pollution at all. The characterisation of the natural mountain streams was the first important step in the analysis of ecological quality. Based on community indices, I found that the five selected streams had a very good ecological status. I also compared the different biological indications, collected on two occasions ¬– once in spring (May) and once in autumn (September) – to determine the optimal sampling time. The macroinvertebrate composition differed considerably between the two seasons, with the number of taxa and Shannon index being significantly higher in autumn than in spring. In the final step, I examined the basal resources of the macroinvertebrates in the reference streams with an isotope analysis. I found that FPOM and biofilm were the most relevant basal resources of benthic invertebrates. Subsequently, based on the similarity of their community structures, I divided the 17 streams into three quality classes, supported by four community indices (EPT [%], EPTCBO [%], number of individuals, evenness). In this process, 23 taxa were identified as indicators for the three quality classes. In the next step, I presented two new or adapted indices for the assessment of quality class. Firstly, I adapted the Hindu Kush-Himalaya biotic index to the catchment area of the Euphrates and created a new, ecoregion-specific score list (Euph-Scores) for 93 taxa. The weighted ASPT values, which were renamed the Euphrates Biotic Score (EUPHbios) in this study, showed sharper differentiations of quality classes compared to the other considered ASPT values. Thus, this modified index has proved to be very effective and easy to implement in practical applications. As a second biological index, I suggested the proportion of habitat specialists. To calculate this index, the habitat preferences of the 20 most common benthic invertebrates were identified using the new habitat score. The proportion of habitat specialists differed significantly among the three quality classes with higher values in natural streams than in polluted streams. The methods and results presented in this doctoral thesis can be used in a multi-metric index for a Turkish assessment programme.