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Foliicolous lichens are one of the most abundant epiphytes in tropical rainforests and one of the few groups of organisms that characterize these forests. Tropical rainforests are increasingly affected by anthropogenic disturbance resulting in forest destruction and degradation. However, not much is known on the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on the diversity of foliicolous lichens. Understanding such effects is crucial for the development of appropriate measures for the conservation of such organisms. In this study, foliicolous lichens diversity was investigated in three tropical rainforests in East Africa. Godere Forest in Southwest Ethiopia is a transitional rainforest with a mixture of Afromontane and Guineo-Congolian species. The forest is secondary and has been affected by shifting cultivation, semi-forest coffee management and commercial coffee plantation. Budongo Forest in West Uganda is a Guineo-Congolian rainforest consisting of primary and secondary forests. Kakamega Forest in western Kenya is a transitional rainforest with a mixture of Guineo-Congolian and Afromontane species. The forest is a mosaic of near-primary forest, secondary forests of different seral stages, grasslands, plantations, and natural glades.
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the sentiment distributions of Wikipedia concepts.
We analyse the sentiment of the entire English Wikipedia corpus, which includes 5,669,867 articles and 1,906,375 talks, by using a lexicon-based method with four different lexicons.
Also, we explore the sentiment distributions from a time perspective using the sentiment scores obtained from our selected corpus. The results obtained have been compared not only between articles and talks but also among four lexicons: OL, MPQA, LIWC, and ANEW.
Our findings show that among the four lexicons, MPQA has the highest sensitivity and ANEW has the lowest sensitivity to emotional expressions. Wikipedia articles show more sentiments than talks according to OL, MPQA, and LIWC, whereas Wikipedia talks show more sentiments than articles according to ANEW. Besides, the sentiment has a trend regarding time series, and each lexicon has its own bias regarding text describing different things.
Moreover, our research provides three interactive widgets for visualising sentiment distributions for Wikipedia concepts regarding the time and geolocation attributes of concepts.
In a world where language defines the boundaries of one's understanding, the words of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein resonate profoundly. Wittgenstein's assertion that "Die Grenzen meine Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt" (Wittgenstein 2016: v. 5.6) underscores the vital role of language in shaping our perceptions. Today, in a globalized and interconnected society, fluency in foreign languages is indispensable for individual success. Education must break down these linguistic barriers, and one promising approach is the integration of foreign languages into content subjects.
Teaching content subjects in a foreign language, a practice known as Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), not only enhances language skills but also cultivates cognitive abilities and intercultural competence. This approach expands horizons and aligns with the core principles of European education (Leaton Gray, Scott & Mehisto 2018: 50). The Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) recognizes the benefits of CLIL and encourages its implementation in German schools (cf. KMK 2013a).
With the rising popularity of CLIL, textbooks in foreign languages have become widely available, simplifying teaching. However, the appropriateness of the language used in these materials remains an unanswered question. If textbooks impose excessive linguistic demands, they may inadvertently limit students' development and contradict the goal of CLIL.
This thesis focuses on addressing this issue by systematically analyzing language requirements in CLIL teaching materials, emphasizing receptive and productive skills in various subjects based on the Common European Framework of Reference. The aim is to identify a sequence of subjects that facilitates students' language skill development throughout their school years. Such a sequence would enable teachers to harness the full potential of CLIL, fostering a bidirectional approach where content subjects facilitate language learning.
While research on CLIL is extensive, studies on language requirements for bilingual students are limited. This thesis seeks to bridge this gap by presenting findings for History, Geography, Biology, and Mathematics, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of language demands. This research endeavors to enrich the field of bilingual education and CLIL, ultimately benefiting the academic success of students in an interconnected world.
Der Klimawandel stellt eine existenzielle Bedrohung für das menschliche Überleben, die soziale Organisation der Gesellschaft und die Stabilität der Ökosysteme dar. Er ist daher zutiefst beängstigend. Im Angesicht von Bedrohungen wollen sich Menschen häufig schützen, anstatt sich proaktiv zu verhalten. Wenn psychologische Ressourcen zur Bewältigung nicht ausreichen, reagieren Menschen oft mit verschiedenen Formen der Leugnung. Diese Dissertation leistet einen Beitrag zum Verständnis des vielschichtigen Phänomens der Klimawandelleugnung aus psychologischer Sicht.
Es gibt vier Forschungslücken in der Literatur zur Klimawandelleugnung: Erstens hat das Spektrum der Klimawandelleugnung als Selbst-schützende Reaktion auf die Klimakrise innerhalb der Psychologie bisher keine Beachtung gefunden. Zweitens wurde psychologische Grundbedürfnisbefriedigung, ein fundamentaler Indikator für menschliches Funktionieren und die Fähigkeit, mit Bedrohungen umzugehen, bisher nicht als Prädiktor für Klimawandelleugnung untersucht. Drittens sind Beziehungen des Spektrums der Klimawandelleugnung zu klimarelevanten Emotionen, insbesondere der Klimaangst, bisher nicht empirisch untersucht worden. Viertens wurde bisher nicht untersucht, wie sich das Spektrum der Klimawandelleugnung zu etablierten Prädiktoren der Klimawandelleugnung, d.h. rechtsideologischen Überzeugungen und männlichem Geschlecht, verhält. Um diese Lücken zu schließen, untersuche ich, wie sich das Spektrum der Klimawandelleugnung im deutschen Kontext manifestiert und wie es mit psychologischer Grundbedürfnisbefriedigung und -frustration, umweltfreundlichem Verhalten, Klimaangst, ideologischer Uberzeugung und Geschlecht zusammenhängt.
Fünf Manuskripte zeigen, dass Klimawandelleugnung im deutschen Kontext auf einem Spektrum existiert, das von der Verzerrung von Fakten (interpretative Leugnung, insbesondere Leugnung der persönlichen und globalen Folgenschwere) bis zur Leugnung von Implikationen reicht (implikatorische Leugnung, insbesondere Vermeidung, Leugnung von Schuld und Rationalisierung der eigenen Beteiligung). Über alle Analysen hinweg war niedrige psychologische Grundbedürfnisbefriedigung Prädiktor für das Spektrum der Klimawandelleugnung, das wiederum mit umweltfreundlichem Verhalten assoziiert war. Klimawandelleugnung stand generell in einem negativen Zusammenhang mit Klimaangst, mit Ausnahme einer positiven Assoziation von Vermeidung und Klimaangst. Rechtsideologische Überzeugung war der stärkste Prädiktor für Klimawandelleugnung über das gesamte Spektrum hinweg. Niedrige Bedürfnisbefriedigung und männliches Geschlecht waren weitere, aber schwächere Prädiktoren für implikatorische Leugnung.
Diese Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass das Spektrum der Klimawandelleugnung viele psychologische Funktionen erfüllt. Klimawandelleugnung ist möglicherweise sowohl eine Selbst-schützende Strategie, um Emotionen herunter zu regulieren, als auch um sich vor dem Verlust von Privilegien zu schützen. Kurz gesagt stellt Klimawandelleugnung eine Barriere für Klimaschutzmaßnahmen dar, die möglicherweise erst dann überwunden wird, wenn Menschen über ausreichende psychologische Ressourcen verfügen, um sich der Bedrohung durch den Klimawandel zu stellen und mit zugrundeliegenden Selbst-schützenden, emotionalen Reaktionen umzugehen.
This thesis addresses the automated identification and localization of a time-varying number of objects in a stream of sensor data. The problem is challenging due to its combinatorial nature: If the number of objects is unknown, the number of possible object trajectories grows exponentially with the number of observations. Random finite sets are a relatively new theory that has been developed to derive at principled and efficient approximations. It is based around set-valued random variables that contain an unknown number of elements which appear in arbitrary order and are themselves random. While extensively studied in theory, random finite sets have not yet become a leading paradigm in practical computer vision and robotics applications. This thesis explores random finite sets in visual tracking applications. The first method developed in this thesis combines set-valued recursive filtering with global optimization. The problem is approached in a min-cost flow network formulation, which has become a standard inference framework for multiple object tracking due to its efficiency and optimality. A main limitation of this formulation is a restriction to unary and pairwise cost terms. This circumstance makes integration of higher-order motion models challenging. The method developed in this thesis approaches this limitation by application of a Probability Hypothesis Density filter. The Probability Hypothesis Density filter was the first practically implemented state estimator based on random finite sets. It circumvents the combinatorial nature of data association itself by propagation of an object density measure that can be computed efficiently, without maintaining explicit trajectory hypotheses. In this work, the filter recursion is used to augment measurements with an additional hidden kinematic state to be used for construction of more informed flow network cost terms, e.g., based on linear motion models. The method is evaluated on public benchmarks where a considerate improvement is achieved compared to network flow formulations that are based on static features alone, such as distance between detections and appearance similarity. A second part of this thesis focuses on the related task of detecting and tracking a single robot operator in crowded environments. Different from the conventional multiple object tracking scenario, the tracked individual can leave the scene and later reappear after a longer period of absence. Therefore, a re-identification component is required that picks up the track on reentrance. Based on random finite sets, the Bernoulli filter is an optimal Bayes filter that provides a natural representation for this type of problem. In this work, it is shown how the Bernoulli filter can be combined with a Probability Hypothesis Density filter to track operator and non-operators simultaneously. The method is evaluated on a publicly available multiple object tracking dataset as well as on custom sequences that are specific to the targeted application. Experiments show reliable tracking in crowded scenes and robust re-identification after long term occlusion. Finally, a third part of this thesis focuses on appearance modeling as an essential aspect of any method that is applied to visual object tracking scenarios. Therefore, a feature representation that is robust to pose variations and changing lighting conditions is learned offline, before the actual tracking application. This thesis proposes a joint classification and metric learning objective where a deep convolutional neural network is trained to identify the individuals in the training set. At test time, the final classification layer can be stripped from the network and appearance similarity can be queried using cosine distance in representation space. This framework represents an alternative to direct metric learning objectives that have required sophisticated pair or triplet sampling strategies in the past. The method is evaluated on two large scale person re-identification datasets where competitive results are achieved overall. In particular, the proposed method better generalizes to the test set compared to a network trained with the well-established triplet loss.
Die automatische Detektion der Lage und Ausrichtung von Unterwasser-Kabeln oder -Pipelines in Kamerabildern ermöglicht es, Unterwasserfahrzeuge autonome Kontrollfahrten durchführen zu lassen. Durch Pflanzenwuchs auf und in der Nähe von Kabeln bzw. Pipelines wird deren visuelle Erfassung jedoch erschwert: Die Bestimmug der Lage über die Detektion von Kanten mit anschließender Linien-Extraktion schlägt oft fehl. Probabilistische Ansätze sind hier den deterministischen überlegen. Durch die Modellierung von Wahrscheinlichkeiten kann trotz geringer Anzahl von extrahierten Merkmalen eine Aussage über den Zustand des Systems getroffen werden. Diese Arbeit stellt ein neues auf Partikelfiltern basierendes Tracking-System für die Verfolgung von Kabeln und Pipelines in Bildsequenzen vor. Umfangreiche Experimente auf realistischen Unterwasser-Videos zeigen die Robustheit und Performanz des gewählten Ansatzes sowie Vorteile gegenüber vorangegangenen Arbeiten.
The Internet of Things is still one of the most relevant topics in the field of economics and research powered by the increasing demand of innovative services. Cost reductions in manufacturing of IoT hardware and the development of completely new communication ways has led to the point of bil-lions of devices connected to the internet. But in order to rule this new IoT landscape a standardized solution to conquer these challenges must be developed, the IoT Architecture.
This thesis examines the structure, purpose and requirements of IoT Architecture Models in the global IoT landscape and proposes an overview across the selected ones. For that purpose, a struc-tured literature analysis on this topic is conducted within this thesis, including an analysis on three existing research approaches trying to frame this topic and a tool supported evaluation of IoT Archi-tecture literature with over 200 accessed documents.
Furthermore, a coding of literature with the help of the specialised coding tool ATLAS.ti 8 is conduct-ed on 30 different IoT Architecture Models. In a final step these Architecture Models are categorized and compared to each other showing that the environment of IoT and its Architectures gets even more complex the further the research goes.
Social-Media Plattformen wie Twitter oder Reddit bieten Nutzern nahezu ohne Beschränkungen die Möglichkeit, ihre Meinungen über aktuelle Ereignisse zu veröffentlichen, diese mit anderen zu teilen und darüber zu diskutieren. Während die Mehrheit der Nutzer diese Plattformen nur als reines Diskussionsportal verwenden, gibt es jedoch Nutzergruppen, welche aktiv und gezielt versuchen, diese veröffentlichten Meinungen in ihrem Sinne zu beeinflussen bzw. zu manipulieren. Durch wiederholtes Verbreiten von bearbeiteten Fake-News oder stark polarisierenden Meinungen im gesamten politischen Spektrum können andere Nutzer beeinflusst, manipuliert und unter Umständen zum Träger von Hassreden und extremen politischen Positionen werden. Viele dieser Nutzergruppen sind vor allem in englischsprachigen Portalen anzutreffen, in denen sie sich überwiegend als Muttersprachler ausgeben. In dieser Arbeit stellen wir eine Methode vor, englische Muttersprachler und Nicht-Muttersprachler, die Englisch als Fremdsprache verwenden, anhand von ausgewählten englischen Social Media Texten zu unterscheiden. Dazu implementieren wir textmerkmalbasierte Modelle, welche für traditionelle Machine-Learning Prozesse und neuartigen AutoML-Pipelines zur Klassifizierung von Texten verwendet werden. Wir klassifizieren dabei Sprachfamilie, Muttersprache und Ursprung eines beliebigen englischen Textes. Die Modelle werden an einem bestehenden Datensatz von Reddit, welcher hauptsächlich aus englischen Texten von europäischen Nutzern besteht, und einem neu erstellten Twitter Datensatz, der Tweets von aktuellen Themen in verschiedenen Ländern enthält, angewandt. Wir evaluieren dabei vergleichsweise die erhaltenen Resultate unserer Pipeline zu traditionellen Maschinenlernprozessen zur Texterkennung anhand von Präzision, Genauigkeit und F1-Maßen der Vorhersagen. Wir vergleichen zudem die Ergebnisse auf Unterschiede der Sprachnutzung auf den unterschiedlichen Plattformen sowie den ausgewählten Themenbereichen. Dabei erzielen wir eine hohe Vorhersagewahrscheinlichkeit für alle gewählten Kategorien des erstellten Twitter Datensatzes und stellen unter anderem eine hohe Abweichung in Bezug auf die durchschnittliche Textlänge insbesondere bei Nutzern aus dem baltoslawischen Sprachraum fest.
As Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) initiatives are gradually moving out of the early experimentation phase it is time to focus greater attention on examining the structures, processes and operations surrounding E2.0 projects. In this paper we present the findings of an empirical study to investigate and understand the reasons for initiating E2.0 projects and the benefits being derived from them. Our study comprises seven in-depth case studies of E2.0 implementations. We develop a classification and means of visualising the scope of E2.0 initiatives and use these methods to analyse and compare projects.
Our findings indicate a wide range of motivations and combinations of technology in use and show a strong emphasis towards the content management functionality of E2.0 technologies.
Remote Working Study 2022
(2022)
The Remote Working Study 2022 is focused on the transition to work from home (WFH) triggered by the stay at home directives of 2020. These directives required employees to work in their private premises wherever possible to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus. The study, conducted by the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) at the University of Koblenz from December 2021 to January 2022, explores the transition to remote working.
The objective of the survey is to collect baseline information about organisations’ remote work experiences during and immediately following the COVID-19 lockdowns. The survey was completed by the key persons responsible for the implementation and/or management of the digital workplace in 19 German and Swiss organisations.
The data presented in this report was collected from member organisations of the IndustryConnect initiative. IndustryConnect is a university-industry research programme that is coordinated by researchers from the University of Koblenz. It focuses on research in the areas of the digital workplace and enterprise collaboration technologies, and facilitates the generation of new research insights and the exchange of experiences among user companies.
Das Internet der Dinge (IoT) ist ein Konzept, bestehend aus vernetzten physischen Objekten, welche in die virtuelle Welt integriert werden um aktive Teilnehmer von Geschäfts- und Alltagsprozessen zu werden (Uckelmann, Harrison and Michahelles, 2011; Shrouf, Ordieres and Miragliotta, 2014). Es wird erwartet, dass dieses Konzept einen großen Einfluss auf Unternehmen haben wird (Council, Nic and Intelligence, 2008). Geschäftsmodelle kleiner und mittelständischer Unternehmen (KMU) sind bedroht, sollten sie den sich abzeichnenden Trend nutzen (Sommer, 2015). Daher ist das Ziel dieser Arbeit, eine exemplarische Implementierung von vernetzten Geräten in einem kleinen Unternehmen um seine Vorteile darzustellen.
Diese Arbeit verwendet Design Science Research (DSR) um einen Prototyp zu entwickeln, der auf dem Anwendungsfall einer Holzwerkstatt aufbaut. Der Prototyp besteht aus einem physischen Sensor und einer Webapplikation, welche von dem kleinen Unternehmen zur Verbesserung seiner Prozesse genutzt werden kann. Die Arbeit dokumentiert den iterativen Entwicklungsprozess der Prototypen von Grund auf zu nutzbarer Hard- und Software.
Der Hauptbeitrag dieser Arbeit ist die beispielhafte Anwendung und Nutzung von IoT in einem kleinen Unternehmen.
Agricultural land-use may lead to brief pulse exposures of pesticides in edge-of-field streams, potentially resulting in adverse effects on aquatic macrophytes, invertebrates and ecosystem functions. The higher tier risk assessment is mainly based on pond mesocosms which are not designed to mimic stream-typical conditions. Relatively little is known on exposure and effect assessment using stream mesocosms.
Thus the present thesis evaluates the appliacability of the stream mesocosms to mimic stream-typical pulse exposures, to assess resulting effects on flora and fauna and to evaluate aquatic-terrestrial food web coupling. The first objective was to mimic stream-typical pulse exposure scenarios with different durations (≤ 1 to ≥ 24 hours). These exposure scenarios established using a fluorescence tracer were the methodological basis for the effect assessment of an herbicide and an insecticide. In order to evaluate the applicability of stream mesocosms for regulatory purposes, the second objective was to assess effects on two aquatic macrophytes following a 24-h pulse exposure with the herbicide iofensulfuron-sodium (1, 3, 10 and 30 µg/L; n = 3). Growth inhibition of up to 66 and 45% was observed for the total shoot length of Myriophyllum spicatum and Elodea canadensis, respectively. Recovery of this endpoint could be demonstrated within 42 days for both macrophytes. The third objective was to assess effects on structural and functional endpoints following a 6-h pulse exposure of the pyrethroid ether etofenprox (0.05, 0.5 and 5 µg/L; n = 4). The most sensitive structural (abundance of Cloeon simile) and functional (feeding rates of Asellus aquaticus) endpoint revealed significant effects at 0.05 µg/L etofenprox. This concentration was below field-measured etofenprox concentrations and thus suggests that pulse exposures adversely affect invertebrate populations and ecosystem functions in streams. Such pollutions of streams may also result in decreased emergence of aquatic insects and potentially lead to an insect-mediated transfer of pollutants to adjacent food webs. Test systems capable to assess aquatic-terrestrial effects are not yet integrated in mesocosm approaches but might be of interest for substances with bioaccumulation potential. Here, the fourth part provides an aquatic-terrestrial model ecosystem capable to assess cross-ecosystem effects. Information on the riparian food web such as the contribution of aquatic (up to 71%) and terrestrial (up to 29%) insect prey to the diet of the riparian spider Tetragnatha extensa was assessed via stable isotope ratios (δ13C and δ15N). Thus, the present thesis provides the methodological basis to assess aquatic-terrestrial pollutant transfer and effects on the riparian food web.
Overall the results of this thesis indicate, that stream mesocosms can be used to mimic stream-typical pulse exposures of pesticides, to assess resulting effects on macrophytes and invertebrates within prospective environmental risk assessment (ERA) and to evaluate changes in riparian food webs.
The work presented in this thesis investigated interactions of selected biophysical processes that affect zooplankton ecology at smaller scales. In this endeavour, the extent of changes in swimming behaviour and fluid disturbances produced by swimming Daphnia in response to changing physical environments were quantified. In the first research question addressed within this context, size and energetics of hydrodynamic trails produced by Daphnia swimming in non-stratified still waters were characterized and quantified as a function of organisms’ size and their swimming patterns.
The results revealed that neither size nor the swimming pattern of Daphnia affects the width of induced trails or dissipation rates. Nevertheless, as the size and swimming velocity of the organisms increased, trail volume increased in proportional to the cubic power of Reynolds number, and the biggest trail volume was about 500 times the body volume of the largest daphnids. Larger spatial extent of fluid perturbation and prolonged period to decay caused by bigger trail volumes would play a significant role in zooplankton ecology, e.g. increasing the risk of predation.
The study also found that increased trail volume brought about significantly enhanced total dissipated power at higher Reynolds number, and the magnitudes of total dissipated power observed varied in the range of (1.3-10)X10-9 W.
Furthermore, this study provided strong evidence that swimming speed of Daphnia and total dissipated power in Daphnia trails exceeded those of some other selected zooplankton species.
In recognizing turbulence as an intrinsic environmental perturbation in aquatic habitats, this thesis also examined the response of Daphnia to a range of turbulence flows, which correspond to turbu-lence levels that zooplankton generally encounter in their habitats. Results indicated that within the range of turbulent intensities to which the Daphnia are likely to be exposed in their natural habitats, increasing turbulence compelled the organisms to enhance their swimming activity and swim-ming speed. However, as the turbulence increased to extremely high values (10-4 m2s-3), Daphnia began to withdraw from their active swimming behaviour. Findings of this work also demonstrated that the threshold level of turbulence at which animals start to alleviate from largely active swimming is about 10-6 m2s-3. The study further illustrated that during the intermediate range of turbu-lence; 10-7 - 10-6 m2s-3, kinetic energy dissipation rates in the vicinity of the organisms is consistently one order of magnitude higher than that of the background turbulent flow.
Swarming, a common conspicuous behavioural trait observed in many zooplankton species, is considered to play a significant role in defining freshwater ecology of their habitats from food exploitation, mate encountering to avoiding predators through hydrodynamic flow structures produced by them, therefore, this thesis also investigated implications of Daphnia swarms at varied abundance & swarm densities on their swimming kinematics and induced flow field.
The results showed that Daphnia aggregated in swarms with swarm densities of (1.1-2.3)x103 L-1, which exceeded the abundance densities by two orders of magnitude (i.e. 1.7 - 6.7 L-1). The estimated swarm volume decreased from 52 cm3 to 6.5 cm3, and the mean neighbouring distance dropped from 9.9 to 6.4 body lengths. The findings of this work also showed that mean swimming trajectories were primarily horizontal concentric circles around the light source. Mean flow speeds found to be one order of magnitude lower than the corresponding swimming speeds of Daphnia. Furthermore, this study provided evidences that the flow fields produced by swarming Daphnia differed considerably between unidirectional vortex swarming and bidirectional swimming at low and high abundances respectively.
Increasingly, problematic smartphone use behavior (PSU) and excessive consumption are reported. In this study, an experiment was developed to investigate the influence of screen coloration using the grayscale setting on smartphone usage time in repeated measurements. We also investigated how individuals perceived suffering correlates with smartphone usage time and PSU, and whether differences exist by smartphone usage type (social, process, habitual). 240 subjects completed a questionnaire about smartphone usage time, PSU, perceived suffering, and smartphone usage types. Afterward, their smartphones were switched to grayscale setting for at least 24h, and thereafter 92 of these participants completed the second questionnaire. Analyses showed that grayscale setting decreases usage time and that there is a positive correlation between PSU, smartphone usage duration, and perceived suffering. The types of use (process and habitual) influence one’s perceived suffering. Thus, it shows that individuals are aware of their PSU and suffer from it. Using grayscale setting is effective in reducing smartphone use time.
Über 10.000 verschiedene organische Substanzen wie Arzneistoffe, Inhaltsstoffe von Körperpflegemitteln und Biozide werden regelmäßig im Alltag eingesetzt. Die meisten Substanzen gelangen nach ihrer Verwendung in das häusliche Abwasser. Bisherige wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen haben ergeben, dass eine konventionelle biologische Abwasserreinigung in kommunalen Kläranlagen keine ausreichende Barriere für die Emission dieser anthropogenen Stoffe in die Oberflächengewässer darstellt.
Dies birgt unvorhersehbare Risiken für die aquatischen Lebensgemeinschaften und die Trinkwasserversorgung. Hinsichtlich ihres Vorkommens und Verhaltens in kommunalen Kläranlagen besteht daher insbesondere für erst kürzlich eingeführte und/oder in der Umwelt nachgewiesene Spurenstoffe (sogenannte "neuartige" Spurenstoffe, engl.: "emerging micropollutants") ein großer Forschungsbedarf. Um ein möglichst umfassendes Bild vom Verhalten neuartiger organischer Spurenstoffe in der kommunalen Abwasserbehandlung zu erhalten, wurden im Rahmen dieser Dissertation die folgenden Substanzklassen, welche ein weites Spektrum an physiko-chemischen Eigenschaften aufweisen, untersucht: Arzneistoffe (Betablocker und psychoaktive Substanzen), UV-Filtersubstanzen, Vulkanisationsbeschleuniger (Benzothiazole), Biozide (Antischuppenmittel, Konservierungsmittel, Desinfektionsmittel) und Pestizide (Phenylharnstoff- und Triazinherbizide).
Generalized methods for automated theorem proving can be used to compute formula transformations such as projection elimination and knowledge compilation. We present a framework based on clausal tableaux suited for such tasks. These tableaux are characterized independently of particular construction methods, but important features of empirically successful methods are taken into account, especially dependency directed backjumping and branch local operation. As an instance of that framework an adaption of DPLL is described. We show that knowledge compilation methods can be essentially improved by weaving projection elimination partially into the compilation phase.
The decline of biodiversity can be observed worldwide and its consequences are alarming. It is therefore crucial that nature must be protected and, where possible, restored. A wide variety of different project options are possible. Yet in the context of limited availability of resources, the selection of the most efficient measures is increasingly important. For this purpose, there is still a lack of information. This pertains, as outlined in the next paragraph, in particular, to information at different scales of projects.
Firstly, there is a lack of information on the concrete added value of biodiversity protection projects. Secondly, there is a lack of information on the actual impacts of such projects and on the costs and benefits associated with a project. Finally, there is a lack of information on the links between the design of a project, the associated framework conditions and the perception of specific impacts. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by providing more information on the three scales by means of three empirical studies on three different biodiversity protection projects in order to help optimize future projects.
The first study “Assessing the trade-offs in more nature-friendly mosquito control in the Upper Rhine region” examines the added value of a more nature-friendly mosquito control in the Upper Rhine Valley of Germany using a contingent valuation method. Recent studies show that the widely used biocide Bti, which is used as the main mosquito control agent in many parts of the world, has more negative effects on nature than previously expected. However, it is not yet clear whether the population supports a more nature-friendly mosquito control, as such an adaptation could potentially lead to higher nuisance. This study attempts to answer this question by assessing the willingness to pay for an adapted mosquito control strategy that reduces the use of Bti, while maintaining nuisance protection within settlements. The results show that the majority of the surveyed population attaches a high value to a more nature-friendly mosquito control and is willing to accept a higher nuisance outside of the villages.
The second study “Inner city river restoration projects: the role of project components for acceptance” examines the acceptance of a river restoration project in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Despite much effort, many rivers worldwide are still in poor condition. Therefore, a rapid implementation of river restoration projects is of great importance. In this context, acceptance by society plays a fundamental role, however, the factors determining such acceptance are still poorly understood. In particular, the complex interplay between the acceptance or rejection of specific project components and the acceptance of the overall project require further exploration. This study addresses this knowledge gap by assessing the acceptance of the project, its various ecological and social components, and the perception of real and fictitious costs as well as the benefits of the components. Our findings demonstrate that while acceptance of the overall project is generally rather high, many respondents reject one or more of the project's components. Complementary social project components, like a playground, find less support than purely ecological components. Overall, our research shows that complementary components may increase or decrease acceptance of the overall project. We, furthermore, found that differences in the acceptance of the individual components depend on individual concerns, such as perceived flood risk, construction costs, expected noise and littering as well as the quality of communication, attachment to the site, and the age of the respondents.
The third study “What determines preferences for semi-natural habitats in agrarian landscapes? A choice-modelling approach across two countries using attributes characterizing vegetation” investigates people's aesthetic preferences for semi-natural habitats in agricultural landscapes. The EU-Common Agricultural Policy promotes the introduction of woody and grassy semi-natural habitats (SNH) in agricultural landscapes. While the benefits of these structures in terms of regulating ecosystem services are already well understood, the effects of SNH on visual landscape quality is still not clear. This study investigates the factors determining people’s visual preferences in the context of grassy and woody SNH elements in Swiss and Hungarian landscapes using picture-based choice experiments. The results suggest that respondents’ choices strongly depend on specific vegetation characteristics that appear and disappear over the year. In particular, flowers as a source of colours and green vegetation as well as ordered structure and the proportion of uncovered soil in the picture play an important role regarding respondents’ aesthetic perceptions of the pictures.
The three empirical studies can help to make future projects in the study areas of biodiversity protection more efficient. While this thesis highlights the importance of exploring biodiversity protection projects at different scales, further analyses of the different scales of biodiversity protection projects are needed to provide a sound basis to develop guidance on identifying the most efficient biodiversity protection projects.
Thousands of chemicals from daily use are being discharged from civilization into the water cycle via different pathways. Ingredients of personal care products, detergents, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and industrial chemicals thus find their way into the aquatic ecosystems and may cause adverse impacts on the ecology. Pharmaceuticals for instance, represent a central group of anthropogenic chemicals, because of their designed potency to interfere with physiological functions in organisms. Ecotoxicological effects from pharmaceutical burden have been verified in the past. Therapeutic groups with pronounced endocrine disrupting potentials such as steroid hormones gain increasing focus in environmental research as it was reported that they cause endocrine disruption in aquatic organisms even when exposed to environmentally relevant concentrations. This thesis considers the comprehensive investigation of the occurrence of corticosteroids and progestogens in wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents and surface waters as well as the elucidation of the fate and biodegradability of these steroid families during activated sludge treatment. For the first goal of the thesis, a robust and highly sensitive analytical method based on liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) was developed in order to simultaneously determine the occurrence of around 60 mineralocorticoids, glucocorticoids and progestogens in the aquatic environment. A special focus was set to the compound selection due to the diversity of marketed synthetic steroids. Some analytical challenges have been approved by individual approaches regarding sensitivity enhancement and compound stabilities. These results may be important for further research in environmental analysis of steroid hormones. Reliable and low quantification limits are the perquisite for the determination of corticosteroids and progestogens at relevant concentrations due to low consumption volumes and simultaneously low effect-based trigger values. Achieved quantification limits for all target analytes ranged between 0.02 ng/L and 0.5 ng/L in surface water and 0.05 ng/L to 5 ng/L in WWTP effluents. This sensitivity enabled the detection of three mineralocorticoids, 23 glucocorticoids and 10 progestogens within the sampling campaign around Germany. Many of them were detected for the first time in the environment, particularly in Germany and the EU. To the best of our knowledge, this in-depth steroid screening provided a good overview of single steroid burden and allowed for the identification of predominantly steroids of each steroid
type analyzed for the first time. The frequent detection of highly potent synthetic steroids (e.g. triamcinolone acetonide, clobetasol propionate, betamethasone valerate, dienogest, cyproterone acetate) highlighted insufficient removal during conventional Summary wastewater treatment and indicated the need for regulation to control their emission since the steroid concentrations were found to be above the reported effect-based trigger values for biota. Overall, the study revealed reliable environmental data of poorly or even not analyzed steroids. The results complement the existing knowledge in this field but also providednew information which can beused particularly for compound prioritization in ecotoxicological research and environmental analysis. Based on the data obtained from the monitoring campaign, incubation experiments were conducted to enable the comparison of the biodegradability and transformation processes in activated sludge treatment for structure-related steroids under aerobic and standardized experimental conditions. The compounds were accurately selected to cover manifold structural moieties of commonly used glucocorticoids, including non-halogenated and halogenated steroids, their mono- and diesters, and several acetonide-type steroids. This approach allowed for a structure-based interpretation of the results. The obtained biodegradation rate constants suggested large variations in the biodegradability (half-lifes ranged from < 0.5 h to > 14 d). An increasing stability was identified in the order from non-halogenated steroids (e.g. hydrocortisone), over 9α-halogenated steroids (e.g. betamethasone), to C17-monoesters (e.g. betamethasone 17-valerate, clobetasol propionate), and finally to acetonides (e.g. triamcinolone acetonide), thus suggesting a strong relationship of the biodegradability with the glucocorticoid structure. Some explanations for this behavior have been received by identifying the transformation products (TPs) and elucidating individual transformation pathways. The results revealed the identification of the likelihood of transformation reactions depending on the chemical steroid structure for the first time. Among the identified TPs, the carboxylates (e.g. TPs of fluticasone propionate, triamcinolone acetonide) have been shown persistency in the subsequent incubation experiments. The newly identified TPs furthermore were frequently detected in the effluents of full-scale wastewater treatment plants. These findings emphasized i) the transferability of the lab-scale degradation experiments to real world and that ii) insufficient removals may cause adverse effects in the aquatic environment due to the ability of the precursor steroids and TPs to interact with the endocrine system in biota. For the last goal, the conceptual study for glucocorticoids was applied to progestogens.
Here, two sub-types of the steroid family frequently used for hormonal contraception were selected (17α-hydroxyprogesterone and 19-norstestosterone type). The progestogens showed a fast and complete degradation within six hours, and thus empathizes pronounced biodegradability. However, cyproterone acetate and dienogest Summary have been found to be more recalcitrant in activated sludge treatment. This was consistent with their ubiquitously occurrence during the previous monitoring campaign. The elucidation of TPs again revealed some crucial information regarding the observed behavior and highlighted furthermore the formation of hazardous TPs. It was shown that 19-nortestosterone type steroids are able to undergo aromatization at ring A in contact with activated sludge, leading to the formation of estrogen-like TPs with a phenolic moiety at ring A. In the case of norethisterone the formation of 17α-ethinylestradiol was confirmed, which is a well-known potent synthetic estrogen with elevated ecotoxicological potency. Thus, the results indicated for the very first time an unknown source of estrogenic compounds, particularly for 17α-ethinylestradiol. In conclusion, some steroids were found to be very stable in activated sludge treatment, others degrade well, and others which do degrade but predominantly to active TPs depending on their chemical structure. Fluorinated acetal steroids such as triamcinolone acetonide and fluocinolone acetonide are poorly biodegradable, which is reflected in high concentrations detected ubiquitously in WWTP effluents. Endogenous steroids and their most related synthetic once such as hydrocortisone, prednisolone or 17α-hydroxyprogesterone are readily biodegradable. Regardless their high influent concentrations, they are almost completely removed in conventional WWTPs. Steroids between this range have been found to form elevated quantities of TPs which are partially still active, which particularly the case for betamethasone, fluticasone propionate, cyproterone acetate or dienogest. The thesis illustrates the need for an extensive evaluation of the environmental risks and carried out that corticosteroids and progestogens merit more attention in environmental regulatory and research than it is currently the case
Instructor feedback on written assignments is one of the most important elements in the writing process, especially for students writing in English as a foreign language. However, students are often critical of both the amount and quality of the feedback they receive. In order to better understand what makes feedback effective, this study explored the nature of students’ assessments of the educational alliance, and how their receptivity to, perceptions of, and decisions about using their instructors’ feedback differed depending on how strong they believed the educational alliance to be. This exploratory case study found that students not only assessed the quality of the educational alliance based on goal compatibility, task relevance, and teacher effectiveness, but that there was also a reciprocal relationship between these elements. Furthermore, students’ perceptions of the educational alliance directly influenced how they perceived the feedback, which made the instructor’s choice of feedback method largely irrelevant. Stronger educational alliances resulted in higher instances of critical engagement, intrinsic motivation, and feelings of self-efficacy. The multidirectional influence of goal, task, and bond mean that instructors who want to maximize their feedback efforts need to attend to all three.
Die heutige Landwirtschaft ist in hohem Maße auf den Einsatz von Pestiziden angewiesen, um verschiedene Schädlinge zu bekämpfen und die Ernteerträge zu maximieren. Trotz detaillierter Vorschriften für den Einsatz von Pestiziden, die auf einem komplexen System der Risikobewertung beruhen, hat sich gezeigt, dass der weit verbreitete Einsatz dieser biologisch aktiven Substanzen eine Gefahr für die Umwelt darstellt. In Oberflächengewässern wurde beobachtet, dass die Pestizidbelastung die als noch umweltverträglich angesehenen Konzentrationen übersteigt und sich negativ auf die Ökologie der Fließgewässer auswirkt, was die Frage aufwirft, ob die derzeitige Risikobewertung einen nachhaltigen Einsatz von Pestiziden gewährleistet. Um diese Frage zu beantworten, hat das umfassende "Kleingewässer-Monitoring" (KgM) in den Jahren 2018 und 2019 das Vorkommen von Pestiziden und die damit verbundenen ökologischen Auswirkungen in 124 Fließgewässern in ganz Deutschland untersucht.
Basierend auf fünf wissenschaftlichen Publikationen, die aus dem KgM hervorgegangen sind, werden in dieser Arbeit die Pestizidbelastung in Fließgewässern, die ökologischen Auswirkungen und die regulatorischen Implikationen bewertet. Mehr als 1000 Wasserproben wurden auf über 100 Pestizid-Analyten untersucht, um das Vorkommen zu charakterisieren (Publikation 1). Die gemessenen Konzentrationen und Auswirkungen wurden zur Validierung der in der Risikobewertung vorhergesagten Umweltkonzentrationen und Wirkungschwellen verwendet (Veröffentlichung 2). Durch die gemeinsame Analyse von realen Pestizidanwendungsdaten und gemessenen Pestizidmischungen in Fließgewässern wurde die Missachtung von Pestizidmischungen in der Umwelt in der Risikobewertung beurteilt (Veröffentlichung 3). Das Risikopotenzial von Mischungen in Fließgewässern wurde zusätzlich mit Hilfe eines Verdachtsscreenings für 395 Chemikalien und einer Batterie von In-vitro-Bioassays untersucht (Publikation 4). Schließlich wurden die Ergebnisse des KgM verwendet, um die Eignung staatlicher Monitoringprogramme zur Identifizierung von Pestizidrisiken in Oberflächengewässern zu bewerten (Publikation 5).
Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit zeigen das weit verbreitete Vorkommen von Pestiziden in den Nichtzielökosystemen der Fließgewässer. Die Wasserproben wiesen eine Vielzahl von Pestiziden auf, die in komplexen Mischungen vor allem in kurzzeitigen Spitzenwerten nach Niederschlagsereignissen auftraten (Veröffentlichungen 1 & 4). Die jeweiligen Höchstwerte der Pestizidkonzentration wurden mit dem Rückgang empfindlicher Wirbellosenarten in Verbindung gebracht und überstiegen in etwa 80 % der landwirtschaftlich geprägten Fließgewässer die gesetzlich zulässigen Konzentrationen, welche als Schwellenwerte zum Teil noch als unzureichend für den Schutz der Wirbellosengemeinschaft angesehen wurden (Publikation 2). Das gleichzeitige Vorkommen von Pestiziden in Fließgewässern führte zu einem Risiko, das in der auf eine einzelne Substanzen ausgerichteten Risikobewertung in realistischen Worst-Case-Szenarien um einen Faktor von etwa 3,2 unterschätzt wurde. Dies wird durch die hohe Häufigkeit, mit der Nichtzielorganismen den Pestiziden ausgesetzt sind, weiter verstärkt (Veröffentlichung 3). Wasserproben, die nach Regenfällen entnommen wurden, verursachten in den Bioassays deutliche Effekte, die nur zu einem geringen Teil durch die vielen detektierten Analyten erklärbar waren, was auf die Relevanz unbekannter chemischer oder biologischer Mischungskomponenten hinweist (Publikation 4). Schließlich wurde festgestellt, dass die behördliche Überwachung von Oberflächengewässern gemäß der Wasserrahmenrichtlinie (WRRL) die Risiken von Pestiziden erheblich unterschätzt, da hier etwa drei Viertel der kritischen Pestizide und mehr als die Hälfte der gefährdeten Gewässer übersehen worden wären (Veröffentlichung 5).
Im Wesentlichen liefert diese Arbeit eine neue Ebene der Validierung der Risikobewertung von Pestiziden in aquatischen Ökosystemen, indem das Auftreten von Pestiziden und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Umwelt in einem bisher einzigartigen Maßstab bewertet werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen generell, dass der derzeitige landwirtschaftliche Einsatz von Pestiziden zu erheblichen Auswirkungen auf die Fließgewässerökologie führt, die über das von der Risikobewertung tolerierte Maß hinausgehen. In dieser Arbeit wurden die Unterschätzung der Pestizidexposition, die potenzielle Unzulänglichkeit der gesetzlichen Schwellenwerte und die allgemeine Trägheit des Zulassungsverfahrens als Hauptursachen dafür ermittelt, dass entsprechende gesetzlich verankerte, ökologische Zielsetzungen momentan erwiesenermaßen nicht erreicht werden. Um einen nachhaltigen Einsatz von Pestiziden zu gewährleisten, schlägt die Arbeit wesentliche Änderungen der Risikobewertung vor. Monitoringprogramme wie das KgM, die über die derzeitigen staatlichen Überwachungsbemühungen hinausgehen, werden weiterhin erforderlich sein, um die Regulierungsbehörden für Pestizide ständig über die Gültigkeit ihrer prospektiven Risikobewertung zu informieren, die immer mit Unsicherheiten behaftet sein wird.
To construct a business process model manually is a highly complex and error-prone task which takes a lot of time and deep insights into the organizational structure, its operations and business rules. To improve the output of business analysts dealing with this process, different techniques have been introduced by researchers to support them during construction with helpful recommendations. These supporting recommendation systems vary in their way of what to recommend in the first place as well as their calculations taking place under the hood to recommend the most fitting element to the user. After a broad introduction into the field of business process modeling and its basic recommendation structures, this work will take a closer look at diverse proposals and descriptions published in current literature regarding implementation strategies to effectively and efficiently assist modelers during their business process model creation. A critical analysis of presentations in the selected literature will point out strengths and weaknesses of their approaches, studies and descriptions of those. As a result, the final concept matrix in this work will give a precise and helpful overview about the key features and recommendation methods used and implemented in previous research studies to pinpoint an entry into future works without the downsides already spotted by fellow researchers.
The thesis develops and evaluates a hypothetical model of the factors that influence user acceptance of weblog technology. Previous acceptance studies are reviewed, and the various models employed are discussed. The eventual model is based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) by Davis et al. It conceptualizes and operationalizes a quantitative survey conducted by means of an online questionnaire, strictly from a user perspective. Finally, it is tested and validated by applying methods of data analysis.
In einem Großteil der Welt wird Grundwasser für die Versorgung von Siedlungen und Agrarflächen genutzt. Organismen, die im Grundwasser leben, erfüllen wichtige Funktionen im Ökosystem und haben positiven Einfluss auf die Grundwasserqualität. Um das Risiko negativer Effekte auf diese wertvollen Ökosysteme zu minimieren muss die entsprechende Sanierungsmethode, im Falle einer Grundwasserbehandlung, mit Vorsicht gewählt werden. In der vorliegenden Thesis wurde das Umweltrisiko von Carbo-Iron untersucht, ein Komposit aus nanoskaligem null-valentem Eisen und Aktivkohle zur in situ-Behandlung von Grundwasser. Des Weiteren wurde eine umfassende Beurteilung des Umweltrisikos und des Nutzens einer Grundwasserbehandlung mit Carbo-Iron durchgeführt.
Zu Beginn der Arbeit an der vorliegenden Thesis existierten noch keine Empfehlungen für Untersuchung der Ökotoxizität von Nanomaterialien. Daher bestanden viele Unsicherheiten hinsichtlich geeigneter Methoden. Im Rahmen dieser Thesis wurde eine Entscheidungshilfe entwickelt, um bei der ökotoxikologischen Untersuchung von Nanomaterialien systematisch geeignete methodische Schritte auszuwählen.
Mögliche Effekte von Carbo-Iron wurden in Tests mit embryonalen, juvenilen und adulten Lebensstadien des Zebrabärblings (Danio rerio) und juvenilen und adulten Amphipoden (Hyalella azteca) untersucht. Die gewählten Testsysteme basierten auf existierenden Testmethoden der OECD und EPA zur ökotoxikologischen Untersuchung von Chemikalien (OECD, 1992a, 2013a, 2013b; US EPA, 2000). Zusätzlich wurde die Aufnahme der Partikel in die genannten Testorganismen untersucht. In Zebrabärblingsembryonen wurden außerdem potentielle Effekte auf die Genexpression mittels Microarrays ermittelt. Die erhaltenen Daten wurden später mit Ergebnissen aus Tests mit dem Wasserfloh Daphnia magna, der Alge Scenedesmus vacuolatus, Larven der Mücke Chironomus riparius und nitrifizierenden Bodenmikroorganismen ergänzt.
In dem Fischembryotoxizitätstest wurde keine Passage der Carbo-Iron-Partikel durch das Chorion in den perivitellinen Raum oder den Embryo beobachtet. Nach der Exposition wurde Carbo-Iron im Darm von H. azteca und D. rerio, aber keinem anderen Gewebe oder Organen detektiert. Carbo-Iron hatte keine signifikanten Effekte auf die Nitrifikationsrate der Bodenmikroorganismen sowie Überleben und Wachstum des Zebrabärblings. Dennoch wurden signifikant negative Effekte auf Wachstum, Fütterungsrate und Reproduktion von H. azteca und auf das Überleben und die Reproduktion von D. magna festgestellt. Des Weiteren war die Entwicklungsrate von C. riparius und das Zellvolumen von S. vacuolatus negativ beeinflusst.
Anhand der durchgeführten Studien wurde basierend auf dem Ergebnis des Reproduktionstests mit D. magna und einem assessment factor von 10 für Carbo-Iron eine predicted no effect concentration von 0,1 mg/L ermittelt. Diese wurde mit modellierten und gemessenen Umweltkonzentrationen von Carbo-Iron verglichen die in einer Studie erhoben wurden, in denen Carbo-Iron zur Behandlung eines mit Chlorkohlenwasserstoffen kontaminierten Aquifers eingesetzt wurde, und Risiko-Quotienten wurden abgeleitet. Zur gesamtheitlichen Betrachtung wurde anschließend ein Schema zur Bewertung des Umweltrisikos vor und nach der Behandlung des Aquifers mit Carbo-Iron entwickelt. Die erhobenen Daten weisen auf ein reduziertes Umweltrisiko nach der Applikation von Carbo-Iron hin. Dementsprechend überwiegen die Vorteile einer Grundwasserbehandlung mit Carbo-Iron die potentiellen negativen Effekte auf die Umwelt.
This Master Thesis is an exploratory research to determine whether it is feasible to construct a subjectivity lexicon using Wikipedia. The key hypothesis is that that all quotes in Wikipedia are subjective and all regular text are objective. The degree of subjectivity of a word, also known as ''Quote Score'' is determined based on the ratio of word frequency in quotations to its frequency outside quotations. The proportion of words in the English Wikipedia which are within quotations is found to be much smaller as compared to those which are not in quotes, resulting in a right-skewed distribution and low mean value of Quote Scores.
The methodology used to generate the subjectivity lexicon from text corpus in English Wikipedia is designed in such a way that it can be scaled and reused to produce similar subjectivity lexica of other languages. This is achieved by abstaining from domain and language-specific methods, apart from using only readily-available English dictionary packages to detect and exclude stopwords and non-English words in the Wikipedia text corpus.
The subjectivity lexicon generated from English Wikipedia is compared against other lexica; namely MPQA and SentiWordNet. It is found that words which are strongly subjective tend to have high Quote Scores in the subjectivity lexicon generated from English Wikipedia. There is a large observable difference between distribution of Quote Scores for words classified as strongly subjective versus distribution of Quote Scores for words classified as weakly subjective and objective. However, weakly subjective and objective words cannot be differentiated clearly based on Quote Score. In addition to that, a questionnaire is commissioned as an exploratory approach to investigate whether subjectivity lexicon generated from Wikipedia could be used to extend the coverage of words of existing lexica.
Pelagic oxyclines, the transition zone between oxygen rich surface waters and oxygen depleted deep waters, are a common characteristic of eutrophic lakes during summer stratification. They can have tremendous effects on the biodiversity and the ecosystem functioning of lakes and, to add insult to injury, are expected to become more frequent and more pronounced as climate warming progresses. On these grounds, this thesis endeavors to advance the understanding of formation, persistence, and consequences of pelagic oxyclines: We test, whether the formation of metalimnetic oxygen minima is intrinsically tied to a locally enhanced oxygen consuming process, investigate the relative importance of vertical physical oxygen transport and biochemical oxygen consumption for the persistence of pelagic oxyclines, and finally assess their potential consequences for whole lake cycling. To pursue these objectives, the present thesis nearly exclusively resorts to in situ measurements. Field campaigns were conducted at three lakes in Germany featuring different types of oxyclines and resolved either a short (hours to days) or a long (weeks to months) time scale. Measurements comprised temperature, current velocity, and concentrations of oxygen and reduced substances in high temporal and vertical resolution. Additionally, vertical transport was estimated by applying the eddy correlation technique within the pelagic region for the first time. The thesis revealed, that the formation of metalimnetic oxygen minima does not necessarily depend on locally enhanced oxygen depletion, but can solely result from gradients and curvatures of oxygen concentration and depletion and their relative position to each other. Physical oxygen transport was found to be relevant for oxycline persistence when it considerably postponed anoxia on a long time scale. However, its influence on oxygen dynamics was minor on short time scales, although mixing and transport were highly variable. Biochemical consumption always dominated the fate of oxygen in pelagic oxyclines. It was primarily determined by the oxidative breakdown of organic matter originating from the epilimnion, whereas in meromictic lakes, the oxidation of reduced substances dominated. Beyond that, the results of the thesis emphasize that pelagic oxyclines can be a hotspot of mineralization and, hence, short-circuit carbon and nutrient cycling in the upper part of the water column. Overall, the present thesis highlights the importance of considering physical transport as well as biochemical cycling in future studies.
Fresh water resources like rivers and reservoirs are exposed to a drastically changing world. In order to safeguard these lentic ecosystems, they need stronger protection in times of global change and population growth. In the last years, the exploitation pressure on drinking water reservoirs has increased steadily worldwide. Besides securing the demands of safe drinking water supply, international laws especially in Europe (EU Water Framework Directive) stipulate to minimize the impact of dams on downstream rivers. In this study we investigate the potential of a smart withdrawal strategy at Grosse Dhuenn Reservoir to improve the temperature and discharge regime downstream without jeopardizing drinking water production. Our aim is to improve the existing withdrawal strategy for operating the reservoir in a sustainable way in terms of water quality and quantity. First, we set-up and calibrated a 1D numerical model for Grosse Dhuenn Reservoir with the open-source community model “General Lake Model” (GLM) together with its water quality module “Aquatic Ecodynamics” library (AED2). The reservoir model reproduced water temperatures and hypolimnetic dissolved oxygen concentrations accurately over a 5 year period. Second, we extended the model source code with a selective withdrawal functionality (adaptive offtake) and added operational rules for a realistic reservoir management. Now the model is able to autonomously determine the best withdrawal height according to the temperature and flow requirements of the downstream river and the raw water quality objectives. Criteria for the determination of the withdrawal regime are selective withdrawal, development of stratification and oxygen content in the deep hypolimnion. This functionality is not available in current reservoir models, where withdrawal heights are generally provided a priori to the model and kept fixed during the simulation. Third, we ran scenario simulations identifying an improved reservoir withdrawal strategy to balance the demands for downstream river and raw water supply. Therefore we aimed at finding an optimal parallel withdrawal ratio between cold hypolimnetic water and warm epilimnetic or metalimnetic water in order to provide a pre-defined temperature in the downstream river. The reservoir model and the proposed withdrawal strategy provide a simple and efficient tool to optimize reservoir management in a multi-objective view for mastering future reservoir management challenges.
Previous research concerned with early science education revealed that guided play can support young children’s knowledge acquisition. However, the questions whether guided play maintains other important prerequisites such as children’s science self-concept and how guided play should be implemented remain unanswered. The present dissertation encompasses three research articles that investigated 5- to 6-year-old children’s science knowledge, science theories, and science self-concept in the stability domain and their relation to interindividual prerequisites. Moreover, the articles examined whether children’s science knowledge, science theories, and science self-concept can be supported by different play forms, i.e., guided play with material and verbal scaffolds, guided play with material scaffolds, and free play. The general introduction of the present dissertation first highlights children’s cognitive development, their science self-concept, and interindividual prerequisites, i.e., fluid and crystallised intelligence, mental rotation ability, and interest in block play. These prerequisites are applied to possible ways of supporting children during play. The first article focused on the measurement of 5-to-6-year-old children’s stability knowledge and its relation to interindividual prerequisites. Results suggested that children’s stability knowledge could be measured reliably and validly, and was related to their fluid and crystallised intelligence. The second article was concerned with the development of children’s intuitive stability theories over three points of measurement and the effects of guided and free play, children’s prior theories as well as their intelligence on these intuitive theories. Results implied that guided play with material and verbal scaffolds supported children’s stability theories more than the other two play forms, i.e., guided play with material scaffolds and free play. Moreover, consistency of children’s prior theories, their fluid and crystallised intelligence were related to children’s theory adaptation after the intervention. The third article focused on the effect of the playful interventions on children’s stability knowledge and science self-concept over three points of measurement. Furthermore, the reciprocal effects between knowledge acquisition and science self-concept were investigated. Results implied that guided play supported knowledge acquisition and maintained children’s science self-concept. Free play did not support children’s stability knowledge and decreased children’s science self-concept. No evidence for reciprocal effects between children’s stability knowledge and their science self-concept was found. Last, in a general discussion, the findings of the three articles are combined and reflected amidst children’s cognitive development. Summarising, the present dissertation shows that children’s science knowledge, science theories, and science self-concept can be supported through guided play that considers children’s cognitive development.
Eine genaue Schneesimulation ist der Schlüssel zur Erfassung der charakteristischen Visualisierung von Schnee. Aufwendige Methoden existieren, die versuchen Schneeverhalten ganzheitlich zu ergreifen. Die Rechenkomplexität dieser Ansätze hindert sie daran, Echtzeitfähigkeit zu erreichen. Diese Arbeit stellt drei Methoden vor, die unter Verwendung der GPU eine echtzeitfähige Deformation einer Schneeoberoberfläche darstellen. Die Ansätze werden hinsichtlich ihrer wahrheitsgetreuen Schneedarstellung untersucht und nach ihrer Fähigkeit, mit einer zunehmenden Anzahl von schneeverformenden Objekten zu skalieren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Methoden bei mehreren hunderten schneeverformenden Objekten ihre Echtzeitfähigkeit beibehalten. Jedoch benachteiligen die charakteristischen Einschränkungen jener Methoden die visuellen Resultate. Ein experimenteller Ansatz ist es, die Anzahl der schneeverformenden Objekte zu reduzieren und durch Zusammenfügen der Methoden ein genaueres, kombiniertes Verformungsmuster zu erzeugen.
Die modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung beabsichtigt die Spezifikation von Softwaresystemen durch Modelle zu vereinfachen und die automatisierte Entwicklung zu verbessern. Die Modellierungssprachen und Werkzeuge, die zur Modellierung von Systemen und Anwendungsdomänen herangezogen werden, werden in modellbasierten technologischen Räumen zusammengefasst. Ontologiebasierte technologische Räume enthalten Ontologiesprachen und Technologien zum Entwurf, der Anfrage und dem Schlussfolgern von Wissen. Mit der Verbreitung des semantischen Webs werden Ontologien in der Entwicklung von Software zunehmend eingesetzt.
In dieser Arbeit werden zur Kombination von technologischen Räumen Brückentechnologien vorgestellt. Transformationsbrücken übersetzen Modelle, Abbildungsbrücken stellen Beziehungen zwischen Modellen verschiedener technologischer Räume her und Integrationsbrücken verschmelzen Räume zu neuen allumfassenden technologischen Räumen. API Brücken erschaffen Interoperabilität zwischen Werkzeugen. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich insbesondere mit der Kombination von modellbasierten und ontologiebasierten technologischen Räumen. Nach einem Vergleich zwischen Sprachen und Werkzeugen der einzelnen Räume wird die Integrationsbrücke herangezogen um einen neuen gemeinsamen technologischen Raum zu erstellen, der den hybriden Gebrauch von Sprachen und den interoperablen Einsatz von Werkzeugen ermöglicht. Die Syntax und Semantik von Modellierungssprachen kann mit Hilfe von Ontologiesprachen spezifiziert werden. Die Korrektheit von Modellen wird durch den Einsatz von Ontologietechnologien gewährleistet. Ontologiebasierte Modellierungssprachen erlauben den Nutzen von Anfrage- und Schlussfolgerungstechnologien. Sie sind darüber hinaus so flexibel um verschiedene Anforderungen von Softwareentwicklern zu erfüllen. Domänenspezifische Sprachen unterstützen neben der Spezifikation von Systemen auch die konzeptionelle Beschreibung von Domänen durch Modelle, die aus möglichen Laufzeitinstanzen und deren Typen bestehen. Integrierte Ontologiesprachen helfen eine formale Semantik für Domänenmodellierungssprachen zu definieren und Ontologietechnologien ermöglichen das Schlussfolgern über Typen und Instanzen.
Alle Ansätze in dieser Arbeit werden mit Hilfe eines Szenarios, in dem die Konfigurationen für Familien von Netzwerkgeräte modelliert werden, veranschaulicht. Ferner werden die Implementationen aller Brückentechnologien zur Kombination von technologischen Räumen und alle Werkzeuge für die ontologiebasierte Entwicklung von Modellierungssprachen illustriert.
Abstract for the print-book: Walden, R. (2008). Architectural Psychology: School, University Campus, and Office Building of the Future. Lengerich: Pabst Science Publishers (in German). The need for display of self in architecture and for users' self-regulation of stress factors, which demonstrate that users crave individual control of their environment (cf. Flammer, 1990; Burger, 1992) motivated this study to use the concept of environmental control as a central criterion for the evaluation of built environment. It was applied to three case studies: a school, a university campus, and an office building. Advantages and disadvantages of the data- gathering methods of architectural Programming, User-Needs Analysis, and Post-Occupancy Evaluation were analyzed to highlight their significance in terms of Building Performance Evaluation as described by Preiser and Sc hramm (1997, 2005). The “Koblenz Architecture Questionnaire” was used as an instrument for assessing the built environment of the three case studies, and the study reports selected findings from these questionnaires. The investigation seeks to determine the effect of architecture - especially buildings' provisions for user control of environmental conditions - on user performance (cf. BOSTI studies, 1984, 2001) in three innovative buildings: the Waldorf School in Cologne, the new campus for the University in Koblenz, and the Office Tower of the Deutsche Post World Net AG in Bonn. Performance is measured in terms of (1) Lear ning and Work Efficiency, (2) Well-being, (3) Environmental Control, (4) Social Behavior (the latter just for the school project), and by means of 21 and 16 additional psychological criteria for success of the organization in the cases of the university and the office building, respectively. The study aims, among other things, at reassessing the theoretical concept of 'environmental control' and at making recommendations for both improvement of existing buildings and the design of new projects. Two central questions are: In User-Needs Analysis, what is the difference between the assessment of a building for its current use and its estimated performance in future? Do certain architectural features influence user assessments on the given performance criteria? In the studies, three mapping sentences were developed according to the 'facet approach' (Borg, 1996) as well as two systems to judge the quality of school and office buildings. Using these systems, information was obtained in all three studies to construct questionnaires. In the school study, teachers were asked 139 questions, pupils 86 questions. Responses were obtained from 26 teachers and 122 pupils. For the university, 147 students and 28 faculty members responded to 203 questions. For the office building, 56 student-experts were asked 254 questions. Characteristics of the built environment were rated using the following scale: +2 ☺☺ (very good “at present”, and accordingly very important “in the future”) down to –2 // (very bad “at present”, and very unimportant “in the future”). A general finding was a high and significant co rrelation between the responses for the three main performance criteria in all three case studies, especially for the 'importance for the future' aspect. This supports the conclusion that a perception of higher degree of environmental control by users will lead to an increased sense of well-being and consequently, there will also be a higher expectation of improved work or learning efficiency 'in the future'. The three studies further show for example that users in all three environments desire 'retreat opportunities' which may take the form of student offices in schools, niches and small group seating in classrooms, and sheltered seating in outdoor areas and work tables in the cafeteria for the university. For the offices, users wanted more visual privacy (less transparent office partitions in Combi Offices) for less visual control of their activities by supervisors and co-workers. The relationships found by the studies between the responses on the central performance criteria and the spatial characteristics of the three buildings support the contention that focused improvements in the built environment, especially with respect to features that enhance user control of environmental conditions, will influence users’ well-being as well as work performance and work or learning efficiency in a positive way.
Towards Improving the Understanding of Image Semantics by Gaze-based Tag-to-Region Assignments
(2011)
Eye-trackers have been used in the past to identify visual foci in images, find task-related image regions, or localize affective regions in images. However, they have not been used for identifying specific objects in images. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to assign image regions showing specific objects with tags describing these objects by analyzing the users' gaze paths. To this end, we have conducted an experiment with 20 subjects viewing 50 image-tag-pairs each. We have compared the tag-to-region assignments for nine existing and four new fixation measures. In addition, we have investigated the impact of extending region boundaries, weighting small image regions, and the number of subjects viewing the images. The paper shows that a tag-to-region assignment with an accuracy of 67% can be achieved by using gaze information. In addition, we show that multiple regions on the same image can be differentiated with an accuracy of 38%.
Mit der zunehmenden Verbreitung digitaler Kameras nimmt die Anzahl der aufgenommen Fotos drastisch zu. Fotos werden sowohl für den privaten Gebrauch aufgenommen und auf eigenen Festplatten gespeichert, als auch im Internet verbreitet. Die Verwaltung dieser großen Datenmengen stellt eine Herausforderung dar, bei der Benutzer zunehmend unterstützt werden müssen. Die automatische Analyse von Bildinhalten anhand von Algorithmen ist ein ungelöstes Problem und kann kaum die Bedürfnisse menschlicher Nutzer erfüllen. Daher werden häufig Metainformationen genutzt, um z.B. abgebildete Szenen textuell zu beschreiben oder Bewertungen zu Fotos zu speichern. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, wie diese Metainformationen ohne zusätzlichen Aufwand für Benutzer generiert werden können. Dazu werden Augenbewegungen von Benutzern mit einem Eyetrackinggerät erfasst und die daraus abgeleitete visuelle Aufmerksamkeit als Informationsquelle genutzt.
Aufgrund von fallenden Hardwarepreisen bei gleichzeitig zunehmender Konkurrenz sind die Preise für Eyetracker in den letzten Jahren stark gefallen und ihre Bedienbarkeit wurde vereinfacht. Es wird angenommen, dass die Erfassung von Blickdaten bald mit alltäglichen Geräten wie Laptops möglich sein wird, während Benutzer z.B. verschiedenen Beschäftigungen mit digitalen Bildern nachgehen. Die Auswertung dieser Blickinformationen erlaubt es, Informationen ohne zusätzlichen Aufwand für den Menschen bereitzustellen.
Im ersten Teil dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, ob durch die Auswertung von Blickinformationen, Schlagworte Bildregionen zugewiesen werden können, mit dem Ziel abgebildete Szenen zu beschreiben. Insgesamt wurden drei Experimente durchgeführt um die Qualität der Beschreibungen zu untersuchen. Im ersten Experiment entschieden Teilnehmer durch das Drücken bestimmter Tasten, ob ein gegebenes Objekt auf einem Foto zu sehen war. In der zweiten Studie suchten Benutzer mit einer simulierten Bildersuche nach Fotos von bestimmten Objekten. Im dritten Experiment klassifizierten Benutzer Fotos bezüglich gegebener Objektnamen in einem eyetracking-gesteuerten Spiel. In jedem Experiment wurden die Augenbewegungen aufgezeichnet und die Objektnamen bzw. Suchbegriffe entsprechenden Bildregionen zugeordnet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass in den verschiedenen Anwendungen Bildinhalte durch Blickpfadanalysen sinnvoll beschrieben werden können. Im zweiten Teil wird die Identifizierung von interessanten Fotos in einer Sammlung von Fotos anhand von Blickbewegungen erforscht, mit dem Ziel, Benutzern individuelle Fotoauswahlen anzubieten, nachdem sie Fotos in einer Sammlung betrachtet haben. Durch den Vergleich der unter Einbeziehung der visuellen Aufmerksamkeit automatisch erstellten Auswahlen mit manuell von den Benutzer erstellten Auswahlen, wird das Potential von Blickinformation in der Erkennung wichtiger Fotos deutlich.
Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit zeigen das große und bisher ungenutzte Potential der impliziten Nutzung von Blickdaten. Es kann von menschlichen Fähigkeiten profitiert werden, besonders dort, wo Algorithmen die menschliche Wahrnehmung noch lange nicht simulieren können.
This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary contribution to the project ReGLaN-Health & Logistics. ReGLaN-Health & Logistics, is an international cooperation deriving benefits from the capabilities of scientists working on different fields. The aim of the project is the development of a socalled SDSS that supports decision makers working within health systems with a special focus on rural areas. In this dissertation, one important component for the development of the DSS named EWARS is proposed and described in detail. This component called SPATTB is developed with the intention of dealing with spatial data, i.e. data with additional geocoded information with regard to the special requirements of the EWARS.rnrnAn important component in the process of developing the EWARS is the concept of GIS. Classically, geocoded information with a vectorial character numerically describing spatial phenomena is managed and processed in a GIS. For the development of the EWARS, the manageability of the type of data exemplarily given by (x,y,o) with coordinates x,y ) and Ozon-concentration o is not sufficient. It is described, that the manageable data has to be extended to data of type (x,y,f ), where (x,y) are the geocoded information, but where f is not only a numerical value but a functional description of a certain phenomenom. An example for the existence and appearance of that type of data is the geocoded information about the variation of the Ozon-concentration in time or depending on temperature. A knowledge-base as important subsystem of DSS containing expert knowledge is mentioned. This expert-knowledge can be made manageable when using methods from the field of fuzzy logic. Thereby mappings, socalled fuzzy-sets, are generated. Within the EWARS, these mappings will be used with respect to additional geocoded data. The knowledge about the geocoded mapping information only at a finite set of locations (x,y) associated with mapping information f is not sufficient in applications that need continuous statements in a certain geographical area. To provide a contribution towards solving this problem, methods from the field of computer geometry and CAD, so-called Bezier-methods, are used for interpolating this geocoded mapping information. Classically, these methods operates on vectors a the multidimensional vector-space whose elements contain real-valued components but in terms of dealing with mapping information, there has to be an extension on topological vector spaces since mapping spaces can be defined as such spaces. This builds a new perspective and possibility in the application of these methods. Therefore, the according algorithms have to be extended; this work is presented. The field of Artificial Neural Networks plays an important role for the processing and management of the data within the EWARS, where features of biological processes and structures are modeled and implemented as algorithms. Generally, the developed methods can be divided as usable in terms of interpolation or approximation functional coherences and in such being applicable to classification problems. In this dissertation one method from each type is regarded in more detailed. Thereby, the classical algorithms of the so-called Backpropagation-Networks for approximation and the Kohonen-Networks for classification are described. Within the thesis, an extension of these algorithms is then proposed using coherences from mathematical measure-theory and approximation theory. The mentioned extension of these algorithms is based on a preprocessing of the mapping data using integration methods from measure theory.
Klassische Fahrerassistenzsysteme (FAS) wie beispielsweise der Spurassistent oder das weit verbreitete Elektronische Stabilitätsprogramm basieren auf statischen System- und Softwarearchitekturen. Dies bedeutet, dass weder die Anzahl oder Topologie der Steuergeräte noch das Vorhandensein oder die Funktionalität von Softwaremodulen Änderungen zur Laufzeit unterliegen. Es existieren allerdings zukünftige FAS, bei denen solche Veränderungen eintreten können. Hierzu gehören beispielsweise Assistenzsysteme für Fahrzeuge mit Anhänger, da deren Steuergeräte und Softwaremodule über beide Teile des Gespanns verteilt sind. Diese neue Herausforderung kann nicht durch Ansätze, die zum Stand der Technik gehören, bewältigt werden. Stattdessen muss ein neuartiges Verfahren für das Design von solch verteilten Fahrerassistenzsystemen entwickelt werden.
Der zentrale wissenschaftliche Beitrag dieser Arbeit liegt in der Entwicklung einer neuartigen Software- und Systemarchitektur für dynamisch veränderliche FAS am Beispiel der Assistenzsysteme für Fahrzeuge mit Anhänger. Diese Architektur muss in der Lage sein, Veränderungen in der Topologie eigenständig zu erkennen und darauf zu reagieren. Hierbei entscheidet das System, welcher Grad der Assistenz und welche Nutzerschnittstelle nach dem An- oder Abkoppeln eines Anhängers angeboten werden kann. Hierzu werden neben der verfügbaren Software und Hardware die ausführbaren Assistenzfunktionalitäten analysiert und eine entsprechende Re-Konfiguration durchgeführt. Eine solche Systemanpassung kann vorgenommen werden, indem man auf die Prinzipien der Service-orientierten Architektur zurückgreift. Hierbei wird alle vorhandene Funktionalität in abgeschlossene Einheiten, so genannte Services gegossen. Diese Services stellen ihre Funktionalität über klar definierte Schnittstellen zur Verfügung, deren Verhalten durch so genannte Contracts beschrieben wird. Größere Applikationen werden zur Laufzeit durch den Zusammenschluss von mehreren solcher Services gebildet und adaptiert.
Die Arbeit beschreibt die Forschung die geleistet wurde, um die oben genannten Ziele durch den Einsatz von Service-orientierten Architekturen im automotiven Umfeld zu erreichen. Hierbei wird dem hohen Grad an Verteilung, dem Wunsch nach Wiederverwendbarkeit sowie der Heterogenität der einzelnen Komponenten durch den Einsatz der Prinzipien einer SOA begegnet. Weiterhin führt das Service-orientierte System eine automatische Re-Konfiguration im Falle einer Systemänderung durch. Statt eines der vorhandenen SOA Frameworks an die Verhältnisse im automotiven Umfeld anzupassen werden die einzelnen in SOA enthaltenen Prinzipien auf die Problemstellung angepasst. Hierbei entsteht ein eigenständiges Framework namens "Service-oriented Driver Assistance" (SODA) welches die Vorteile einer SOA mit den Anforderungen, bewährten Methoden und Standards vereint. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden verschiedene SOA Frameworks analysiert und miteinander vergleichen. Außerdem wird das SODA Framework sowie dessen Anpassungen bezüglich automotiver Systeme detailliert beschrieben. Hierzu zählt auch ein Referenzmodell, welches die Begrifflichkeiten und Konzepte einführt und zueinander in Beziehung setzt sowie eine Referenzarchitektur definiert. Einige der Module dieser Referenzarchitektur wie beispielsweise das Re-Konfigurations- und das Kommunikationsmodul werden sehr detailiert in eigenen Kapiteln beschrieben. Um die Kompatibilität des Frameworks sicherzustellen wird die Integration in einen bewährten Entwicklungsprozess sowie in den Architekturstandard AUTOSAR diskutiert. Abschließend wird der Aufbau eines Demonstrators und dessen Evaluation bezüglich der Leistungsfähigkeit und Effizienz des Frameworks beschrieben.
World’s ecosystems are under great pressure satisfying anthropogenic demands, with freshwaters being of central importance. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has identified anthropogenic land use and associated stressors as main drivers in jeopardizing stream ecosystem functions and the
biodiversity supported by freshwaters. Adverse effects on the biodiversity of freshwater organisms, such as macroinvertebrates, may propagate to fundamental ecosystem functions, such as organic matter breakdown (OMB) with potentially severe consequences for ecosystem services. In order to adequately protect and preserve freshwater ecosystems, investigations regarding potential and observed as well as direct and indirect effects of anthropogenic land use and associated stressors (e.g. nutrients, pesticides or heavy metals) on ecosystem functioning and stream biodiversity are needed. While greater species diversity most likely benefits ecosystem functions, the direction and magnitude of changes in ecosystem functioning depends primarily on species functional traits. In this context, the functional diversity of stream organisms has been suggested to be a more suitable predictor of changes in ecosystem functions than taxonomic diversity.
The thesis aims at investigating effects of anthropogenic land use on (i) three ecosystem functions by anthropogenic toxicants to identify effect thresholds (chapter 2), (ii) the organic matter breakdown by three land use categories to identify effects on the functional level (chapter 3) and (iii)on the stream community along an established land-use gradient to identify effects on the community level.
In chapter 2, I reviewed the literature regarding pesticide and heavy metal effects on OMB, primary production and community respiration. From each reviewed study that met inclusion criteria, the toxicant concentration resulting in a reduction of at least 20% in an ecosystem function was standardized based on laboratory toxicity data. Effect thresholds were based on the relationship between ecosystem functions and standardized concentration-effect relationships. The analysis revealed that more than one third of pesticide observations indicated reductions in ecosystem functions at concentrations that are assumed being protective in regulation. However, high variation within and between studies hampered the derivation of a concentration-effect relationship and thus effect thresholds.
In chapter 3, I conducted a field study to determine the microbial and invertebrate-mediated OMB by deploying fine and coarse mesh leaf bags in streams with forested, agricultural, vinicultural
and urban riparian land use. Additionally, physicochemical, geographical and habitat parameters were monitored to explain potential differences in OMB among land use types and sites. Regarding results, only microbial OMB differed between land use types. The microbial OMB showed a negative relationship with pH while the invertebrate-mediated OMB was positively related to tree cover. OMB responded to stressor gradients rather than directly to land use.
In chapter 4, macroinvertebrates were sampled in concert with leaf bag deployment and after species identification (i) the taxonomic diversity in terms of Simpson diversity and total taxonomic
richness (TTR) and (ii) the functional diversity in terms of bio-ecological traits and Rao’s quadratic entropy was determined for each community. Additionally, a land-use gradient was established and the response of the taxonomic and functional diversity of invertebrate communities along this gradient was investigated to examine whether these two metrics of biodiversity are predictive for the rate of OMB. Neither bio-ecological traits nor the functional diversity showed a significant relationship with
OMB. Although, TTR decreased with increasing anthropogenic stress and also the community structure and 26 % of bio-ecological traits were significantly related to the stress gradient, any of these shifts propagated to OMB.
Our results show that the complexity of real-world situations in freshwater ecosystems impedes the effect assessment of chemicals and land use for functional endpoints, and consequently our potential to predict changes. We conclude that current safety factors used in chemical risk assessment may not be sufficient for pesticides to protect functional endpoints. Furthermore, simplifying real-world stressor gradients into few land use categories was unsuitable to predict and quantify losses in OMB. Thus, the monitoring of specific stressors may be more relevant than crude land use categories to detect effects on ecosystem functions. This may, however, limit the large scale assessment of the status of OMB. Finally, despite several functional changes in the communities the functional diversity over several trait modalities remained similar. Neither taxonomic nor functional diversity were suitable predictors of OMB. Thus, when understanding anthropogenic impacts on the linkage between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is of main interest, focusing on diversity metrics that are clearly linked to the stressor in question (Jackson et al. 2016) or integrating taxonomic and functional metrics (Mondy et al., 2012) might enhance our predictive capacity.
In dieser Arbeit werden drei Verfahren zur Objektentfernung aus Bildern einander gegenübergestellt. Zwei der ausgewählten Verfahren stammen aus dem Bereich der sogenannten Inpainting-Verfahren, während das dritte dem Forschungsgebiet der medizinischen Bildverarbeitung entnommen ist. Die Evaluation dieser Verfahren zeigt ihre jeweiligen Vor- und Nachteile auf und prüft ihre Anwendbarkeit auf das spezifische Problem, ein Farbkalibriermuster aus strukturdominierten Bildern zu entfernen. Auf der Grundlage dieser Eigenschaften werden abschließend mehrere Erweiterungen vorgestellt, die eine verbesserte Anwendbarkeit auf das gestellte Problem erreichen.
Autonome Systeme, wie Roboter, sind bereits Teil unseres täglichen Lebens. Eine Sache, in der Menschen diesen Maschinen überlegen sind, ist die Fähigkeit, auf sein Gegenüber angemessen zu reagieren. Dies besteht nicht nur aus der Fähigkeit zu hören, was eine Person sagt, sondern auch daraus, ihre Mimik zu erkennen und zu interpretieren.
In dieser Bachelorarbeit wird ein System entwickelt, welches automatisch Gesichtsausdrücke erkennt und einer Emotion zuordnet. Das System arbeitet mit statischen Bildern und benutzt merkmalsbasierte Methoden zur Beschreibung von Gesichtsdaten. In dieser Arbeit werden gebräuchliche Schritte analysiert und aktuelle Methoden vorgestellt. Das beschriebene System basiert auf 2D-Merkmalen. Diese Merkmale werden im Gesicht detektiert. Ein neutraler Gesichtsausdruck wird nicht als Referenzbild benötigt. Das System extrahiert zwei Arten von Gesichtsparametern. Zum einen sind es Distanzen, die zwischen den Merkmalspunkten liegen. Zum anderen sind es Winkel, die zwischen den Linien liegen, die die Merkmalspunkte verbinden. Beide Arten von Parametern werden implementiert und getestet. Der Parametertyp, der die besten Ergebnisse liefert, wird schließlich in dem System benutzt. Eine Support Vector Machine (SVM) mit mehreren Klassen klassifiziert die Parameter. Das Ergebnis sind Kennzeichen von Action Units des Facial Action Coding Systems (FACS). Diese Kennzeichen werden einer Gesichtsemotion zugeordnet.
Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit den sechs Basisgesichtsausdrücken (glücklich, überrascht, traurig, ängstlich, wütend und angeekelt) plus dem neutralen Gesichtsausdruck. Das vorgestellte System wird in C++ implementiert und an das Robot Operating System (ROS) angebunden.
The content aggregator platform Reddit has established itself as one of the most popular websites in the world. However, scientific research on Reddit is hindered as Reddit allows (and even encourages) user anonymity, i.e., user profiles do not contain personal information such as the gender. Inferring the gender of users in large-scale could enable the analysis of gender-specific areas of interest, reactions to events, and behavioral patterns. In this direction, this thesis suggests a machine learning approach of estimating the gender of Reddit users. By exploiting specific conventions in parts of the website, we obtain a ground truth for more than 190 million comments of labeled users. This data is then used to train machine learning classifiers to use them to gain insights about the gender balance of particular subreddits and the platform in general. By comparing a variety of different approaches for classification algorithm, we find that character-level convolutional neural network achieves performance with an 82.3% F1 score on a task of predicting a gender of a user based on his/her comments. The score surpasses 85% mark for frequent users with more than 50 comments. Furthermore, we discover that female users are less active on Reddit platform, they write fewer comments and post in fewer subreddits on average, when compared to male users.
The term “Software Chrestomaty” is defined as a collection of software systems meant to be useful in learning about or gaining insight into software languages, software technologies, software concepts, programming, and software engineering. 101companies software chrestomathy is a community project with the attributes of a Research 2.0 infrastructure for various stakeholders in software languages and technology communities. The core of 101companies combines a semantic wiki and confederated open source repositories. We designed and developed an integrated ontology-based knowledge base about software languages and technologies. The knowledge is created by the community of contributors and supported with a running example and structured documentation. The complete ecosystem is exposed by using Linked Data principles and equipped with the additional metadata about individual artifacts. Within the context of software chrestomathy we explored a new type of software architecture – linguistic architecture that is targeted on the language and technology relationships within a software product and based on the megamodels. Our approach to documentation of the software systems is highly structured and makes use of the concepts of the newly developed megamodeling language MegaL. We “connect” an emerging ontology with the megamodeling artifacts to raise the cognitive value of the linguistic architecture.
While the existing literature on cooperative R&D projects between firms and public research institutes (PRI) has made valuable contributions by examining various factors and their influence on different outcome measures, there has been no investigation of cooperative R&D project success between firms and PRI from a product competitive advantage perspective. However, insights into the development of a meaningful and superior product (i.e., product competitive advantage) are particularly important in the context of cooperative R&D projects between PRI and (mainly small and medium-sized) firms in the biotechnology industry in response to increasing competition to raise capital funds necessary for survival.
The objectives of this thesis are: (1) to elaborate the theoretical foundations which explain the achievement of a product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI, (2) to identify and empirically evaluate the determining factors for achieving a product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI, and (3) to show how cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI should be designed and executed to support the achievement of a product competitive advantage.
To accomplish these objectives, a model of determinants of product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI is developed by drawing from the theoretical foundations of resource-based theory and information-processing theory. The model is evaluated using data from 517 questionnaires on cooperative R&D projects between at least one biotechnology firm and one PRI. The data are analyzed using variance-based structural equation modeling (i.e., PLS-SEM) in order to conduct hypotheses testing. The evaluation of the empirical data includes an additional mediation analysis and the comparison of effects in subsamples.
The results demonstrate the importance of available resources and skills, as well as the proficient execution of marketing-related and technical activities for the achievement of a product competitive advantage in cooperative R&D projects between biotechnology firms and PRI. By identifying project-related and process-related factors affecting product competitive advantage and empirically testing their relationships, the research findings should be valuable for both researchers and practitioners. After discussing contributions and implications for research and practice, the present thesis concludes with limitations and avenues for future research.
This study was conducted in Nyungwe National Park (NNP); a biodiversity hotspot Mountain rainforest of high conservation importance in Central Africa, but with little knowledge of its insect communities including butterflies, good indicators of climate change, and forest ecosystem health. The study aimed at availing baseline data on butterfly species diversity and distribution in NNP, for future use in monitoring climate change-driven shifts and the effects of forest fragmentation on the biodiversity of Nyungwe. Butterflies were collected seasonally using fruit-baited traps and hand nets along elevational transects spanning from 1700 m up to 2950 m of altitude. Two hundred forty-two species including 28 endemics to the Albertine Rift and 18 potential local climate change indicators were documented. Species richness and abundance declined with increasing elevation and higher seasonal occurrence was observed during the dry season. This was the first study on the spatial and temporal distribution of butterflies in NNP and further studies could be conducted to add more species and allow a depth understanding of the ecology of Nyungwe butterflies.
Since the invention of U-net architecture in 2015, convolutional networks based on its encoder-decoder approach significantly improved results in image analysis challenges. It has been proven that such architectures can also be successfully applied in different domains by winning numerous championships in recent years. Also, the transfer learning technique created an opportunity to push state-of-the-art benchmarks to a higher level. Using this approach is beneficial for the medical domain, as collecting datasets is generally a difficult and expensive process.
In this thesis, we address the task of semantic segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions and release experimental results that have practical value for medical imaging.
First, we evaluate the performance of four neural network architectures on the dataset of the cervical spine MRI scans. Second, we use transfer learning from models trained on the Imagenet dataset and compare it to randomly initialized networks. Third, we evaluate models trained on the bias field corrected and raw MRI data. All code to reproduce results is publicly available online.
Despite the inception of new technologies at a breakneck pace, many analytics projects fail mainly due to the use of incompatible development methodologies. As big data analytics projects are different from software development projects, the methodologies used in software development projects could not be applied in the same fashion to analytics projects. The traditional agile project management approaches to the projects do not consider the complexities involved in the analytics. In this thesis, the challenges involved in generalizing the application of agile methodologies will be evaluated, and some suitable agile frameworks which are more compatible with the analytics project will be explored and recommended. The standard practices and approaches which are currently applied in the industry for analytics projects will be discussed concerning enablers and success factors for agile adaption. In the end, after the comprehensive discussion and analysis of the problem and complexities, a framework will be recommended that copes best with the discussed challenges and complexities and is generally well suited for the most data-intensive analytics projects.
The European landscape is dominated by intensive agriculture which leads to widespread impact on the environment. The frequent use of agricultural pesticides is one of the major causes of an ongoing decline in flower-visiting insects (FVIs). The conservation of this ecologically diverse assemblage of mobile, flying insect species is required by international and European policy. To counteract the decrease in species numbers and their abundances, FVIs need to be protected from anthropogenic stressors. European pesticide risk assessment was devised to prevent unacceptable adverse consequences of pesticide use on FVIs. However, there is an ongoing discussion by scientists and policy-makers if the current risk assessment actually provides adequate protection for FVI species.
The first main objective of this thesis was to investigate pesticide impact on FVI species. The scientific literature was reviewed to identify groups of FVIs, summarize their ecology, and determine their habitat. This was followed by a synthesis of studies about the exposure of FVIs in their habitat and subsequent effects. In addition, the acute sensitivity of one FVI group, bee species, to pesticides was studied in laboratory experiments.
The second main objective was to evaluate the European risk assessment for possible deficits and propose improvements to the current framework. Regulatory documents were screened to assess the adequacy of the guidance in place in light of the scientific evidence. The suitability of the honey bee Apis mellifera as the currently only regulatory surrogate species for FVIs was discussed in detail.
The available scientific data show that there are far more groups of FVIs than the usually mentioned bees and butterflies. FVIs include many groups of ecologically different species that live in the entire agricultural landscape. Their habitats in crops and adjacent semi-natural areas can be contaminated by pesticides through multiple pathways. Environmentally realistic exposure of these habitats can lead to severe effects on FVI population parameters. The laboratory studies of acute sensitivity in bee species showed that pesticide effects on FVIs can vary greatly between species and pesticides.
The follow-up critical evaluation of the European FVI risk assessment revealed major shortcomings in exposure and effect assessment. The honey bee proved to be a sufficient surrogate for bee species in lower tier risk assessment. Additional test species may be chosen for higher tier risk assessment to account for ecological differences. This thesis shows that the ecology of FVIs should generally be considered to a greater extent to improve the regulatory process. Data-driven computational approaches could be used as alternative methods to incorporate ecological trait data in spatio-temporal scenarios. Many open questions need to be answered by further research to better understand FVI species and promote necessary changes to risk assessment. In general, other FVI groups than bees need to be investigated. Furthermore, comprehensive data on FVI groups and their ecology need to be collected. Contamination of FVI habitat needs to be linked to exposure of FVI individuals and ecologically complex effects on FVI populations should receive increased attention. In the long term, European FVI risk assessment would benefit from shifting its general principles towards more scientifically informed regulatory decisions. This would require a paradigm shift from arbitrary assumptions and unnecessarily complicated schemes to a substantiated holistic framework.
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.
Flowering habitats to enhance biodiversity and pest control services in agricultural landscapes
(2015)
Die wachsende Nachfrage nach landwirtschaftlichen Produkten benötigt Bewirtschaftungslösungen, die die Lebensmittelproduktion unter minimaler Beeinträchtigung der Umwelt steigern. Durch den übermässigen Einsatz künstlicher Hilfsstoffe und die Landschaftsvereinfachung gefährdet die konventionelle landwirtschaftliche Intensivierung die Biodiversität und die damit verknüpften Ökosystemleistungen im landwirtschaftlichen Raum.
Agrarumweltmassnahmen (AES) werden häufig eingesetzt, um die negativen Auswirkungen konventioneller Intensivierung auf die Biodiversität zu mildern. Ihr bisher nur moderater Erfolg könnte jedoch von expliziteren Zielen bezüglich Ökosystemleistungen profitieren. Das Bereitstellen von Schlüsselressourcen für Nützlinge dürfte deren Häufigkeit, Fitness und Diversität, sowie die durch sie bereitgestellten Ökosystemleistungen begünstigen. Durch gezieltes Lebensraummanagement könnten AES sowohl die Biodiversität als auch die landwirtschaftliche Produktion fördern und so zu einer ökologischen Intensivierung beitragen.
Wir zeigen, dass gesäte mehrjährige Wildblumenstreifen, wie sie gegenwärtig in AES mit Fokus auf Biodiversitätsförderung umgesetzt werden, auch die biologische Kontrolle in benachbarten Kulturen fördern (Kapitel 2). Der Vergleich von Winterweizenfeldern mit angrenzendem Wildblumenstreifen, mit Feldern ohne Wildblumenstreifen, zeigte stark reduzierte Getreidehähnchendichten (Oulema sp.) und Pflanzenschaden nahe Wildblumenstreifen, sowie ein um 10 % gesteigerter Ertrag. Dies bestätigt Annahmen, wonach, für ihre positiven Auswirkungen auf die Biodiversität bekannte Wildblumenstreifen, auch Ökosystemleistung-en, wie biologische Schädlingskontrolle fördern können. Die positive Korrelation des Ertrags mit Blütenabundanz und –diversität weist auf Blütenressourcen als Schlüsselfaktor hin.
Um gesäte Blühstreifen für die verstärkte Bereitstellung von Ökosystemleistungen zu verbessern, benötigt es ein mechanistisches Verständnis davon, wie Organismen von Blütenressourcen profitieren. In Klimakabinenversuchen, die den Einfluss von einzelnen und mehreren blühenden Pflanzenarten auf Fitnesskomponenten von drei grundlegenden natürlichen Feind-Arthropoden von Blattläusen untersuchten, zeigen wir, dass natürliche Feinde unterschiedlich von den angebotenen Ressourcen profitieren (Kapitel 3).
Einige Blühpflanzenarten waren dabei im Allgemeinen wertvoller für natürliche Feinde als andere. Die Mischung aller Blütenpflanzen war zudem generell besser als Monokulturen, jedoch nicht besser als die jeweils beste Art in der Mischung (kein „transgressive overyielding“). Durch gezieltes Massschneidern von Blühstreifen auf die Bedürfnisse von wichtigen natürlichen Feinden von Kulturschädlingen, versuchten wir, die durch natürliche Feinde vermittelte biologische Schädlingskontrolle in Winterweizen (Kapitel 4) und Kartoffelkulturen (Kapitel 5) zu maximieren.
Unter Berücksichtigung der vielseitigen Ansprüchen von diversen natürlichen Feinden - aber nicht Schädlingen - bezüglich zeitlicher und räumlicher Bereitstellung von floralen, extrafloralen und strukturellen Ressourcen, konzipierten wir einjährige Nützlingsblühstreifen, die durch Einbau in die Kulturfolge wichtige Arthropoden an Ort und Zeit unterstützen, an denen sie benötigt werden. Tatsächlich zeigten Feldexperimente, dass Getreidehähnchen und Pflanzenschaden in Winterweizen um 40 % bis 61 % gesenkt werden können und Blattläuse in Kartoffelkulturen sogar um 77 %, wenn ein Nützlingsblühstreifen ins Feld gesät wurde. Diese Effekte waren nicht auf die Nähe zum Blühstreifen beschränkt und verhinderten oft, dass im Vergleich zu Feldern ohne Blühstreifen die Schadschwelle erreicht wurde. Dies zeigt, dass Nützlingsblühstreifen Insektizide ersetzen könnten. Alle adulten natürlichen Feinde waren innerhalb der Nützlingsblühstreifen zahlreicher als innerhalb von Kontrollstreifen. Der Überlauf (spillover) von Nützlingen ins Feld war jedoch auf wichtige natürliche Feinde, wie Laufkäfer (Winterweizen), Schwebfliegen (Kartoffeln) und Florfliegen (Win-terweizen und Kartoffeln) beschränkt, was deren dominante Rolle für die biologische Schäd-lingskontrolle nahelegt. In Kartoffeln erhöhten Nützlingsblühstreifen auch die Artenzahl Schwebfliegen in Streifen und Feld, was einen zusätzlichen Nutzen für die Diversität heraushebt.
Die vorliegenden Resultate liefern Einblicke in die Mechanismen, die der biologischen Schädlingskontrolle durch Nützlingsförderung (conservation biological control) unterliegen und heben das Potential von massgeschneidertem Lebensraum-Management für eine ökologische Intensivierung hervor.
This dissertation is dedicated to a new concept for capturing renunciation-oriented attitudes and beliefs — sufficiency orientation. Sufficiency originates in the interdisciplinary sustain-ability debate. In contrast to efficiency and consistency, sufficiency considers human behaviour as the cause of socio-ecological crises and strives for a reduction in consumption respecting the planetary boundaries. The present work places sufficiency in a psychological research context and explores it qualitatively and quantitatively. On the basis of five manuscripts, the overarching question pursued is to what extent sufficiency orientation contributes to socio-ecological transformation. Based on one qualitative study and five further quantitative studies, sufficiency orientation is investigated in different behavioural contexts that are of particular importance with regard to CO2 emissions. In addition, sufficiency orientation is linked to a wider range of psychologically relevant theories that help gain an overview of correlates and possible causes for the development of a sufficiency orientation.
Manuscript 1 uses expert interviews (N = 21) to develop a heuristic framework on a transformation towards societal sufficiency orientation including barriers and enablers, as well as ambiguities on such a change. The derived elements are interpreted in the light of the leverage points approach. This framework can serve as a heuristic for future research and to develop measures concerning sufficiency orientation.
As part of an online study (N = 648), Manuscript 2 examines the extent to which sufficiency orientation can be embedded in classic models for explaining pro-environmental intentions and behaviour (Theory of Planned Behaviour, Norm Activation Model), and showed a significant contribution to the explanation of intentions and behaviour in the field of plastic consumption.
Manuscript 3 reports two framing experiments (Study 1, N = 123, Study 2, N = 330) to investigate how pro-social justice sensitivity contributes to making sufficiency orientation more salient and promoting it. While sufficiency orientation and pro-social facets of justice sensitivity were positively related to each other, there was no effect of the framing intervention in the hypothesised direction. The results indicate that justice-related information at least in the presented manner is more likely to generate reactance.
Manuscript 4 presents an online study (N = 317) and targets the importance of sufficiency orientation for predicting actual greenhouse gas emissions in relation to flight behav-iour and policy support for the decarbonisation of mobility. In addition, the connection between sufficiency orientation and global identity is examined. It turns out that sufficiency orientation is superior to global identity in predicting actual emissions and decarbonisation policies. Contrary to expectations, sufficiency orientation and the form of global identity operationalised in the presented study shows a positive correlation and are compatible.
Manuscript 5 reports a reflective diary intervention (N = 252) that should lead to a short- and long-term increase in sufficiency orientation by satisfying basic psychological needs through induced self-reflection. For both groups with or without the intervention, sufficiency orientation increased slightly but significantly. Although no specific effect of the manipulation was found, basic psychological need satisfaction turns out to be the largest predictor for sufficiency orientation. Subjective well-being is positively associated with sufficiency orientation, while time affluence shows no clear associations in the study.
Overall, the results highlight the relevance of sufficiency orientation in relation to socio-ecological transformation and actual behavioural change. Sufficiency orientation is related to low-emission behaviour and support for political measures to decarbonize infrastructures. These results contribute to the discussion on the intention-behaviour gap in regard to impact-relevant behaviour, i.e. behaviour producing high emissions. The present findings suggest, that sufficiency orientation could be related to a strong intention-behavioural consistency. However, further research is needed to validate these results and improve the measurement of sufficiency orientation. Furthermore, the studies provided insights on correlates of sufficiency orientation: justice sensitivity, global identity, subjective well-being and left-wing liberal political ideologies are all found to be positively related to sufficiency orien-tation. Moreover, basic psychological need satisfaction was identified as a potential mechanism that can support the emergence of sufficiency orientation, however, causality remains unclear. From these findings, the work derives practical implications how to possibly strengthen sufficiency orientation on the micro, meso and macro levels of society.
Taken together, the dissertation provides important insights into a new and still developing concept, and shows its connectivity to psychological theories. However, future research is required in order to grasp more precisely the complexity of sufficiency orientation and to understand origins and predictors of sufficiency orientation. This work contributes to the interdisciplinary debate on socio-ecological transformation and points out that sufficiency orientation can serve to a future worth living as being related to reduced consumption.
The natural and the artificial environment of mankind is of enormous complexity, and our means of understanding this complex environment are restricted unless we make use of simplified (but not oversimplified) dynamical models with the help of which we can explicate and communicate what we have understood in order to discuss among ourselves how to re-shape reality according to what our simulation models make us believe to be possible. Being both a science and an art, modelling and simulation isrnstill one of the core tools of extended thought experiments, and its use is still spreading into new application areas, particularly as the increasing availability of massive computational resources allows for simulating more and more complex target systems.
In the early summer of 2012, the 26th European Conference on Modelling andrnSimulation (ECMS) once again brings together the best experts and scientists in the field to present their ideas and research, and to discuss new challenges and directions for the field.
The 2012 edition of ECMS includes three new tracks, namely Simulation-BasedrnBusiness Research, Policy Modelling and Social Dynamics and Collective Behaviour, and extended the classical Finance and Economics track with Social Science. It attracted more than 110 papers, 125 participants from 21 countries and backgrounds ranging from electrical engineering to sociology.
This book was inspired by the event, and it was prepared to compile the most recent concepts, advances, challenges and ideas associated with modelling and computer simulation. It contains all papers carefully selected from the large number of submissions by the programme committee for presentation during the conference and is organised according to the still growing number tracks which shaped the event. The book is complemented by two invited pieces from other experts that discussed an emerging approach to modelling and a specialised application. rnrnWe hope these proceedings will serve as a reference to researchers and practitioners in the ever growing field as well as an inspiration to newcomers to the area of modelling and computer simulation. The editors are honoured and proud to present you with this carefully compiled selection of topics and publications in the field.
From September 4 to 11, 1992, a fiirst meeting between Ukrainian and German scientists interested in mathematical and computer modeling of social processes was held at Vorzel' near Kiev. The meeting had been planned for nearly three years by Igor V. Chernenko and Mikhail V. Kuz'min, then members of the research group on mathematical modeling in sociology at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Science of the Ukrainian Republic, and had to be postponed twice due to the political development in the former Soviet Union, but thanks to the organizers' perseverance (and in spite of a strike of the airport personell at Kiev Borispol Airport on the eve of the conference) the conference could at last be realized.rnThe main purpose of the conference was to discuss a synergetic interpretation of large-scale destructive social processes as catastrophic phenomena in self-organized systems.
This paper originates from the FP6 project "Emergence in the Loop (EMIL)" which explores the emergence of norms in artificial societies. Part of work package 3 of this project is a simulator that allows for simulation experiments in different scenarios, one of which is collaborative writing. The agents in this still prototypical implementation are able to perform certain actions, such as writing short texts, submitting them to a central collection of texts (the "encyclopaedia") or adding their texts to texts formerly prepared by other agents. At the same time they are able to comment upon others' texts, for instance checking for correct spelling, for double entries in the encyclopaedia or for plagiarisms. Findings of this kind lead to reproaching the original authors of blamable texts. Under certain conditions blamable activities are no longer performed after some time.