Master's Thesis
29 search hits
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Concepts of "Female Inversion" and the "New Woman" in Rhoda Broughton’s "Dear Faustina" (1897)
(2012)
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Simone Hennig
- Published in 1897, Rhoda Broughton’s fin de siècle novel "Dear Faustina" took an active part in the discursive production of two cultural figures: the New Woman and the Female Invert. Employing those identity constructs to negotiate conservative anxieties about social change, while at the same time commenting on a range of alternatives to Victorian middle-class lifestyle, the novel is clearly rooted in the discourses of transition that characterised the fin de siècle....
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A study on the impact of mobile telecommunication on the welfare of sub saharan african countries
(2010)
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Hauke Heinrich Friedrich Plambeck
- Africa: A continent is waking up. Not through aid or wealth from the exploitation of natural resources, but through a technological revolution. The access to affordable mobile telecommunication. Inspired by deregulation and pioneered by local champions who have taken a lead in what is today's fastest growing mobile market in the world. There is money to be made in these markets, attracting more and more operators from the northern hemisphere.
However positive the short term impact of this revolution may be, governments should try hard to assure a market of continued competition among network operators, as this competition is the source of a self propelled creation of welfare and new opportunities, motivated from within Africa.
Chapter 1 of this thesis highlights the positive impact of mobile telecommunication on the social and economic life in Sub Saharan Africa. Chapter 2 builds on the static as well as the dynamic version of the Network Pricing Game, a model developed by Dr. Carolyn Gideon, to stress the immanent threat of network markets turning into a monopoly. This theses ends in Chapter 3 with an brief outlook on further drivers of economic growth and opportunities awaiting Sub Saharan Africa in the coming decade.
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Newspeak, Nadsat and Láadan – The Evolution of Speech and the Role of Language in 20th Century Dystopian Fiction
(2009)
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Eike Kühl
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Approximating Perpetuities
(2006)
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Margarete Knape
- A perpetuity is a real valued random variable which is characterised by a distributional fixed-point equation of the form X=AX+b, where (A,b) is a vector of random variables independent of X, whereas dependencies between A and b are allowed. Conditions for existence and uniqueness of solutions of such fixed-point equations are known, as is the tail behaviour for most cases. In this work, we look at the central area and develop an algorithm to approximate the distribution function and possibly density of a large class of such perpetuities. For one specific example from the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, the algorithm is implemented and explicit error bounds for this approximation are given. At last, we look at some examples, where the densities or at least some properties are known to compare the theoretical error bounds to the actual error of the approximation. The algorithm used here is based on a method which was developed for another class of fixed-point equations. While adapting to this case, a considerable improvement was found, which can be translated to the original method.
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A break in neoliberal ideology? : A critical analysis of Bolivian elite discourse
(2006)
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Marión C. Schmidt
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Latino politics in the United States : a diverse minority and its growing influence
(2006)
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Kolja Müller
- This paper is intended to show how Latinos in general and Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans in particular, engage politically in the United States. Latinos execute their influence by voting or in non-electoral activities like campaign work or financial contributions. As an individual, one participates as a member of society and possibly as a member of an interest group, i.e. a party. Thus, to be successful, it is necessary to combine one’s personal interest with that of others in order to form an alliance that, due to its size, may have an impact on the political stage. This study will show which factors are necessary and which steps were taken to gain and enhance Latino political influence. In doing so, it will become clear that Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans all started their struggle from diverse backgrounds and possess significantly different goals. Although common language unites these three national-origin groups, they do not have the same political and economic resources at their disposal. Decisive differences in immigration politics, naturalization, and economic opportunities become visible and will prove a distinct heterogeneity of Latinos concerning political behavior and goals. Political activities of Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans will be outlined as well as how they differ from each other. In doing so, it is necessary to take notice of their specific histories and legal experiences upon arrival in the United States. Furthermore, different demographic factors of the three national-origin groups additionally affect political participation. An understanding of Latino political participation should be in the interest of the U.S. public as well as scholars engaging in American Studies. This biggest minority increasingly makes its presence felt in the electoral arena, especially at the state level. In states such as California, Texas, Florida and New Mexico Latinos constitute decisive voting blocs. But also, Latinos nationwide enlarge their political clout, due to cumulative numbers and a more developed political consciousness. With this national and state level significance of the Latino electorate, examining their policy preferences and goals has become progressively more important to the understanding of the U.S. political scene. The approach here is twofold. First, political participation of the Latino population as a whole will be researched; using numbers and results from the presidential election 2004. In this part of the paper, the concept of pan-ethnicity using the label Latino will be used to sum up Spanish-speaking nationalities and their political efforts. In order to be eligible to vote, certain legal requirements are to be met, so factors that account for voting will be outlined first. In accordance with the large share of non-citizens among the Latino population, it is also necessary to examine their non-electoral political activities. The second part will portray Latinos in more detail, examining the three largest national-origin groups. By demonstrating their specific histories and varied experiences and opportunities in U.S. politics, it will become clear that when talking about Latino Politics, it is indispensable to bear in mind the heterogeneity of America’s biggest minority and the side effects this has.
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Semantic Web & Caché : Objektorientierte Speicherung des RDF-Modells in die postrelationale Datenbank Caché von InterSystems
(2004)
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Christoph Karwoth
- RDF is widely used in order to catalogue the chaos of data across the internet. But these descriptions must be stored, evaluated, analyzed and verified. This creates the need to search for an environment to realize these aspects and strengthen RDFs influence. InterSystems postrelational database Caché exposes many features that are similar to RDF and provide persistence with semantic part. Some models for relational databases exist but these lack features like object-oriented data-structures and multidimensional variables. The aim of this thesis is to develop an RDF model for Caché that saves RDF data in an object-oriented form. Furthermore an interface for importing RDF data will be presented and implemented.
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Production of neutral strange hadrons with high transverse momentum in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 A GeV
(2006)
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Tim Schuster
- The motivation for studying ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is to search for signatures of a transition from hadronic matter to a partonic phase, the Quark-Gluon plasma. The bulk of the particles produced in these collisions possesses transverse momenta of pT < 2 GeV/c and evidence for the production of a Quark-Gluon plasma at SPS energies has been found in the properties of particles from this pT range. The rare particles seen in the higher pT domain can complete the picture of the produced matter. Examples for such high pT signatures include the properties of the baryon/meson ratios and the elliptic flow in the region 2 < pT < 4 GeV/c observed at RHIC. They can be explained by quark coalescence models. This phase space range can also be accessed for analysis at the highest SPS beam energy of 158 A GeV. A study of the pT dependence of baryon/meson ratios here can help to answer the question which hadron production mechanisms are relevant in this energy range. In the NA49 large acceptance hadron spectrometer, K0S and Lambda are identified via the V 0 topology of their decay into charged hadrons and the determination of their invariant mass. The reach in pT of this method is only limited by the statistics of the available data. An important part of the analysis presented in this thesis is to select potential V 0 candidates by adequate cuts. Optimisation for the high pT domain requires careful cuts in order to retain the signal there. A challenge implicated by this approach is the large combinatorial background left over by the loose cuts. A reliable signal extraction method was found that can deal with this possible difficulty and provide raw spectra.The fraction of particles that cannot be detected because of the geometrical acceptance of the detector and analysis inefficiencies was determined in simulations. Correction factors are extracted from this simulation for each phase space bin and applied to the raw spectra. The spectra corrected in this way reach pT = 3.6 GeV/c (for K0 S) and pT = 3.8 GeV/c (Lambda), respectively. The whole analysis method has been checked to be self-consistent and was compared to existing data on kaon and ... production, that is only available in the lower pT range. While the Lambda spectra agree with an earlier analysis [44], a disagreement remains between the results for K0 S presented here and charged kaon data published in [42]. The Lambda/K0 S ratio calculated from the corrected spectra qualitatively agrees with the results for the higher collision energy at RHIC [8]. A saturation of the ratio for pT >= 2 GeV/c clearly indicates that the hydrodynamical picture is not valid in the higher range any more. Unfortunately, no calculations from coalescence models are available for the SPS energy range so far.
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Über quasistationäre Verteilungen
(1997)
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Lars Kauffmann
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Analysis of Higher-Order Coincident Activity in Multiple Parallel Processes
(2002)
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Gaby Schneider
- The synchronization of neuronal firing activity is considered an important mechanism in cortical information processing. The tendency of multiple neurons to synchronize their joint firing activity can be investigated with the 'unitary event' analysis (Grün, 1996). This method is based on the nullhypothesis of independent Bernoulli processes and can therefore not tell whether coincidences observed between more than two processes can be considered "genuine" higher- order coincidences or whether they might be caused by coincidences of lower order that coincide by chance ("chance coincidences"). In order to distinguish between genuine and chance coincidences, a parametric model of independent interaction processes (MIIP) is presented. In the framework of this model, Maximum-Likelihood estimates are derived for the firing rates of n single processes and for the rates with which genuine higher order correlations occur. The asymptotic normality of these estimates is used to derive their asymptotic variance and in order to investigate whether higher order coincidences can be considered genuine or whether they can be explained by chance coincidences. The empirical test power of this procedure for n=2 and n=3 processes and for finite analysis windows is derived with simulations and compared to the asymptotic values. Finally, the model is extended in order to allow for the analysis of correlations that are caused by jittered coincidences.
