Search results for: German pragmatics

Authors: Ronit German, Alexandra Beytenbrat

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Although English seems to be prevalent in every sphere of Israeli daily life, not many Israeli students have a sufficient level of writing and speaking in English which is necessary for academic studies. The inadequate level of English among Israeli students, almost the sole focus on teaching reading comprehension, and the need to adapt to the trends of the professional worldwide demands triggered a reform that requires to implement Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) courses in the Israeli academic institutions. However, it will be argued that this reform is challenging to implement. The fact that modern Hebrew is a revived language, and that English is L3 for more than 30% of the population, the diverse social and cultural students’ background, and psychological factors stand in the way of the new reform.

Keywords: CEFR, cultural diversity, EMI courses, English in Israel, reform

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Authors: Daniela Zalazar-Garcia, Erick Torres, German Mazza

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Slow pyrolysis of a pellet of pistachio waste was studied using a lab-scale stainless-steel reactor. Experiments were conducted at different heating rates (5, 10, and 15 K/min). A 3-E (environmental, exergetic, and energetic) analysis for the processing of 20 kg/h of bio-waste was carried out. Experimental results showed that biochar and gas yields decreased with an increase in the heating rate (43 to 36 % and 28 to 24 %, respectively), while the bio-oil yield increased (29 to 40 %). Finally, from the 3-E analysis and the experimental results, it can be suggested that an increase in the heating rate resulted in a higher pyrolysis exergetic efficiency (70 %) due to an increase of the bio-oil yield with high-energy content.

Keywords: 3E assessment, bio-waste pellet, life cycle assessment, slow pyrolysis

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Authors: Mawande Dlali

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This paper examines the request strategies in commuter discourse involving taxi drivers and passengers in Khayelitsha as well as the responses to these requests. The present study considers requests in commuter transport as face threatening acts (FTAs), hence the need for the commuter crew to strategically shape their communicative actions to achieve their overall discourse goal of getting passengers to perform actions that are in their own interest with minimum resistance or confrontation. The crew presents itself by using communicative devices that prompt the passengers to evaluate it positively as warm, friendly, and respectful. However, the passengers' responses to requests range from compliance to resistance depending on their interpretation of the speaker’s motive and the probable social consequences. Participant observation by the researcher was the main method of collecting examples of requests and responses to the requests. Unstructured interviews and informal discussions were made with randomly selected taxi drivers and commuters. The findings and explanations presented in this article revealed the predominance of polite requests as speech acts in taxi discourse in Khayelitsha. This research makes a contribution to the contemporary pragmatics study of African languages in urban context.

Keywords: face threatening acts, speech acts, request strategies, discourse

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Authors: Malte Brettel, Niklas Friederichsen, Michael Keller, Marius Rosenberg

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The German manufacturing industry has to withstand an increasing global competition on product quality and production costs. As labor costs are high, several industries have suffered severely under the relocation of production facilities towards aspiring countries, which have managed to close the productivity and quality gap substantially. Established manufacturing companies have recognized that customers are not willing to pay large price premiums for incremental quality improvements. As a consequence, many companies from the German manufacturing industry adjust their production focusing on customized products and fast time to market. Leveraging the advantages of novel production strategies such as Agile Manufacturing and Mass Customization, manufacturing companies transform into integrated networks, in which companies unite their core competencies. Hereby, virtualization of the process- and supply-chain ensures smooth inter-company operations providing real-time access to relevant product and production information for all participating entities. Boundaries of companies deteriorate, as autonomous systems exchange data, gained by embedded systems throughout the entire value chain. By including Cyber-Physical-Systems, advanced communication between machines is tantamount to their dialogue with humans. The increasing utilization of information and communication technology allows digital engineering of products and production processes alike. Modular simulation and modeling techniques allow decentralized units to flexibly alter products and thereby enable rapid product innovation. The present article describes the developments of Industry 4.0 within the literature and reviews the associated research streams. Hereby, we analyze eight scientific journals with regards to the following research fields: Individualized production, end-to-end engineering in a virtual process chain and production networks. We employ cluster analysis to assign sub-topics into the respective research field. To assess the practical implications, we conducted face-to-face interviews with managers from the industry as well as from the consulting business using a structured interview guideline. The results reveal reasons for the adaption and refusal of Industry 4.0 practices from a managerial point of view. Our findings contribute to the upcoming research stream of Industry 4.0 and support decision-makers to assess their need for transformation towards Industry 4.0 practices.

Keywords: Industry 4.0., mass customization, production networks, virtual process-chain

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Authors: German Ricci, Horacio Divito

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This article analyses the ethical dimension of the IMF in its relationship with Argentina from the Standby Agreement sanctioned in 2018 to the Extended Fund Facilities of 2023. From the analysis of the statements of the IMF, the appeal of the Agency to an ethic is evidenced and supposedly shared with the borrowing country, in addition to the well-known technical-economic evaluations. The Fund "vindicates" and "punishes" the borrowing country through moral judgment. In the Fund's narratives, the "effort," "commitment," and "work" of the local elite are rewarded. On the other hand, there is a repeated discursive emphasis of the IMF on its permanent intention to "help" Argentina through its collaborative nature. Finally, the emergence of moral prescriptions that question the very being of the debtor country and its representatives is detected when the relationship between local authorities and the IMF is tense.

Keywords: IMF, Argentina, ethics, moral, dependency routine, symbolic power

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Authors: Csaba Tóth, Éva Lakatos, László Pethő, Seoyoung Cho

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The temperature effect on asphalt pavement structure is a crucial factor at the design stage. In this paper, by applying the German guidelines for temperature along the asphalt depth is estimated. The aim is to consider temperature profiles in different seasons in numerical modelling. The model is built with an elastic and isotropic solid element with 19 subdivisions of asphalt layers to reflect the temperature variation. Comparison with the simple three-layer pavement system (asphalt layers, base, and subgrade layers) will be followed to see the difference in result without temperature variation along with the depth. Finally, the fatigue life calculation was checked to prove the validity of the methodology of considering the temperature in the numerical modelling.

Keywords: temperature profile, flexible pavement modeling, finite element method, temperature modeling

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Authors: Yu Ling Chang

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Since the United Nations announced Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, people are paying more and more attention to the value of lives. On the other hand, life education is being vigorously pushed in different countries. Unfortunately, the results have been only moderately successful by reason that the concept is not implemented in everyone’s daily life. Even worse, animal abuse and killing events keep happening. This research is focused on generalizing a conclusion from different countries’ Animal Protection Act and actual execution by case studies, in order to make an approach of whether the number of animal abuse is directly influenced by different laws and regimes or not. It concludes the central notion and spirit of Animal Protection Act in German, Japan, and Taiwan. Providing the reference of specific schemes and analysis based on Taiwanese social culture.

Keywords: animal abuse, Animal Management Act, Animal Protection Act, social culture

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Authors: Lanthony Slater

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The paper will focus on the philosophy and practices of Eugene Fischer and his impact on the German Holocaust and the Namibian genocide. Fischer played a major role in racial superiority theory, eugenics, and the impact of human heredity. Through my research and comparative examination of his positionality in both societies, much is revealed about how philosophical notions would contribute to division and ultimately acts of genocide on two countries. In addition, this research will focus on the legacy in both events of genocide. The objective of the research is to connect both the Namibian genocide and the Holocaust in Germany. For many historians, when explaining the origins of the holocaust, connections to the Namibian genocide is often omitted. The main contribution to my research is to attribute the National Socialist ideology towards the ongoing issues that the country of Namibia is faced with. Additionally, it compares how Germany and Namibia deal with the legacies created under Nazism.

Keywords: genocide, namibia, rehoboth, experiments

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Authors: Peter Winzer, Erik Massarczyk

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Experts, enterprises and operators expect that the bandwidth request will increase up to rates of 100 to 1,000 Mbps within several years. Therefore the most important question is, which technology shall satisfy the future consumer broadband demands. Currently the consensus is, that the fiber technology has the best technical characteristics to achieve such the high bandwidth rates. But fiber technology is so far very cost-intensive and resource consuming. To avoid these investments, operators are concentrating to upgrade the existing copper and hybrid fiber coax infrastructures. This work presents a comparison of the copper and fiber technologies including an overview about the current German broadband market. Both technologies are reviewed in the terms of demand, willingness to pay and economic efficiency in connection with the technical characteristics.

Keywords: broadband customer demand, fiber development, g.fast, vectoring, willingness to pay for broadband services

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Authors: Marc Dietrich

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Youth cultures like Punk as much as media relevant to the specific scenes associated with them offer ample opportunity for young people or juvenile adults to construct their personal identities. However, developmental psychology has largely neglected such identity construction processes during the last decades. Such was not always the case: Early developmental psychologists intensely studied youth cultures and their meaningful objects and media in the early 20th century but lost interest when cultural studies and the social sciences occupied the field after World War II. Our project Constructions of Juvenility and Generation(ality), funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, reintegrates the study of youth cultures and their meaningful objects and media in a developmental psychology perspective. We present an empirical study of the ways in which youth, juvenility, and generation (ality) are constructed and negotiated in underground media like punk fanzines (a portmanteau of fan and magazine), including both semantic and aesthetic aspects of these construction processes within punk culture. The fanzine sample was accessed by the theoretical sampling strategy typical for GTM studies. Acknowledging fanzines as artful self-produced media by scene members for scene members, we conceptualize them as authentic documents of scene norms and values. Drawing on an analysis of both text and (cover) images in Punk fanzines published in Germany (and within a sample dating from 1981 until 2015) using a novel Visual Grounded Theory approach, we found that: a) Juvenility is a highly contested concept in punk culture. Its semantic quality and valuation varies with the perspectives present within the culture (e.g. embryo punks versus older punks); b) Juvenility is constructed as having energy and being socio-critical that does not depend on biological age; c) Juvenility is regarded not an ideal per se in German Punk culture; Punk culture constructs old age in a largely positive way (e.g., as marker of being real and a historical innovator); d) Juvenility is constructed as a habit that should be kept for life as it is constantly adapted to individual biographical trajectories like specific job situations or having a family. Consequently, identity negotiation as documented in the zines attempts to balance subculturally driven perspectives on life and society with the pragmatic requirements of a bourgeois life. The proposed paper will present the main results of this large-scale study of punk fanzines and show how developmental psychology perspectives as represented in the novel methodology applied in it can advance the study of youth cultures.

Keywords: construction of juvenility, developmental psychology, visual GTM, youth culture, fanzines

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Authors: M. Holle, M. Roth, M. R. Gürtler, U. Lindemann

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This paper gives insights into the research project "InnoCyFer" (in the form of an outlook) which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. Enabling the integrated customer individual product design as well as flexible manufacturing of these products are the main objectives of the project. To achieve this, a web-based open innovation-platform containing an integrated Toolkit will be developed. This toolkit enables the active integration of the customer’s creativity and potentials of innovation in the product development process. Furthermore, the project will show the chances and possibilities of customer individualized products by building and examining the continuous process from innovation through the customers to the flexible manufacturing of individual products.

Keywords: customer individual product design, innovation networks, open innovation, open innovation platform, toolkit

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Authors: Andreja Benko

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Article presents a short overview of the architects’ profession over time with outlined work of the architectural theoreticians. In the continuation is described a former affiliation of Slovenia as well as the spatial planning documents that were in use until the Slovenia joint Yugoslavia (last part in 1919). This legislation from former Austro-Hungarian monarchy was valid almost until 1950 in some parts of Yugoslavia even longer. Upon that will be mentioned some valid Slovenian spatial documents which will be compared with the German legislation. Analysed will be the number of architect and spatial planners in Slovenia and also their number upon certain region in Slovenia. Based on that will be given also the number from statistical office of Slovenia of the number of buildings between years 2007 and 2012, and described also the collapse of the major construction companies in Slovenia and consequences of that. At the end will be outlined the morality and ethics by spatial interventions and lack of the architectural law in Slovenia as well as the problematic of minimal collaboration between the Ministry of infrastructure and spatial planning with the profession.

Keywords: architect, history, legislation, Slovenia

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Authors: Evelyn Kropfreiter, Roland Bernhard

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There has been an increased interest in school-based whole-child development in the Austrian education system in the last few years. Although there is a consensus among academics that teachers' beliefs are an essential component of their professional competence, there are hardly any studies in the German-speaking world examining teachers' beliefs about school-based character education. To close this gap, we are conducting a mixed methods study combining qualitative interviews and a questionnaire in Austria (doctoral thesis at the University of Salzburg). In this paper, we present preliminary insights into the quantitative strand of the project. In contrast to German-speaking countries, the Anglo-Saxon world has a long tradition of explicit character education in schools. There has been a rising interest in approaches focusing on a neo-Aristotelian form of character education in England. The Jubilee Centre strongly influences the "renaissance" of papers on neo-Aristotelian character education for Character and Virtues, founded in 2012. The quantitative questionnaire study (n = 264) is an online survey of teachers and school principals conducted in four different federal states in spring 2023. Most respondents (n = 264) from lower secondary schools (AHS-Unterstufe and Mittelschule) believe that character education in schools for 10-14-year-olds is more important for society than good exam results. Many teachers state that they consider themselves prepared to promote their students' personal development and life skills through their education and to attend further training courses. However, there are many obstacles in the education system to ensure that a comprehensive education reaches the students. Many teachers state that they consider themselves prepared to promote their students' character strengths and life skills through their education and to attend further training courses. However, there are many obstacles in the education system to ensure that a comprehensive education reaches the students. Among the most cited difficulties, teachers mention the time factor associated with an overcrowded curriculum and a strong focus on performance, which often leaves them needing more time to keep an eye on nurturing the whole person. The fact that character education is not a separate subject, and its implementation needs to be monitored also makes it challenging to implement it in everyday school life. Austrian teachers prioritize moral virtues such as compassion and honesty as character strengths in everyday school life and resilience and commitment in the next place. Our results are like those reported in other studies on teacher's beliefs about character education. They indicate that Austrian teachers want to teach character in their schools but see systemic constraints such as the curriculum, in which personality roles play a subordinate role, and the focus on performance testing in the school system and the associated lack of time as obstacles to fostering more character development in students.

Keywords: character education, life skills, teachers' beliefs, virtues

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Authors: Patrick Nüß

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I estimate management opposition against unions in terms of hiring discrimination by a large scale field experiment in the German labor market. The results show that callback rates for union members decrease significantly in the presence of high sectoral union density and large firm size. I further explore how this effect varies with regional and sectoral labor dispute intensity and find that management opposition is stronger when a sector is exposed to an intense labor dispute. There is evidence that the observed management opposition can be explained by sectoral union threat effects. Sectors with lower hiring discrimination have lower coverage of collective agreements, and in the absence of a collective agreement, they are less likely to follow the collective agreement wage setting.

Keywords: trade unions, Industrial relations, management opposition, union threat, labor disputes, field experiments

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Authors: Sarah E. Stief, Anne Theresa Eidhoff, Markus Voeth

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Despite all progress firms are facing the increasing need to adapt and assimilate digital technologies to transform their business activities in order to pursue business development. By using new digital technologies, firms can implement major business improvements in order to stay competitive and foster new growth potentials. The corresponding phenomenon of digital transformation has received some attention in previous literature in respect to industries such as media and publishing. Nevertheless, there is a lack of understanding of the concept and its organization within firms. With the help of twenty-three in-depth field interviews with German experts responsible for their company’s digital transformation, we examined what digital transformation encompasses, how it is organized and which opportunities and challenges arise within firms. Our results indicate that digital transformation is an inevitable task for all firms, as it bears the potential to comprehensively optimize and reshape established business activities and can thus be seen as a strategy of business development.

Keywords: business development, digitalization, digital strategies, digital transformation

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Authors: Vinay Kumar Vanjakula, Frank Adam, Nils Goseberg

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Wind power is one of the leading renewable energy generation methods. Due to abundant higher wind speeds far away from shore, the construction of offshore wind turbines began in the last decades. However, installation of offshore foundation-based (monopiles) wind turbines in deep waters are often associated with technical and financial challenges. To overcome such challenges, the concept of floating wind turbines is expanded as the basis from the oil and gas industry. The unfolding of Universal heavyweight gravity anchor (UGA) for floating based foundation for floating Tension Leg Platform (TLP) sub-structures is developed in this research work. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) for a three-year (2019-2022) research program called “Offshore Wind Solutions Plus (OWSplus) - Floating Offshore Wind Solutions Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.” It’s a group consists of German institutions (Universities, laboratories, and consulting companies). The part of the project is focused on the numerical modeling of gravity anchor that involves to analyze and solve fluid flow problems. Compared to gravity-based torpedo anchors, these UGA will be towed and lowered via controlled machines (tug boats) at lower speeds. This kind of installation of UGA are new to the offshore wind industry, particularly for TLP, and very few research works have been carried out in recent years. Conventional methods for transporting the anchor requires a large transportation crane vessel which involves a greater cost. This conceptual UGA anchors consists of ballasting chambers which utilizes the concept of buoyancy forces; the inside chambers are filled with the required amount of water in a way that they can float on the water for towing. After reaching the installation site, those chambers are ballasted with water for lowering. After it’s lifetime, these UGA can be unballasted (for erection or replacement) results in self-rising to the sea surface; buoyancy chambers give an advantage for using an UGA without the need of heavy machinery. However, while lowering/rising the UGA towards/away from the seabed, it experiences difficult, harsh marine environments due to the interaction of waves and currents. This leads to drifting of the anchor from the desired installation position and damage to the lowering machines. To overcome such harsh environments problems, a numerical model is built to investigate the influences of different outer contours and other fluid governing shapes that can be installed on the UGA to overcome the turbulence and drifting. The presentation will highlight the importance of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) numerical model in OpenFOAM, which is open-source programming software.

Keywords: anchor lowering, towing, waves, currrents, computational fluid dynamics

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Authors: Dina Mahmoud Hammouri

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The study investigates the Jordanian EFL learners’ pragmatic competence through their production of the speech acts of responding to requests, making suggestions, making threats and expressing farewells. The sample of the study consists of 130 Jordanian EFL learners and native speakers. 2600 responses were collected through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The findings of the study revealed that the tested students showed similarities and differences in performing the strategies of four speech acts. Differences in the students’ performances led to pragmatic failure instances. The pragmatic failure committed by students refers to a lack of linguistic competence (i.e., pragmalinguistic failure), sociocultural differences and pragmatic transfer (i.e., sociopragmatic failure). EFL learners employed many mechanisms to maintain their communicative competence; the analysis of the test on speech acts showed learners’ tendency towards using particular strategies, resorting to modify strategies and relating them to their grammatical competence, prefabrication, performing long forms, buffing and transfer. The results were also suggestive of the learners’ lack of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge. The implications of this study are for language teachers to teach interlanguage pragmatics explicitly in EFL contexts to draw learners’ attention to both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features, pay more attention to these areas and allocate more time and practice to solve learners’ problems in these areas. The implication of this study is also for pedagogical material designers to provide sufficient and well-organized pragmatic input.

Keywords: pragmatic failure, Jordanian EFL learner, sociopragmatic competence, pragmalinguistic competence

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Authors: Andreas Hirseland, Lukas Kerschbaumer

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In Germany, during the past years there constantly are about one million long term unemployed who did not benefit from the prospering labor market while most short term unemployed did. Instead, they are continuously dependent on welfare and sometimes precarious short-term employment, experiencing work poverty. Long term unemployment thus turns into a main obstacle to regular employment, especially if accompanied by other impediments such as low level education (school/vocational), poor health (especially chronical illness), advanced age (older than fifty), immigrant status, motherhood or engagement in care for other relatives. Almost two thirds of all welfare recipients have multiple impediments which hinder a successful transition from welfare back to sustainable and sufficient employment. Hiring them is often considered as an investment too risky for employers. Therefore formal application schemes based on formal qualification certificates and vocational biographies might reduce employers’ risks but at the same time are not helpful for long-term unemployed and welfare recipients. The panel survey ‘Labor market and social security’ (PASS; ~15,000 respondents in ~10,000 households), carried out by the Institute of Employment Research (the research institute of the German Federal Labor Agency), shows that their chance to get back to work tends to fall to nil. Only 66 cases of such unlikely transitions could be observed. In a sequential explanatory mixed-method study, the very scarce ‘success stories’ of unlikely transitions from long term unemployment to work were explored by qualitative inquiry – in-depth interviews with a focus on biography accompanied by qualitative network techniques in order to get a more detailed insight of relevant actors involved in the processes which promote the transition from being a welfare recipient to work. There is strong evidence that sustainable transitions are influenced by biographical resources like habits of network use, a set of informal skills and particularly a resilient way of dealing with obstacles, combined with contextual factors rather than by job-placement procedures promoted by Job-Centers according to activation rules or by following formal paths of application. On the employer’s side small and medium-sized enterprises are often found to give job opportunities to a wider variety of applicants, often based on a slow but steadily increasing relationship leading to employment. According to these results it is possible to show and discuss some limitations of (German) activation policies targeting welfare dependency and long-term unemployment. Based on these findings, indications for more supportive small scale measures in the field of labor-market policies are suggested to help long-term unemployed with multiple impediments to overcome their situation.

Keywords: against-all-odds, economic sociology, long-term unemployment, mixed-methods

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Authors: Birgit Heike Spohn

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Several authors (e.g., Krowatschek & Reid, 2011; Winkler, 1998) pronounce themselves in favor of the use of relaxation techniques in school because those techniques could help children to cope with stress, improve power of concentration, learning, and social behavior as well as class climate. Children with learning disabilities might profit from those techniques in a special way because they contribute to improved learning behavior. There is no study addressing the frequency of the use of relaxation techniques in special schools for children with learning disabilities in German speaking countries. The paper presents a study in which all teachers of special schools for children with learning disabilities in a district of South Germany (n = 625) were questioned about the use of relaxation techniques in school using a standardized questionnaire. Variables addressed were the use of these techniques in the classroom, aspects of their use (kind of relaxation technique, frequency, and regularity of their use), and potential influencing factors. The results are discussed, and implications for further research are drawn.

Keywords: special education, learning disabilities, relaxation training, concentration

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Authors: Volker Mittendorf, Andre Schmale

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In this case study, we want to explore the Twitter-use of candidates during the state parliamentary elections-year 2018 in Bavaria, Germany. This paper focusses on the seven parties that probably entered the parliament. Against this background, the paper classifies the use of language as populism which itself is considered as a political communication style. First, we determine the election campaigns which started in the years 2017 on Twitter, after that we categorize the posting times of the different direct candidates in order to derive ideal types from our empirical data. Second, we have done the exploration based on the dictionary of concerned citizens which contains German political language of the right and the far right. According to that, we are analyzing the corpus with methods of text mining and social network analysis, and afterwards we display the results in a network of words of concerned citizen communication style (CCCS).

Keywords: populism, communication style, election, text mining, social media

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Authors: Ananth Malali, Rohan Prasad, Ananth Revankar, Chiranth Hulgur

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This paper aims to show evidence that value creation by sustainable methods is achieved when a relation is shared with a sustainability attribute between two or more companies in every stage of the supply chain. The pillars of this paper, the value creation factors, attributes of sustainability and various relations that exist between firms in a horizontally integrated supply chain are defined. Further, a relational analysis was done using a simple analysis tool built based on research. Couple of case studies from the German manufacturing and Australian retail sectors were considered for the intra industry analysis and comparison. Taking the analysis ahead, for inter-industry comparison, the same cases were scrutinised in order to understand how the sustainability attributes change across each industry. Concluding, this paper gives an overview of how companies can plan their strategies to attain sustainability through horizontal integration.

Keywords: horizontal integration, value creation, sustainable supply chain

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Authors: Reda A. H. Mahmoud

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This paper investigates the pragmatic meaning of prosodic focus through four accentuation moods of blaming utterances in Egyptian Arabic. Prosodic focus results in various pragmatic meanings when the speaker utters the same blaming expression in different emotional moods: the angry, the mocking, the frustrated, and the informative moods. The main objective of this study is to interpret the meanings of these four accentuation moods in relation to their illocutionary forces and pre-locutionary effects, the integrated features of prosodic focus (e.g., tone movement distributions, pitch accents, lengthening of vowels, deaccentuation of certain syllables/words, and tempo), and the consonance between the former prosodic features and certain lexico-grammatical components to communicate the intentions of the speaker. The data on blaming utterances has been collected via elicitation and pre-recorded material, and the selection of blaming utterances is based on the criteria of lexical and prosodic regularity to be processed and verified by three computer programs, Praat, Speech Analyzer, and Spectrogram Freeware. A dual pragmatic approach is established to interpret expressive blaming utterance and their lexico-grammatical distributions into intonational focus structure units. The pragmatic component of this approach explains the variable psychological attitudes through the expressions of blaming and their effects whereas the analysis of prosodic focus structure is used to describe the intonational contours of blaming utterances and other prosodic features. The study concludes that every accentuation mood has its different prosodic configuration which influences the listener’s interpretation of the pragmatic meanings of blaming utterances.

Keywords: pragmatics, pragmatic interpretation, prosody, prosodic focus

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Authors: Christian Giddings

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Using rhetorical analysis, this paper analyzes thirteen madrigalian settings of Torquato Tasso's (1544-1595) poetry by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) published between 1587 (Book One) and 1619 (Book Seven). Such analysis suggests that the composer consistently responded to the expressivity and increased formal freedom typical of Tasso's poetry by making greater use of musico-rhetorical figures, as described by the German theorist Joachim Burmeister (1564-1629) in his treatise Musica poetica (1606). The use of rhetorical analysis when examining the influence of the poet Tasso on Monteverdi can illustrate the influence of literary components on music. One cannot overestimate the importance of these texts and their influence on composers of the day. The evidence presented in this paper strongly suggests that exposure to the poems of Torquato Tasso early in his career encouraged Claudio Monteverdi to increasingly adopt a more rhetorical approach in his madrigal compositions.

Keywords: Claudio Monteverdi, musico-rhetorical analysis, renaissance, torquato tasso

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Authors: Devineni Vijay Bhaskar, Yendluri Raja

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We recommend a model for traffic sign detection stranded on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We first renovate the unique image into the gray scale image through with support vector machines, then use convolutional neural networks with fixed and learnable layers for revealing and understanding. The permanent layer can reduction the amount of attention areas to notice and crop the limits very close to the boundaries of traffic signs. The learnable coverings can rise the accuracy of detection significantly. Besides, we use bootstrap procedures to progress the accuracy and avoid overfitting problem. In the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark, we obtained modest results, with an area under the precision-recall curve (AUC) of 99.49% in the group “Risk”, and an AUC of 96.62% in the group “Obligatory”.

Keywords: convolutional neural network, support vector machine, detection, traffic signs, bootstrap procedures, precision-recall curve

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Authors: Daniel Gredig, Annabelle Bartelsen-Raemy

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Social work services offered to people living with diabetes tend to be moulded by the prevailing understanding that social work is to support people living with diabetes in their adherence to medical prescription and/or life style changes. As diabetes has been conceived as a condition facing no stigma, discrimination of people living with diabetes has not been considered. However, there is growing evidence of stigma. To our knowledge, nevertheless, there have been no comprehensive, in-depth studies of stigma and its impact. Against this background and challenging the present layout of services for people living with diabetes, the present study aimed to establish whether: -people living with diabetes in Switzerland experience stigma, and if so, in what context and to what extent; -experiencing stigma impacts the quality of life of those affected. It was hypothesized that stigma would impact on their quality of life. It was further hypothesized that low self-esteem, psychological distress, depression, and a lack of social support would be mediating factors. For data collection an anonymous paper-and-pencil self-administered questionnaire was used which drew on a qualitative elicitation study. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modelling. To generate a large and diverse convenience sample the questionnaire was distributed to the readers of journal destined to diabetics living in Switzerland issued in German and French. The sample included 3347 people with type 1 and 2 diabetes, aged 16–96, living in diverse living conditions in the German- and French-speaking areas of Switzerland. Respondents reported experiences of discrimination in various contexts and stereotyping based on the belief that diabetics have a low work performance; are inefficient in the workplace; inferior; weak-willed in their ability to manage health-related issues; take advantage of their condition and are viewed as pitiful or sick people. Respondents who reported higher levels of perceived stigma reported higher levels of psychological distress (β = .37), more pronounced depressive symptoms (β=.33), and less social support (β = -.22). Higher psychological distress (β = -.29) and more pronounced depressive symptoms (β = -.28), in turn, predicted lower quality of life. These research findings challenge the prevailing understanding of social work services for people living with diabetes in Switzerland and beyond. They call for a less individualistic approach, the consideration of the social context service users are placed in their everyday life, and addressing stigma. So, social work could partner with people living with diabetes in order to fight against discrimination and stereotypes. This could include identifying and designing educational and public awareness strategies. In direct social work with people living with diabetes, this could include broaching experiences of stigma and modes of coping with. This study was carried out in collaboration with the Swiss Diabetes Association. The association accepted the challenging conclusions from this study. It connected to the results and is currently discussing the priorities and courses of action to be taken.

Keywords: diabetes, discrimination, quality of life, services, stigma

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Authors: Ahmed Kayad Abdourazak, Abderafi Souad, Zejli Driss, Idriss Abdoulkader Ibrahim

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In this paper Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is used to predict the solar irradiation in Djibouti for the first Time that is useful to the integration of Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) and sites selections for new or future solar plants as part of solar energy development. An ANN algorithm was developed to establish a forward/reverse correspondence between the latitude, longitude, altitude and monthly solar irradiation. For this purpose the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) data of eight Djibouti sites were used as training and testing in a standard three layers network with the back propagation algorithm of Lavenber-Marquardt. Results have shown a very good agreement for the solar irradiation prediction in Djibouti and proves that the proposed approach can be well used as an efficient tool for prediction of solar irradiation by providing so helpful information concerning sites selection, design and planning of solar plants.

Keywords: artificial neural network, solar irradiation, concentrated solar power, Lavenberg-Marquardt

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Authors: Kazuyasu Yoshino, Keita Yamaguchi, Toshihiko Nishimura, Masashi Kawasaki

Abstract:

Shared Space, the planning and design concept that allows pedestrians and vehicles to coexist in a street space, has been advocated and developed according to the traffic conditions in each country in Europe. Especially in German/French-speaking countries, the "Meeting Zone," which is a traffic rule combining speed regulation (20km/h) and pedestrian priority, is often applied when designing shared spaces at intersections, squares, and streets in the city center. In this study, the process of establishment and development of the Meeting Zone in Switzerland, France, and Austria was chronologically organized based on the descriptions in the major discourse and guidelines in each country. Then, the characteristics of the spatial design were extracted by analyzing representative examples of Meeting Zone applications. Finally, the relationships between the different approaches to designing of Meeting Zone and traffic regulations in different countries were discussed.

Keywords: shared space, traffic calming, meeting zone, street design

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Authors: Weihsuan Lin

Abstract:

The Swiss Bethlehem Mission Society (BMS) in Taiwan has influenced and made an important contribution to religion and social work in Taidong. This German-speaking Catholic missionary society is located in Taidong, which is the political and economic periphery of Taiwan but is the cultural center of the Chinese and many different Austronesian ethnic groups, including Amis, Paiwan, Puyuma, Yami, Bunun, and Rukai. Through document analysis and fieldwork, this research aims to explore the result of the confrontation, exchange, and innovation between the BMS and other ethnic groups. Further, based upon Michael Foucault’s discussion of two modalities of constructing individuals, namely ‘discipline’ and ‘care of the self,’ this research will analyze the ‘discipline’ and ‘care of the self’ mechanisms of and between BMS Fathers, Brothers, and Church followers at the scale of individuals. At the scale of groups, the ‘autonomy’ and ‘been governed’ of the BMS in relationship to the Catholic Church in Taiwan and the world will also be examined.

Keywords: Bethlehem Mission Society, Religion and Geography, Spirituality, Foucault

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Authors: Christa Fricke, Sibylle Meyer, Gert G. Wagner

Abstract:

Our research focuses on the question of whether assistive and social robotics could pose a promising strategy to support the independent living of elderly people and potentially relieve relatives of any anxieties. To answer the question of how elderly people perceive the potential of robotics, we analysed the data from the Berlin Aging Study BASE-II (https://www.base2.mpg.de/de) (N=1463) and data from the German SYMPARTNER study (http://www.sympartner.de) (N=120) and compared those to a control group made up of people younger than 30 years (BASE II: N=241; SYMPARTNER: N=30). BASE-II is a cohort study of people living in Berlin, Germany. The sample covers more than 2200 cases; a questionnaire on the use and acceptance of assistive and social robots was carried out with a sub-sample of 1463 respondents in 2015. The SYMPARTNER study was done by SIBIS institute of Social Research, Berlin and included a total of 120 persons between the ages of 60 and 87 in Berlin and the rural German federal state of Thuringia. Both studies included a control group of persons between the ages of 20 and 35 (BASE II: N=241; SYMPARTNER: N=30). Additional data, representative for the whole population in Germany, will be surveyed in fall 2017 (Survey “Technikradar” [technology radar] by the National Academy of Science and Engineering). Since this survey is including some identical questions as BASE-II/SYMPARTNER, comparative results can be presented at 20th International Conference on Social Robotics in New York 2018. The complexity of the data gathered in BASE-II and SYMPARTNER, encompassing detailed socio-economic background characteristics as well as personality traits such as the personal attitude to risk taking, locus of control and Big Five, proves highly valuable and beneficial. Results show that participants’ expressions of resentment against robots are comparatively low. Participants’ personality traits play a role, however the effect sizes are small. Only 15 percent of participants received domestic robots with great scepticism. Participants aged older than 70 years expressed greatest rejection of the robotic assistant. The effect sizes however account for only a few percentage points. Overall, participants were surprisingly open to the robot and its usefulness. The analysis also shows that men’s acceptance of the robot is generally greater than that of women (with odds ratios of about 0.6 to 0.7). This applies to both assistive robots in the private household and in care environments. Men expect greater benefits of the robot than women. Women tend to be more sceptical of their technical feasibility than men. Interview results prove our hypothesis that men, in particular of the age group 60+, are more accustomed to delegate household chores to women. A delegation to machines instead of humans, therefore, seems palpable. The answer to the title question of this planned presentation is: social and assistive robots at home robots are not only accepted by men – but by fewer women than men.

Keywords: acceptance, care, gender, household

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Authors: K. V. Nabichu

Abstract:

The rationale of this research was to review how Germans perceive Uganda as a tourism destination, after German visitors arrivals to Uganda remain few compared to other destinations like Kenya. It was assumed that Uganda suffers a negative image in Germany due to negative media influence. The study findings indicate that Uganda is not a popular travel destination in Germany, there is generally lack of travel information about Uganda. Despite the respondents’ hearing about Uganda’s and her beautiful attractions, good climate and friendly people, they also think Uganda is unsafe for travel. Findings further show that Uganda is a potential travel destination for Germans due to her beautifull landscape, rich culture, wild life, primates and the Nile, however political unrest, insecurity, the fear for diseases and poor hygiene hinder Germans from travelling to Uganda. The media, internet as well as friends and relatives were the major primary sources of information on Uganda while others knew about Uganda through their school lessons and sports. Uganda is not well advertised and promoted in Germany.

Keywords: destination Uganda and Germany, image, perception, negative media influence

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