Hasil untuk "History of Germany"

Sandra Kus, Sandra Kus, Andrea Glässel et al.

Daniel Deimel, Lucie Feldmann, Norbert Scherbaum et al.

Abstract Background Open drug scenes are characterized by public gatherings of people who use drugs (PWUD) for the purpose of drug consumption and trade, often related to poor health conditions as risk of overdose, a higher prevalence of infectious disease and social exclusion. This cross-sectional survey investigated the characteristics, substance use patterns, and support needs of PWUD within the open drug scene at Neumarkt in Cologne (ODSC) in Germany. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted between April and June 2023 among PWUD frequenting the ODSC. A structured questionnaire, comprising sociodemographic information, substance use patterns, overdose history, and psychosocial support needs was used. Results A total of 119 participants were surveyed, with a majority identifying as male (79%) and an average age of 42 years. Heroin was the most frequently consumed substance (64.7%), followed by alcohol (56.3%) and crack/cocaine (21%). People who use crack (PWUC) were younger (mean age 36.6) and more likely to be homeless (56%) than respondents who are not using crack. The most mentioned support needs included housing (69.5%), bureaucratic assistance (60.2%), and health related support (51.7%). Conclusion The ODSC presents a complex risk environment where homelessness, limited access to healthcare due to lack of health insurance, and frequent substance use exacerbate health and social challenges. Expanding harm reduction services, including housing first initiatives, and low-threshold opioid substitution treatment access for individuals without health insurance, is crucial to address these issues.

Roman Bleier, Florian Zeilinger

A key challenge for the long-term editorial project Deutsche Reichstagsakten is the lack of a cross-edition subject index, alongside the complexity of the existing specialised indices. These factors hinder the searchability of texts and their comparability with sources from other European proto-parliamentary estates assemblies. While these indices are largely consistent with contemporaneous language, they are shaped by editorial selection and primarily designed from a print-focused perspective. In this article, we test and compare three Topic Modelling methods frequently used in Digital Humanities, particularly for modern parliamentary records. These methods facilitate the automatic identification of language-based word clusters, which can be labelled with new subject terms to create updated indices and critically evaluate on editorial practices. Using the minutes from the Imperial Diet Records of 1576, we applied and compared Gensim and Mallet, both based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation, as well as the transformer-based BERTopic. All three methods produced strong results for approximately 100 topics. These include not only content- and function-related topics—traditionally prioritised in editorial work—but also topics related to the functioning and procedural aspects of the Imperial Diet. Such findings highlight and support recent research efforts into the functioning and symbolic dimensions of these historical assemblies.

Efe Bozkir, Babette Bühler, Xiaoyuan Wu et al.

Augmented reality technology will likely be prevalent with more affordable head-mounted displays. Integrating novel interaction modalities, such as eye trackers into head-mounted displays could lead to collecting vast amounts of biometric data, which may allow inference of sensitive user attributes like health status or sexual preference, posing privacy issues. While previous works broadly examined privacy concerns about augmented reality, ours is the first to extensively explore privacy concerns on behavioral data, particularly eye tracking in augmented reality. We crowdsourced four survey studies in the United States (n1 = 48, n2 = 525) and Germany (n3 = 48, n4 = 525) to understand the impact of user attributes, augmented reality devices, use cases, data practices, and country on privacy concerns. Our findings indicate that participants are generally concerned about privacy when they know what inferences can be made based on the collected data. Despite the more prominent use of smartphones in daily life than augmented reality glasses, we found no indications of differing privacy concerns depending on the device type. In addition, our participants are more comfortable when a particular use case benefits them and less comfortable when other humans can consume their data. Furthermore, participants in the United States are less concerned about their privacy than those in Germany. Based on our findings, we provide several recommendations to practitioners and policymakers for privacy-aware augmented reality.

Xurui Zhou, Gongwei Chen, Yuquan Xie et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents require effective use of historical context to perform sequential navigation tasks. While incorporating past actions and observations can improve decision making, naive use of full history leads to excessive computational overhead and distraction from irrelevant information. To address this, we introduce HiconAgent, a GUI agent trained with History Context-aware Policy Optimization (HCPO) for efficient and effective utilization of historical information. HCPO optimizes history usage in both sampling and policy updates through two complementary components: (1) Dynamic Context Sampling (DCS) presents the agent with variable length histories during sampling, enabling adaptive use of the most relevant context; (2) Anchor-guided History Compression (AHC) refines the policy update phase with a dual branch strategy where the compressed branch removes history observations while keeping history actions as information flow anchors. The compressed and uncompressed branches are coupled through a history-enhanced alignment loss to enforce consistent history usage while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on mainstream GUI navigation benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Despite being smaller, HiconAgent-3B outperforms GUI-R1-7B by +8.46 percent grounding accuracy and +11.32 percent step success rate on GUI-Odyssey, while achieving comparable results on AndroidControl and AITW with up to 2.47x computational speedup and 60 percent FLOPs reduction.

G. Aad, E. Aakvaag, B. Abbott et al.

Searches for exclusive decays of the Higgs boson into D⁎γ and of the Z boson into D0γ and Ks0γ can probe flavour-violating Higgs boson and Z boson couplings to light quarks. Searches for these decays are performed with a pp collision data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 136.3 fb−1 collected at s=13TeV between 2016–2018 with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In the D⁎γ and D0γ channels, the observed (expected) 95% confidence-level upper limits on the respective branching fractions are B(H→D⁎γ)<1.0(1.2)×10−3, B(Z→D0γ)<4.0(3.4)×10−6, while the corresponding results in the Ks0γ channel are B(Z→Ks0γ)<3.1(3.0)×10−6.

Wang Bill Zhu, Deqing Fu, Kai Sun et al.

Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible, and are not generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history -- comprising images from daily life -- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.

Judith Stute, Sabine Pelka, Matthias Kühnbach et al.

In 2022, energy prices skyrocketed across Europe, with average day-ahead spot market prices in Germany 2.43 times higher than the previous year, hinting at future trends. At the same time, electricity infrastructure is expected to be overutilized in some regions in the future due to the uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps, PV systems, and other appliances in the residential sector. Dynamic electricity pricing for households is proposed as a solution to alleviate infrastructure strain and reduce costs. The question arises as to what impact dynamic electricity prices as recently seen on the day-ahead spot market in Germany would have on the use of flexibility in households and whether it can compensate for cost increases for households. We analyze the cost-effectiveness of utilizing flexibility through a home energy management system (HEMS) and smart meters against increased self-consumption using a HEMS and static tariffs. We show that with higher electricity prices and price spreads, a higher share of households can offset initial investments in HEMS and metering operation costs by utilizing flexibility from their electric vehicles, heat pumps, and battery storage systems. While increasing self-consumption remains beneficial for households with heat pumps and PV systems, dynamic electricity tariffs are financially more advantageous for those with electric vehicles. The study also determines the maximum additional annual costs for HEMS and metering point operation that still allow cost savings for 75% of households. these costs range from 126 to 145 Euro in the self-consumption scenario depending and from 50 to 111 Euro in the dynamic electricity tariff scenario, highlighting the financial viability of flexibility utilization in response to current pricing trends.

Anna Migliorini

Andrei A. Linchenko, Bella V. Gartwig

This paper compares the processes of rediscovering identity in autobiographical memory and media discourses of Russian-Germans living in Germany and in Russia. According to R. Brubaker, the Russian-Germans are viewed as a transnational group with a specific “hybrid identity”, whose identification varies depending on the cultural project, which they are involved in. In Germany and Russia, the boundaries of this identification are the politics of memory of the host society and the dominant narratives regarding this group as repatriates (Germany) and as a diaspora with its own culture (Russia). Our analysis, which was based on the methodology of the critical discourse analysis by S. Jäger, revealed that such a dominant narrative in Germany is the “narrative of return”. In Russia, however, there are two discursive threads: the image of Russian-Germans as a repressed group and the narrative about the outstanding role of Russian-Germans in the history of Russia. The curves of autobiographical and family narratives of the three generations of Russian-Germans in Russia and Germany were analyzed and compared according to the biographical method of F. Schütze. People aged 30–50 were the most open to the influence of collective “standardized” narratives both in Germany and in Russia. Despite the fact of living in Russia, those respondents who were preparing to repatriate to Germany actively reproduced the “return narrative” and used international mnemonic frameworks to structure their autobiographical and family story. Our study showed that the influence of the discursive media environment on the autobiographical and family memory of Russian-Germans living in Germany and Russia depends on the respondent’s individual life experience (the curve of their biography), age, and some peculiarities of their family history.

Kirill Aleksandrovich Zverev

As we move away from the historical events associated with Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, attempts to rewrite the history of World War II as a whole and the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 in particular are becoming more frequent in ideological and geopolitical interests. Especially regularly ambiguous and outrightly tendentious interpretations come from Baltic historians. In this regard, the author of the article aims to consider the interpretation of the events of 1941–1945, in the works of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian researchers and the reasons for the emergence of often opposite assessments of this historical period. In the modern Baltic countries, a very peculiar perception of the events of World War II and the Great Patriotic War has developed, negatively assessing the role of the USSR in the liberation of these territories. The author concludes that the reasons for the dominance of these interpretations lie in the anti-Soviet orientation of local political elites, as well as in the dominance of this trend (for political reasons) in the local politics of memory over the past three decades since independence. In addition, it is important to emphasise the features of the historical development of the Baltic States influencing these interpretations. Thus, the perception of the events of World War II is also influenced by the historical memory of the Baltic peoples about the Civil / Liberation War of 1918–1920, in which representatives of the titular peoples found themselves on opposite sides (red and white formations). In addition, loyalty to Germany and German formations is associated with the strongest German influence in all social spheres in the previous periods of development of the Baltic countries.

Louis Arnould, Déa Haddad, Florian Baudin et al.

The retinal vascular network fractal dimension (FD) could be a promising imaging biomarker. Our objective was to evaluate its repeatability and reproducibility in healthy eyes. A cross-sectional study was undertaken with young, healthy volunteers who had no reported cardiac risk factors or ocular disease history. For each participant, three SS-OCTA images (12 × 12 mm) were acquired using the Plex Elite 9000 (Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Jena, Germany) by two ophthalmologists. Automated segmentation was obtained from both the superficial and deep capillary plexuses. FD was estimated by box counting. The intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were used as measures for repeatability and reproducibility. A total of 43 eyes of healthy volunteers were included. The mean ± standard deviation (SD) age was 30 ± 6.2 years. The results show good repeatability. The ICC was 0.722 (95% CI, 0.541–0.839) in the superficial capillary plexus and 0.828 (95% CI, 0.705–0.903) in the deep capillary plexus. For reproducibility, the ICC was 0.651 (95% CI, 0.439–0.795) and 0.363 (95% CI, 0.073–0.596) at the superficial and deep capillary plexus, respectively. In this study, the FD of the vascular network measured via SS-OCTA showed good repeatability and reproducibility in healthy participants.

Christopher Hecht, Jan Figgener, Dirk Uwe Sauer

Electric vehicles are booming and with them the required public charging stations. Knowing how charging stations are used is crucial for operators of the charging stations themselves, navigation systems, electricity grids, and many more. Given that there are now 2.5 as many vehicles per charging station compared to 2017, the system needs to allocate charging points intelligently and efficiently. This paper presents representative data on energy consumption, arrival times, occupation, and profitability of charging stations in Germany by combining usage data of 27,800 installations. Charging happens mainly during the day and on weekdays for AC charging stations while DC fast-charging stations are more popular on the weekend. Fast-chargers service approximately 3 times as many vehicles per connection point while also being substantially more profitable due to higher achieved margins. For AC chargers, up to 20 kWh of energy are charged in an average charge event while DC fast-chargers supply approximately 40 kWh.

F. Lomoc, A. P. Boette, N. Canosa et al.

We analyze the application of the history state formalism to quantum walks. The formalism allows one to describe the whole walk through a pure quantum history state, which can be derived from a timeless eigenvalue equation. It naturally leads to the notion of system-time entanglement of the walk, which can be considered as a measure of the number of orthogonal states visited in the walk. We then focus on one-dimensional discrete quantum walks, where it is shown that such entanglement is independent of the initial spin orientation for real Hadamard-type coin operators and real initial states (in the standard basis) with definite site parity. Moreover, in the case of an initially localized particle it can be identified with the entanglement of the unitary global operator that generates the whole history state, which is related to its entangling power and can be analytically evaluated. Besides, it is shown that the evolution of the spin subsystem can also be described through a spin history state with an extended clock. A connection between its average entanglement (over all initial states) and that of the operator generating this state is also derived. A quantum circuit for generating the quantum walk history state is provided as well.

Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman

With the widespread availability of high-speed networks, it becomes feasible to outsource computing to remote providers and to federate resources from many locations. Such observations motivated the development, from the mid-1990s onwards, of a range of innovative Grid technologies, applications, and infrastructures. We review the history, current status, and future prospects for Grid computing.

Lauren Greenspan

Based on string theory's framework, the gauge/gravity duality, also known as holography, has the ability to solve practical problems in low energy physical systems like metals and fluids. Holographic applications open a path for conversation and collaboration between the theory-driven, high energy culture of string theory and fields like nuclear and condensed matter physics, which in contrast place great emphasis on the empirical evidence that experiment provides. This paper takes a look at holography's history, from its roots in string theory to its present-day applications that are challenging the cultural identity of the field. I will focus on two of these applications: holographic QCD and holographic superconductivity, highlighting some of the (often incompatible) historical influences, motives, and epistemic values at play, as well as the subcultural shifts that help the collaborations work. The extent to which holographic research -- arguably string theory's most successful and prolific area -- must change its subcultural identity in order to function in fields outside of string theory reflects its changing nature and the field's uncertain future. Does string theory lose its identity in the low-energy applications that holography provides? Does holography still belong under string theory's umbrella, or is it destined to form new subcultures with each of its fields of application? I find that the answers to these questions are dynamic, interconnected, and highly dependent on string theory's relationship with its field of application. In some cases, holography can maintain the goals and values it inherited from string theory. In others, it instead adopts the goals and values of the field in which it is applied. These examples highlight a need for the STS community to expand its treatment of string theory beyond its relationship with empiricism and role as a theory of quantum gravity.

Plamen Nikolov, Leila Salarpour, David Titus

Upon arrival to a new country, many immigrants face job downgrading, a phenomenon describing workers being in jobs below the ones they have based on the skills they possess. Moreover, in the presence of downgrading immigrants receiving lower wage returns to the same skills compared to natives. The level of downgrading could depend on the immigrant type and numerous other factors. This study examines the determinants of skill downgrading among two types of immigrants - refugees and economic immigrants - in the German labor markets between 1984 and 2018. We find that refugees downgrade more than economic immigrants, and this discrepancy between the two groups persists over time. We show that language skill improvements exert a strong influence on subsequent labor market outcomes of both groups.

P. Harter, J. Hauke, F. Heitz et al.

Background Identification of families at risk for ovarian cancer offers the opportunity to consider prophylactic surgery thus reducing ovarian cancer mortality. So far, identification of potentially affected families in Germany was solely performed via family history and numbers of affected family members with breast or ovarian cancer. However, neither the prevalence of deleterious variants in BRCA1/2 in ovarian cancer in Germany nor the reliability of family history as trigger for genetic counselling has ever been evaluated. Methods Prospective counseling and germline testing of consecutive patients with primary diagnosis or with platinum-sensitive relapse of an invasive epithelial ovarian cancer. Testing included 25 candidate and established risk genes. Among these 25 genes, 16 genes (ATM, BRCA1, BRCA2, CDH1, CHEK2, MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, NBN, PMS2, PTEN, PALB2, RAD51C, RAD51D, STK11, TP53) were defined as established cancer risk genes. A positive family history was defined as at least one relative with breast cancer or ovarian cancer or breast cancer in personal history. Results In total, we analyzed 523 patients: 281 patients with primary diagnosis of ovarian cancer and 242 patients with relapsed disease. Median age at primary diagnosis was 58 years (range 16–93) and 406 patients (77.6%) had a high-grade serous ovarian cancer. In total, 27.9% of the patients showed at least one deleterious variant in all 25 investigated genes and 26.4% in the defined 16 risk genes. Deleterious variants were most prevalent in the BRCA1 (15.5%), BRCA2 (5.5%), RAD51C (2.5%) and PALB2 (1.1%) genes. The prevalence of deleterious variants did not differ significantly between patients at primary diagnosis and relapse. The prevalence of deleterious variants in BRCA1/2 (and in all 16 risk genes) in patients <60 years was 30.2% (33.2%) versus 10.6% (18.9%) in patients ≥60 years. Family history was positive in 43% of all patients. Patients with a positive family history had a prevalence of deleterious variants of 31.6% (36.0%) versus 11.4% (17.6%) and histologic subtype of high grade serous ovarian cancer versus other showed a prevalence of deleterious variants of 23.2% (29.1%) and 10.2% (14.8%), respectively. Testing only for BRCA1/2 would miss in our series more than 5% of the patients with a deleterious variant in established risk genes. Conclusions 26.4% of all patients harbor at least one deleterious variant in established risk genes. The threshold of 10% mutation rate which is accepted for reimbursement by health care providers in Germany was observed in all subgroups analyzed and neither age at primary diagnosis nor histo-type or family history sufficiently enough could identify a subgroup not eligible for genetic counselling and testing. Genetic testing should therefore be offered to every patient with invasive epithelial ovarian cancer and limiting testing to BRCA1/2 seems to be not sufficient.

Tetiana Hoshko, Vitalii Rud, Robert Hofmann

Metal items are rare at the settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillia Cultural Complex during archaeological investigations. The investigation of the five recently found items were performed by X-ray fluorescence and metallographic methods. The results of the investigation are presented in the article. The origin of the items was from such settlements as Hariachkivka 8, Trostianchyk and Andriivka, belonged to BI-BII and BII stages of the Trypillia culture. It has been established that all items are made of melted copper. Forging of billet took place in a hot state. They were repeatedly heated and got a significant deformation. The forging temperature decreased till the edge. Smith welding was traced both visually and with the help of metallographic analysis on two awls from the Andriivka and Trostianchyk settlements. The popularity of welding in the production of piercing tools is typical for metalworking of Trypillia middle stages. According to N. V. Ryndina the copper was imported in the form of metal strips, which are sometimes found at the settlements.

Jenny G. Sorce, Stefan Gottlöber, Gustavo Yepes

Galaxy clusters can play a key role in modern cosmology provided their evolution is properly understood. However, observed clusters give us only a single timeframe of their dynamical state. Therefore, finding present observable data of clusters that are well correlated to their assembly history constitutes an inestimable tool for cosmology. Former studies correlating environmental descriptors of clusters to their formation history are dominated by halo mass - environment relations. This paper presents a mass-free correlation between the present neighbor distribution of cluster-size halos and the latter mass assembly history. From the Big Multidark simulation, we extract two large samples of random halos with masses ranging from Virgo to Coma cluster sizes. Additionally, to find the main environmental culprit for the formation history of the Virgo cluster, we compare the Virgo-size halos to 200 Virgo-like halos extracted from simulations that resemble the local Universe. The number of neighbors at different cluster-centric distances permits discriminating between clusters with different mass accretion histories. Similarly to Virgo-like halos, clusters with numerous neighbors within a distance of about 2 times their virial radius experience a transition at z~1 between an active period of mass accretion, relative to the mean, and a quiet history. On the contrary, clusters with few neighbors share an opposite trend: from passive to active assembly histories. Additionally, clusters with massive companions within about 4 times their virial radius tend to have recent active merging histories. Therefore, the radial distribution of cluster neighbors provides invaluable insights into the past history of these objects.