In recent years, ultra-wideband (UWB) communications has gained tremendous popularity in both research community and industry. The large bandwidth of UWB systems raises new wireless channel effects and consequently unique advantages as well as challenges to be dealt with, compared to conventional wireless systems. One of these advantages is the ability to resolve dense multipath components and use Rake combining at the receiver in order to significantly reduce the negative effects of fading. However, implementing a Rake receiver with a sufficiently large number of fingers to make use of this advantage is an evident challenge for most UWB devices with limited signal processing capabilities. A possible approach to overcome this problem is to move computational complexity from the receiver to the more powerful transmitter, which is the main focus of the present work. In this thesis, we propose two novel pre-equalization schemes for multiple- input single-output (MISO) direct-sequence ultra-wideband (DS-UWB) systems with pre-Rake combining and symbol-by-symbol detection. The first pre-equalization filter (PEF) scheme employs one PEF per transmit antenna, whereas in the second, simplified PEF (S-PEF) scheme all transmit antennas share the same PEF. For both schemes the optimum finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) PEFs are calculated based on the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criterion. We show that in contrast to previously proposed schemes for DS-UWB, both our proposed PEF schemes efficiently exploit the channel shortening properties of the pre-Rake filter. In particular, our proposed PEF schemes operate at the symbol level. We also show that under certain conditions the S-PEF scheme achieves the same performance as the more complex PEF scheme. Finally, we demonstrate that a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) DS-UWB system with post-Rake combining and MMSE post-equalization is the dual system to the considered MISO DS–UWB system with pre-Rake combining and MMSE pre-equalization. This uplink-downlink duality can be exploited for efficient calculation of the PEFs and for complexity reduction. Our simulation results show that the proposed PEF schemes achieve significant performance gains over pre-Rake combining without equalization even if only short PEFs are employed, and this is the case even for long UWB channel impulse responses.

My thesis, titled ‘Alter-Democratization: A Critique of US Interventionism in the Middle East’, is grounded in political sociology and its principal concern for the phenomenon of power and relations thereof. As such, it explores the dialectics of Bush administration democratic interventionism in the Middle East, with particular focus on Iran. The first part of the thesis deals with the hybrid nature of such interventionism, which is mainly empirical in nature. Here, it is argued that, because of its strategic disposition, the neoconservative drive to ‘democratize’ the Middle East is in fact an attempt at domination rather than democratization. The second part of the thesis deals with the main ontological aspect of the project, namely, the Bush administration’s assumption – as reflected in its Greater Middle East Initiative of 2004 – that Western – especially liberal, market-oriented – conceptions of freedom and democracy are somehow prior, and thus superior, to local conceptions of such phenomena. Accordingly, particular attention is paid, in mainly a cross-hermeneutical comparative manner, to issues relating to social psychology, traditional Islamic political philosophy and jurisprudence, economic conditions, and civil/uncivil society as potential determinants of the future of democracy in the Middle East. Through the use of books, journal articles, and electronic documents, the thesis draws, in quite an interdisciplinary manner, upon both primary and secondary sources of relevant historical and theoretical data, in order to put forward the idea that viable transitions to democracy in the Middle East, including Iran, will have to eventually be an outcome of endogenous processes of reflexivity, education, negotiation, consensus, and socioeconomic development, and that anything other than the above (i.e. so exogenous as to undermine endogenous processes of transition to democracy) will necessarily be dominational and, thus, undemocratic in nature. Consequently, the thesis will be addressing some of the deficiencies inherent in the existing literature on US liberal internationalism, for many of the hitherto accounts of such internationalism have either viewed the topic from an Orientalist perspective, thereby ignoring local preferences and capacities altogether, or have simply overlooked many of the negative consequences of so-called democratic interventionism for the populations and endogenous processes involved.

This thesis charts British and American policy-making towards Burma between the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962. In particular, it examines the role aid played in Burma's relations with the West and China and the Soviet Union: what it was offered, by whom, when and why, and how its leaders responded. Aid from the West began immediately after independence, when the British furnished the Burmese government with military aid against the communist insurgency that broke out in March 1948. Financial assistance was offered, but refused, in 1950. American help began under Harry Truman's administration, also in 1950, and continued under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Further proposals were developed by John F. Kennedy's administration, although these plans were thwarted by the military coup in 1962. In giving aid to Burma, British and American planners shared the same basic underlying aim - keeping the government in power and maintaining its independence from the communist bloc. Both believed that the provision of aid gave them some measure of influence over the government in Rangoon - that, in other words, their aid had some degree of coercive potential, somehow independent of the intentions or interests of the recipient state. However, rather than passive and appropriately grateful recipients of external aid, and the policy prescriptions that tended to come with it, the Burmese are revealed as surprisingly active and autonomous agents, prepared to manipulate their aid relationships to suit their own ends, rather than the objectives of their superpower partners in Washington and Moscow.

The aim of the thesis has been to offer a comparative analysis of discourses within English and French travel writing in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of how the East was represented in this type of literature than that offered by Edward Said in his book Orientalism. The thesis considers the degree to which the latent racism and imperialism of western attitudes was universally expressed in this type of writing. While dates have been set for this study, the main reason for this has been to limit the vast body of archive material potentially relevant to its theoretical base. On occasion it has been necessary to step outside these dates in order to examine earlier eighteenth-century work or point out the relevance of this type of study to more recent western approaches to the East. The thesis shows a decline in the nineteenth century in popular belief in a fiction of the Orient as an imagined site of luxury and sensual indulgence, as travel writing countered this image with reports of real countries and peoples. The place of the aesthetic in French writing is considered here, as it offers a challenge to the more political perspective offered by Said. The thesis concludes by suggesting that there were other discourses in travel literature in this period which lie outside specifically racist and imperialist constructs, and therefore deepens and broadens the investigations undertaken by Said with reference to British and French travel writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This is a study about the trade union movement in colonial and early post-colonial Malaysia. This is done by examining the role and development of the country's national labour centre, the Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC), and in particular, its leadership from 1949 to 1981. The central argument of the study is that the MTUC was a reformist organisation because of state control and the dominance of "moderate" and "responsible" leadership. It is also argued that the national centre was unable to effectively represent the interests of labour because the leadership lacked a working-class ideological perspective. These arguments are developed with reference to a number of ma j or themes or issues during the period under review Such as "responsible unionism", government incorporation of the movement, politics, tripartism and industrial peace, "worker capitalism", conflicts within the movement, and communalism. An essential part of the exercise has been to reinterpret the history of the national centre during its first three decades of existence. After the first two introductory chapters, Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the formation and early development of the MTUC during the colonial era. The role of government and "moderate" labour leaders is highlighted. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the position and role of the MTUC with respect to labour disputes and politics under the post-colonial Alliance government. The following two chapters analyse the compromising ideology and divisions and split within the movement under the Barisan Nasional government. The study is an appraisal of the Malaysian trade union movement attempting to contribute to an understanding of trade unionism in an ex-colonial "Third World" setting.

(kein Abstract vorhanden) / Series: Forschungsberichte des Forschungsinstituts für Altersökonomie

This thesis analyzes the history of caste system and explains the theories of the birth of caste in Indian civilization. After defining the caste system in historical and cultural manner. examines the birth of and spreading of Dalit movement or low caste mass movement during the 19th and 20th century with the influence of British rule.

This thesis, depending on some Ottoman archival documents, examines the effects of the Tanzimat reforms on the Ottoman Armenians and Kurds and the origins of the conflicts amongst these communities in the Ottoman Empire. The reforms initiated in the Tanzimat era had such a transformative effect both on the Ottoman Armenian and Kurdish societies that social, political and economic structures of the two communities changed radically. Due to the effects of the Tanzimat reforms and of these structural changes, the relations between the Ottoman Armenian and Kurdish communities started to deteriorate and the communal conflicts emerged during the Tanzimat era. These conflicts between the Armenian and Kurdish communities continued after the Tanzimat era.

Techn. University, Diss., 2007--Darmstadt.

Zugl.: Dresden, Techn. University, Diss., 2006.