Frankfurt (Main), Universiẗat, Diss., 2002.

Thesis advisor: Bonnie Jefferson / “Any one of the prisoners would have been willing to die for his country” (Chesley 68). This quote summarizes the unbreakable will of heroic American Prisoners of War (POWs). This paper explores the personal narratives of four POWs who were held captive during World War II and four who were held during the Vietnam War and seeks to determine how their discourse affects American ideologies of war. By examining these narratives through narrative criticism and Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Rebirth, this analysis shows how POWs reveal the sociopolitical environments of the countries in which they are held by structuring their experiences under a common framework. While the four narratives concerning World War II shed light on the differences in captivity between different countries in the Axis Powers, the narratives from the Vietnam War rationalize American involvement in the conflict. Even though the Vietnam War was one of the most misunderstood and unpopular events in American history, this paper shows how personal POW accounts can justify and garner support for American intervention into foreign affairs. These survival narratives reveal a depth of human strength in the face of horrible circumstances that becomes an inspiration for audiences of this discourse. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication.

<p>In his Dispatches, Michael Herr quotes the gonzo photojournalist Tim Page: "Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?[...] Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." This dissertation is in essence an exploration of Page's question, examining how popular media during the American conflict in Indochina first removed and then restored the glamour of war. For most of its history, the United States has been defined by a certain level of militarism, a glamorizing of the process of regeneration through violence reflected in this quotation, but the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a challenging of this warrior ethos; this challenge was reversed by the 1980s, when American militarism was taken to a new, paramilitary, level. In this project, I propose that this oscillation in the association of masculinity and violence was directly linked to popular media's depiction of the Vietnam war and of the soldiers who fought it. American society is haunted by Vietnam, not just because it was the first war the US lost (as the cliché would have it), but because of the ways in which popular culture presented the war to Americans: in particular, because of the ways the American public received this war through the emerging technologies of their television screens. The rapid response of television news to the conflict created an image of mundane warfare not through any intention on the part of broadcasters but because of the nature of the medium itself; over the next twenty years this image was both mystified and moderated by the more delayed media of film and literature and eventually molded into the now-familiar Vietvet killing machine.</p><p>In five chapters, I chronicle the evolution of the iconic Vietvet through the twenty years following the war. Following the methods of Raymond Williams and the Birmingham School, I trace the history and development of images from Vietnam as well as the interaction of those images with popular narratives of war, violence, masculinity and heroism in America. I start with Susan Jeffords' work in The Remasculization of America, taking her emphasis on the cultural narratives that fostered the restoration of patriarchal ideologies; I then move through Marita Sturken's discussion of the creation of cultural memory from historical artifacts in Tangled Memories. To these foundational texts, I bring an emphasis on form and technology to shift the focus from the narratives to the mechanisms of transmission themselves. In my first chapter, I show how the relatively new medium of television, and the depiction on the nightly news of Vietnam as both mundane and corrupt, called into question the image of the heroic soldier, finally replacing that image with the demon of the uncontrollable violent vet, driven insane by an unjust war. My next two chapters look at how this image was rehabilitated through its recharacterization in the less immediate channels of novels and film, a recharacterization driven by national debates over the diagnosis of PTSD and the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And in my final two chapters, I show how the image of the overly-muscled Supervet killing machine from pulps and blockbusters replaced the broken, victimized effigy.</p><p>I focus on the evolving history of veterans of the Vietnam War in particular because the strong interdependence of the history of that war and popular culture functions as a spotlight on the nature of the relation between media, history and cultural memory. Television coverage of the Vietnam War to a large extent worked not only to expose the inherent immorality of that particular conflict, but also of war more generally and of the image of the soldier hero. But in the two decades between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the standard history of the war had resolidified into one glorifying combat and violence. By looking at this changing social understanding of Vietnam, I hope to reveal the greater mechanisms by which the newly emerging media technologies of the 1960s through the 1980s drastically changed the nature of representation of warfare, violence, and masculinity: first routinizing, then rejecting, and finally enthroning the image of the explosively violent soldier yoked to the state.</p> / Dissertation

In the latest years, the public’s interest in blockchain technology has been growing since it was brought up in 2008, primarily because of its ability to create an immutable ledger, for storing information that never will or can be changed. As an expanding chain structure, the act of nodes adding blocks to the chain is called mining which is regulated by consensus mechanism. In the most widely used consensus mechanism Proof of work, this process is based on computationally heavy guessing of hashes of blocks. Today, there are several prominent ways developed of performing this guessing, thanks to the development of hardware technology, either using the regular all-rounded computer processing unit (CPU), or using the more specialized graphics processing unit (GPU), or using dedicated hardware. This thesis studied the working principles of blockchain, implemented the crucial hash function used in Proof of Work consensus mechanism and other blockchain structures with the popular programming language Java on various platforms. CPU implementation is done with Java’s built-in functions and for GPU I used OpenCL ’ s Java binding JOCL. This project gives a quantified measurement for hash rate on different devices, determines that all the GPUs tested advantage over CPUs in performance and memory consumption. Java’s built-in function is easier to use but both of the implementations are doing well in platform independent that the same code can easily be executed on different platforms. Furthermore, based on the measurements, I did in-depth exploration of the principles and proposed future work, analyzed their application values combined with future possibilities of blockchain based on implementation difficulties and performance.

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No description available.

Despite the high vulnerability of alpine environments to climate change, adaptation and mitigation within the winter sport industry have only recently received consideration. However, the focus has been mainly on the adaptation measures of the ski resort operators (supply side), not taking into consideration other actors (demand side) or attempts aiming for a sustainable form of winter tourism. Through a case study of Protect Our Winters (POW), an environmental group started by a professional snowboarder, this research aims at investigating the role of a new social movement, ski activism, in combating climate change. Interviews with active members of POW Austria and participant observations at events and meetings of this same organisationwere conducted and analysed to gain an overview on the matter. Results show that empirical knowledge of climate change consequences and the concern about the future of lifestyle sports such as skiing and snowboarding can motivate activist behaviour. Furthermore, the variety of outreach tools of an organisation like POW can help raise awareness and inspire to join the ski activist movement. Because the study deals with a new type of movement, further research is needed to explore the effects of this alternative climate mitigation attempt and to analyse more initiatives and organisations started by the demand side of the winter sport industry.

Im Mai 2010 begab sich eine Studiengruppe in das Land Niedersachsen, um nach den Spuren polnischer Migranten zu suchen, die sich im Zweiten Weltkrieg und unmittelbar danach in Nordwestdeutschland aufgehalten haben. Es handelte sich dabei um Feldforschung zur Geschichte der Polen, die infolge des Untergrundkampfes während der deutschen Okkupation sowie einer aktiven Beteiligung am Warschauer Aufstand verhaftet und in die Kriegsgefangenenlager sowie Arbeitslager verschleppt wurden. Die Frage nach ihrem Schicksal während und nach dem Krieg hat die Studenten aus Deutschland und Polen begleitet. Besichtigt wurden Originalschauplätze in Niedersachen, besonders im Emsland, darunter Kriegsgräberstätten sowie einige Orte, wo einst Kriegsgefangenenlager gestanden haben. Auch der Stadt Haren, wo sich 1945-1948 das Zentrum der Polnischen Besatzungszone befand, wurde ein Besuch abgestattet. Das Band enthält studentische Beiträge mit Vorwort von Prof. Dr. Zdzisław Krasnodębski. / In May 2010, a study group went into the Land of Lower Saxony to search for traces of Polish migrants in the Second World War, who have been imprisoned in northwest Germany. This was a field research on the history of Poles, who fought during the German occupation among other as active participants in the Warsaw Uprising. The question of their fate during and after the war accompanied the students from Germany and Poland. The original sites in Lower Saxony, particularly in Emsland were visited, including cemeteries and some places where once the POW camps have stood. We visited also the city Haren, where 1945-1948 was the center of Polish occupation zone. The volume contains student’s entries with a foreword by Prof. Dr. Zdzisław Krasnodębski.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: Electrical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology 2013 / The demand for electrical energy has kept on increasing, thus causing power systems to be more complex and bringing the challenging problems of electrical energy generation, transmission, stability, as well as storage to be examined more thoroughly. With the advent of high-speed computation and the desire to analyze increasingly complex behaviour in power systems, simulation techniques are gaining importance and prevalence. Nevertheless, while simulations of large, interconnected complex power systems are feasible, they remain time-consuming. Moreover, the models and parameters used in simulations are uncertain, due to measurement uncertainty, the need to represent a complex behaviour with low-order models, and the inherent changing nature of the power system. This research explores the use of a model reduction technique and the applications of a Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) to reduce the uncertainty in large-scale complex power system models. The main goal of the research is to develop a reduced order model and to investigate the applications of the RTDS simulator in reduction of large, interconnected power systems models. The first stage of the study is to build and simulate the full model of the power system using the DigSILENT and RTDS simulators. The second phase is to apply model reduction technique to the full model and to determine the parameters in the reduced-order model as well as how the process of reduction increases this model uncertainty. In the third phase the results of the model reduction technique are compared based on the results of the original model - IEEE standard benchmark models has been used. The RTDS was used for comparative purposes. The thesis investigations use a particular model reduction technique as Coherency based Method. Though the method ideas are applicable more generally, a concrete demonstration of its principles is instructive and necessary. Further, while this particular technique is not relevant to every system, it does apply to a broad class of systems and illustrates the salient features of the proposed methodology. The results of the thesis can be used in the development of reduced models of complex power systems, simulation in real-time during power system operation, education at universities, and research. Keywords: IEEE benchmark models, reduced models, Coherency based Method, DigSILENT, RTDS, model uncertainty, power system stability

This study is within the field of financial innovation and entrepreneurship. The thesis’s primary purpose is to investigate how and why entrepreneurs in Sweden are positioning themselves in regarding Initial Coin Offerings as a new financial vehicle based on the Swedish regulations and the underlying factors to the entrepreneur’s point of view. The literature contributes a limited knowledge of the Swedish industry concerning ICOs, and therefore this research aims to enhance awareness. Through qualitative research based on eleven interviews, we conclude there is a general lack of knowledge and risk-aversion from the absence of regulations in Sweden. Furthermore, all interviewed entrepreneurs were open-minded about an ICO with certain limitations. Considering that, on average, an enticing secondary market has existed for the tokens issued by ICOs, and a remarkable amount of money has been left on the table by project promoters, investors seeking for potential profit have hoarded the cryptocurrency space, creating a situation similar to the dot-com bubble. Thus, we also discuss the benefits, drawbacks, and the possible fate regarding ICOs, a new financing method that should not be overlooked.