Bøger af Michael Kipp

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Topic: History of Inernational Relations, grade: 1,3, University of Constance, course: Proseminar Literatur, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine the Franco-German relationshipputting a strong focus on the two different railroad systems. The first twochapters will analyze Germany¿s and France¿s railroad systems from theirearly starts until the beginning of the First World War in a compressed way.In the following step, the fourth chapter, both systems will be compared andcontrasted to each other. It¿s intended to show similarities and differences. Arailway network can in general be regarded as a mirror of its nationaleconomy. A sustainable growth in a country¿s economy can hardly fail tobenefit its railroads. In the 19th century Germany¿s railroads benefitted from aboosting economy whereas the French economy did not take into the samedirection. This had remarkable effects on the commerce via rail and theFrench railroad network in total.1This study will not compare the years after 1914 when the railways whereprimarily used to lead to the front. Each country¿s economy and its innerpolitical movements had comparatively minor effects in contrast to themilitary strategies and decisions.A major challenge will be undoubtedly to fit all the necessary complexity intoa single format. Therefore all comparisons shall be divided into three differentaspects. At first the administrations of France and Germany shall be putopposite to each other starting with the railroads early years until thebeginning of the 20th century. Additionally the two countries¿ economies andtheir effects on the railroad construction will be analyzed. At last the militarystrategies will be examined, for example during the Franco-Prussian War andthe remaining pre-war times.In the 5th chapter current railroad issues of the two countries will be regarded.Mutual interests, alliances, but also rivalries and conflicts are a constant partin the history of two railroad networks, even to this day. They both sharemixed railroad systems combining private, public and economic interests.The ultimate 6th chapter will summarize the obtained results.

In an effort to extend traditional human-computer interfaces research has introduced embodied agents to utilize the modalities of everyday human-human communication, like facial expression, gestures and body postures. However, giving computer agents a human-like body introduces new challenges. Since human users are very sensitive and critical concerning bodily behavior the agents must act naturally and individually in order to be believable. This dissertation focuses on conversational gestures. It shows how to generate conversational gestures for an animated embodied agent based on annotated text input. The central idea is to imitate the gestural behavior of a human individual. Using TV show recordings as empirical data, gestural key parameters are extracted for the generation of natural and individual gestures. The gesture generation task is solved in three stages: observation, modeling and generation. For each stage, a software module was developed. For observation, the video annotation research tool ANVIL was created. It allows the efficient transcription of gesture, speech and other modalities on multiple layers. ANVIL is application-independent by allowing users to define their own annotation schemes, it provides various import/export facilities and it is extensible via its plug-in interface. Therefore, the tool is suitable for a wide variety of research fields. For this work, selected clips of the TV talk show ``Das Literarische Quartett'' were transcribed and analyzed, arriving at a total of 1,056 gestures. For the modeling stage, the NOVALIS module was created to compute individual gesture profiles from these transcriptions with statistical methods. A gesture profile models the aspects handedness, timing and function of gestures for a single human individual using estimated conditional probabilities. The profiles are based on a shared lexicon of 68 gestures, assembled from the data. Finally, for generation, the NOVA generator was devised to create gestures based on gesture profiles in an overgenerate-and-filter approach. Annotated text input is processed in a graph-based representation in multiple stages where semantic data is added, the location of potential gestures is determined by heuristic rules, and gestures are added and filtered based on a gesture profile. NOVA outputs a linear, player-independent action script in XML.