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Although the comparative study of environmental politics and policy dates back well into the 1970s, it has never featured prominently within comparative politics generally. Against a background of mounting environmental pressures, most notably climate change, this low profile seems puzzling. As Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) point out, building bridges between comparative environmental politics and the broader field of comparative politics is an important task for current research. This dissertation seeks to contribute to this linkage by revisiting the issue of cross-national environmental performance, focusing on climate performance. By addressing both the outcome and the output dimension of national climate performance, this thesis engages with two central issues of comparative politics: (i) the effect of political institutions on performance and (ii) policy change. Thus, it also contributes to broader research into the capacity of political systems to deal with complex longterm political problems. This dissertation attempts to make six major conceptual, methodological, and analytical contributions: 1) the thesis presents a conceptualization of general environmental performance based on the “planetary boundaries” approach; 2) it provides a theoretical framework for policy output and develops a measurement for its assessment; 3) it argues that actor constellations of specific environmental problems need to be considered to strengthen theoretical arguments about the effects of political institutions; 4) it argues that entire policy portfolios rather than (a set of) individual policy instruments need to be considered for assessing policy change; 5) it analyses the effect of political institutions on climate performance; 6) and it analyses policy change in climate mitigation and the role of policy innovations in altering policy portfolios.

The critical exponents for T -> 0 of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass model with Gaussian couplings are determined with the help of exact ground states for system sizes up to L=50 and by a Monte Carlo study of a pseudo-ferromagnetic order parameter. We obtain: for the stiffness exponent y(= heta)=-0.281 ±0.002 , for the magnetic exponent delta=1.48 ±0.01 and for the chaos exponent zeta=1.05 ±0.05 . From Monte Carlo simulations we get the thermal exponent u=3.6 ±0.2 . The scaling prediction y=-1/u is fulfilled within the error bars, whereas there is a disagreement with the relation y=1-delta .

Follow-Up-Befragung zur Studie „Homeoffice- und Präsenzkultur im Bereich IT und technische Dienstleistungen in Zeiten der Covid-19-Pandemie“: Durch die Ausbreitung des Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 und die damit verbundenen Schutzmaßnahmen sind für viele Beschäftigte aus dem Bereich IT und technische Dienstleistungen eine Reihe von Veränderungen im Arbeits- und Privatleben entstanden. Ein Jahr später ist die Homeoffice-Situation für einige Beschäftigte – nicht zuletzt auch durch die Corona-Arbeitsschutzverordnung weiter verstärkt – zum Alltag geworden. Es stellt sich die Frage, wie die Beschäftigten mit ihrer neuen Arbeitssituation umgehen. Die vorliegende Studie zielt darauf ab, die Veränderung der Homeoffice- und Präsenzkultur in Zeiten der Covid-19-Pandemie im Bereich IT und technische Dienstleistungen zu untersuchen. Zudem sollen die wahrgenommenen Veränderungen nach einem Jahr Homeoffice ermittelt sowie der Zusammenhang zwischen Homeoffice- und Präsenzkultur und der mentalen Gesundheit von Beschäftigten untersucht werden. Aufbauend auf einer Online-Umfrage aus April 2020 mit 1.933 Beschäftigten aus dem Bereich IT und technische Dienstleistungen führte das IMVR eine Folgebefragung im Mai 2021 durch. Zum zweiten Befragungszeitpunkt haben 236 Beschäftigte erneut an der Befragung teilgenommen. Die Ergebnisse der zweiten Befragung zeigen, dass die Präsenzkultur nach einem Jahr Homeoffice signifikant abgenommen hat und die Homeofficekultur signifikant gestiegen ist. Zudem werden Empfehlungen für eine gesundheitsförderliche Arbeitsgestaltung im Homeoffice häufiger eingehalten. Wahrgenommene Veränderungen der Arbeitssituation nach einem Jahr im Homeoffice beziehen sich vor allem auf den Kontakt und die Zusammenarbeit, die Akzeptanz von Homeoffice sowie den erhöhten Arbeitsaufwand und Flexibilität im Homeoffice. Des Weiteren zeigt sich ein Zusammenhang zwischen der Homeoffice- bzw. Präsenzkultur und der Gesundheit von Beschäftigten.

Starting from the observation that the existing models of digital scholarly editions can be expressed in many technologies, this paper goes beyond the simple opposition of ‘XML’ and ‘graph’, It studies the implicit context of the technologies as applied to digital scholarly editions: embedded mark-up in XML/TEI trees, graph representa- tions in RDF, and stand-off annotation as realised in annotation tools widely used for information extraction. It describes the affordances of the encoding methods offered. It takes as a test case the “assertive edition” (Vogeler 2019), in which the text is considered in a double role: as palaeographical and linguistic phenomenon, and as a representation of information. It comes to the conclusion that the affordances of XML help to detect sequential and hierarchical properties of a text, while those of RDF best cover the representation of knowledge as semantic networks of statements. The relationship between them can be expressed by the metaphor of ‘layers’, for which stand-off annotation technologies seem to be best fitted. However, there is no standardised technical formalism to create stand-off annotations beyond graphical tools sharing interface elements. The contribution concludes with the call for the acceptance of the advantages of each technology, and for efforts to be made to discuss the best way to combine these technologies.

The IS literature on mobile platform ecosystems has so far discussed platform dynamics from a software perspective. But recent regulatory and competitive developments have impacted the hardware layer of mobile platform ecosystems: an increasing number of third-party repair providers have started to modify physical components outside the platform owners’ direct sphere of influence while platform owners attempt to maintain control over the ecosystem. We report on our ongoing case research to develop an account of what we call hardware-layer dynamics in mobile platform ecosystems. Based on an inductive case study of third-party repair complementors operating in Apple’s iPhone aftermarket, we explain how these dynamics are shaped through interactions between complementors and platform owners over time. We expect our contributions to extend our field’s attention to the entire modular architecture of digital platforms—and the ecosystem they support.

Mathematical skills that we acquire during formal education mostly entail exact numerical processing. Besides this specifically human faculty, an additional system exists to represent and manipulate quantities in an approximate manner. We share this innate approximate number system (ANS) with other nonhuman animals and are able to use it to process large numerosities long before we can master the formal algorithms taught in school. Dehaene´s (1992) Triple Code Model (TCM) states that also after the onset of formal education, approximate processing is carried out in this analogue magnitude code no matter if the original problem was presented nonsymbolically or symbolically. Despite the wide acceptance of the model, most research only uses nonsymbolic tasks to assess ANS acuity. Due to this silent assumption that genuine approximation can only be tested with nonsymbolic presentations, up to now important implications in research domains of high practical relevance remain unclear, and existing potential is not fully exploited. For instance, it has been found that nonsymbolic approximation can predict math achievement one year later (Gilmore, McCarthy, & Spelke, 2010), that it is robust against the detrimental influence of learners´ socioeconomic status (SES), and that it is suited to foster performance in exact arithmetic in the short-term (Hyde, Khanum, & Spelke, 2014). We provided evidence that symbolic approximation might be equally and in some cases even better suited to generate predictions and foster more formal math skills independently of SES. In two longitudinal studies, we realized exact and approximate arithmetic tasks in both a nonsymbolic and a symbolic format. With first graders, we demonstrated that performance in symbolic approximation at the beginning of term was the only measure consistently not varying according to children´s SES, and among both approximate tasks it was the better predictor for math achievement at the end of first grade. In part, the strong connection seems to come about from mediation through ordinal skills. In two further experiments, we tested the suitability of both approximation formats to induce an arithmetic principle in elementary school children. We found that symbolic approximation was equally effective in making children exploit the additive law of commutativity in a subsequent formal task as a direct instruction. Nonsymbolic approximation on the other hand had no beneficial effect. The positive influence of the symbolic approximate induction was strongest in children just starting school and decreased with age. However, even third graders still profited from the induction. The results show that also symbolic problems can be processed as genuine approximation, but that beyond that they have their own specific value with regard to didactic-educational concerns. Our findings furthermore demonstrate that the two often con-founded factors ꞌformatꞌ and ꞌdemanded accuracyꞌ cannot be disentangled easily in first graders numerical understanding, but that children´s SES also influences existing interrelations between the different abilities tested here.

Die etwa 30 bekanntesten parametrischen und ca. 20 nichtparametrischen Verfahren für multiple Mittelwertvergleiche sowie ca. 25 Methoden für alpha-Korrekturen bei Paarvergleichen werden vorgestellt. Dabei stehen solche im Vordergrund, die in R und/oder in SPSS ohne großen Aufwand anwendbar sind. Es werden die Voraussetzungen der Verfahren besprochen sowie Lösungen mit R und SPSS ausführlich gezeigt.