,,Ehrende Auszeichnung“ oder ,,Aufforderung zur Leistung eines Geldbeitrages“?

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many prominent German and Austrian scientists declined the election as a member of the Kaiserliche Leopoldinisch-Carolinische Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher (in short: Leopoldina) because they were not willing to pay the entrance and membership fees of about one fifth of the monthly salary of a full professor. Many of theses candidates simply did not answer to the president’s notification of being elected. Some of them came up with ,,various reasons not to be discussed”, or referred to their individual financial situation.The physicist Heinrich Hertz, who had become famous by the discovery of electromagnetic waves in the late 1880ies, was the only elected candidate who protested bluntly against what he considered as an unworthy procedure. Although it would not have been a much of a burden for him to afford the requested entrance and membership fees, he refused to adhere to an association whose statues combined the award of an academic distinction with the obligation of financial support. In two letters addressed to Leopoldina President Carl Hermann Knoblauch,Hertz gave his reasons for declining his election to the academy. In the present article, Hertz’s letters to Knoblauch are fully published for the first time.      

Electrostatic destabilization of water-in-crude oil emulsions: Application to a real case and evaluation of the Aibel VIEC technology

In the current study, the Aibel Vessel Internal Electrostatic Coalescer (VIEC) technology was tested for a real case scenario encountered in the production train of a UK oil field. Depressurized samples were collected both upstream and downstream of the first stage separator. The separation performance was discussed with respect to water cut and droplet size distribution of the emulsions, and the effect of chemical treatment. Issues with respect to representative sampling and testing have been discussed. The application of an external AC electrical field has been shown to significantly enhance the separation of the aqueous phase from tight emulsions, both when it was used alone and in combination with a commercial demulsifier. By using the VIEC technology, the time for separation could be reduced from 8 min to 2 min and the overall BS&W in the emulsions was improved from 45% or 60% to a residual water content of 5-20%. Destabilization of a 45% water-in-oil emulsion by electrical and chemical treatment (20/40 ppm) produced oil in the 2-7% BS&W range whereas the corresponding tests without applying an electrostatic field led to a BS&W greater than 25%. The achieved results strongly suggest that the VIEC technology can resolve the stable emulsion bands encountered in the Schiehallion train and add flexibility or increased production rate to the process. The results also suggest the importance of further studies on the destabilization performances achieved by electrostatic means.     

Conforming spectral methods for Poisson problems in cuboidal domains

A Chebyshev collocation strategy is introduced for the subdivision of cuboids into cuboidal subdomains (elements). These elements are conforming, which means that the approximation to the solution isC ⁰ continuous at all points across their interfaces.     

Iterative multi-party agreement negotiation for establishing collaborations

Inter-domain collaborations suffer not only from technological obstacles that hinder interoperability, but also from diverting business objectives of the involved domains. Today, hand-crafted contracts define the terms and conditions for service interactions. Electronic negotiation can serve as the enabler of dynamic interdomain collaborations by providing a large degree of freedom for the automation of agreement formation and electronic contracting. Negotiation by electronic means has been an area of intensive research for many years now. However, most effort was put on the determination of prices and neglected that real-world agreements also consist of complex dependencies of interdependent obligations. In this paper we present agreement negotiation as a tool to establish ad hoc services collaborations. Our novel protocol allows for the discovery of complex agreement options and for the formation of multi-party agreements. The protocol works through an iterative exchange of requirements and offers. A major benefit over existing bilateral negotiation protocols is that our protocol is capable of discovering potential collaborations between different parties. It will leave each negotiating party with a complete agreement document after a successful negotiation. This comprehensive agreement document defines the interdependent obligations between all parties and is well suited for E-Contracting.     

Benchmarking performance of machine and deep learning-based methodologies for Urdu text document classification

Neural Computing and Applications - In order to provide benchmark performance for Urdu text document classification, the contribution of this paper is manifold. First, it provides a publicly...     

A code tagging approach to software product line development

Software product line engineering seeks to systematise reuse when developing families of similar software systems so as to minimise development time, cost and defects. To realise variability at the code level, product line methods classically advocate usage of inheritance, components, frameworks, aspects or generative techniques. However, these might require unaffordable paradigm shifts for developers if the software was not thought at the outset as a product line. Furthermore, these techniques can be conflicting with a company’s coding practices or external regulations. These concerns were the motivation for the industry–university collaboration described in this paper in which we developed a minimally intrusive coding technique based on tags. The approach was complemented with traceability from code to feature diagrams which were exploited for automated configuration. It is supported by a toolchain and is now in use in the partner company for the development of flight-grade satellite communication software libraries.     

Double necking in polymer tensile deformation

After initial necking of tensile polymer samples the deformation front moves along the gauge length at a stress which is smaller than the yield stress. The still undeformed parts of the sample are therefore subjected to conditions which favour deformation by a creep mechanism. If the extension rate is right, secondary necking becomes possible. Boundary conditions are discussed.