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The price of immersion: language learners as a cheap workforce in Malta’s voluntourism industry
(2021)
This contribution treats “language immersion” as a linguistic ideology and explores narratives, practices, and subjectivities pertinent to that notion in the context of language-motivated voluntourism. Voluntourism programs offer short-term sojourns abroad, which combine voluntary work with holidays while promising “immersion” as an efficient alternative to classroom language learning. In the Mediterranean island state of Malta, whose population is mostly bilingual in English and Maltese, voluntourism has become an attractive product for the booming English language travel industry. Since there is a lack of critical sociolinguistic and second language acquisition research on the language learning trajectories of voluntourists, this piece examines the promise of immersion through the example of a hostel that figures as a workplace. Drawing on ethnographic data, it investigates how learning English through immersion while working abroad is imagined and promoted, whether or not it occurs, and what gains (linguistic or otherwise) it generates and for whom. The article argues that the voluntourism industry appropriates the discourse of immersion to responsibilize English learners for their linguistic self-skilling, thereby constituting them as neoliberal subjects that can easily be exploited as a cheap workforce.
Fazit: Vom Können und Wollen
(2021)
Schon bei Giuseppe Mazzini, dem geistigen Führer der italienischen Freiheitsbewegung im 19. Jahrhundert, hieß es: „Das Geheimnis des Könnens liegt im Wollen“. Angesichts der oben angesprochenen Marginalisierung des Marketing in vielen Unternehmen, muss sich das Marketing konsequenterweise die Frage gefallen lassen: „Kann oder will das Marketing die Verantwortung für den Kunden nicht übernehmen?“
Balancing the energy production and consumption is a huge challenge for future smart grids. In this context, many demand-side management programs are being developed to achieve flexibility from different loads like space heating. As space heating models for flexibility simulations are an interdisciplinary field of work, complex civil engineering thermal models need to be combined with complex electrical engineering control simulations in different software frameworks. Traditionally used methods have shortcomings in one of those two domains as the publications that provide complex control strategies for demand response are lacking complex thermal models and vice versa. Co-simulations overcome this problem but are computationally expensive and have compatibility limitations. Thus, the aim of this work is to develop a methodology for designing space heating/cooling models, intended for positive energy district- or smart city simulations, which provide high accuracy at low computational expense. This could be achieved by synthesizing neural network object models from IDA-ICE civil engineering models in Matlab. These machine learning models showed improvements of more than 30% in different error metrics and a simulation time reduction of more than 80% compared to other methods, making them suitable for use in microgrid simulations, including flexibility analyses.
Safeguarding and type approval of automated vehicles is a key enabler for their market launch in our complex traffic environment. Scenario-based testing by means of computer simulation is becoming increasingly important to cope with the enormous complexity and effort. However, there is a huge gap when assessing the safety of the virtual vehicle while the real vehicle will drive on the road. Simulation must be accompanied by model validation to ensure its credibility since errors and uncertainties are inherent in every model. Unfortunately, this is rarely addressed in the current literature. In this paper, a modular process is presented covering both model validation and safeguarding. It is characterized by the fact that it quantifies a large number of errors and uncertainties, represents them in the form of an error model, and ultimately integrates them into the safeguarding results. It is applied to a type-approval regulation for the lane-keeping behavior of a vehicle under various scenario conditions. The paper contains a thorough validation of the methodology itself by comparing its results with actual ground truth values. For this comparison, a binary classifier and confusion matrices are used that relate the binary type-approval decisions. The classifier demonstrates that the methodology of this paper identifies a systematic error of the simulation model across several safeguarding scenarios. Finally, the paper provides recommendations for alternative configurations of the modular methodology depending on different requirements.
The increasing share of distributed energy resources gives rise to new opportunities for deploying innovative business models and coordination schemes within sustainable energy systems. Different concepts entail different implications at socioeconomic, technical and institutional level. Hence, their thorough assessment is key to understanding their actual potential as enablers of the energy transition. Considering this background, we focus on local energy markets as an increasingly discussed approach for coordinating distributed energy systems and introduce a simulative framework for enabling a multi-regional assessment of this concept. Local energy markets bear the potential for increasing the active participation of end consumers, which could increase their acceptance for energy projects in general and their returns on investment, as well as for reducing the peak load on increasingly congested electrical grids by enhancing local energy balancing. We evaluate these hypotheses for twelve representative German regions, for which we formulate assumptions regarding the energy demand as well as the shares of distributed energy resources that are consistently aligned with an overall European energy scenario envisaging a rapid growth of electric vehicles in Germany. For this purpose, we enhance an existing framework for the assessment of local energy markets in order to be able to include the flexibility of the electric mobility sector in local trade activities. The simulation results show that local energy markets have a significant impact on energy systems: First, local trading increases the economic benefits over all participants, who would otherwise only be able to use their generation for self-consumption or direct marketing in central energy markets. Second, local energy balancing increases on average by 60%over all regions. Third, infrastructural relief of the overlaying transmission grids can be accomplished by reducing the yearly peak load at the point of common coupling by 39%on average and at the most by 97%. Furthermore, we find that including electric vehicles in local market activities does not alter but rather reinforces these effects.
In the light of a new level of reciprocal visibility in the digital age, the journalist–audience relationship has fundamentally changed. Mutual expectations become visible or evolve anew. The question arises as to how these expectations and their (non-)fulfillment influence the journalist–audience relationship. Taking an interpersonal communication perspective by following expectancy violations theory, we focus on the level of interactions and propose a theoretical framework explaining how the interplay of journalists’ and audience’s mutual expectations affects their relationship. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the journalist–audience relationship in digital media environments—and to provide indications for its functioning or failure.
Nano-porous materials can be imaged spatially by focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM). This method generates a stack of SEM images that has to be segmented (or reconstructed) to serve as basis for structural characterization. To this end, we apply two state-of-the-art algorithms. We study the influence of the original image’s voxel size on estimates of morphological characteristics and effective permeabilities. Special attention is paid to analyzing anisotropies due to the FIB-SEM typical anisotropic sampling. Quantitative comparison of morphological descriptors and flow properties of reconstructed data is enabled by the use of synthetic FIB-SEM sets for which a ground truth is available. Moreover, in that case, reconstruction parameters can be chosen optimally, too.
Warum sind manche Unternehmen erfolgreich und manche Unternehmen nicht? Die Ergebnisse unzähliger Studien aus der Erfolgsfaktorenforschung stimmen über Jahrzehnte hinweg darin überein, dass erfolgreiche Unternehmen über ein ausgeprägtes marktorientiertes Selbstverständnis verfügen, den Kundennutzen in den Mittelpunkt aller Unternehmensaktivitäten stellen und ihre Marketingstrategien konsequent verfolgen und umsetzen.
Seit einigen Jahren scheint diese Gewissheit und Gesetzmäßigkeit jedoch ins Wanken geraten zu sein und so wird Marketing zunehmend weniger als Führungsphilosophie verstanden. Vertrieb ist wichtiger als Marketing, Kosten wichtiger als Marke, Profitabilität wichtiger als die Kundenbeziehung, so könnte man den Dreisatz des Bedeutungsverlustes des Marketings auf einen einfachen Nenner bringen. Marketing als Stimme des Kunden im Unternehmen, als treibende Kraft hinter innovativen Produkten, Dienstleistungen oder Geschäftsmodellen beziehungsweise Marketing, verstanden als kundenorientiertes Konzept der Unternehmensführung, steht immer mehr in der Beweispflicht und viele Unternehmen halten offensichtlich die Beiträge des Marketings zum Unternehmenserfolg für überschaubar.
»Purpose is not enough« möchte man vielen Unternehmen auf der Suche nach ihrer Identität und Persönlichkeit zurufen, denn um für Kunden, Mitarbeiter und Investoren relevant zu sein, muss die ganze normative Klaviatur der Unternehmensführung bemüht werden. Im Beitrag wird erklärt, warum Leadership gefragt ist, wieso es ohne Sinn und Vision keine Zukunft gibt, und weshalb der Umsetzungswille entscheidend ist, wenn Unternehmen die Sinnfrage gestellt wird.