This contribution analyses two complex examples of the generic extension of lyric poetry in recent British literature. Tony Harrison’s film poem “The Shadow of Hiroshima” (1995) expands the lyric text into the visual dimension; Glyn Maxwell’s collection “The Sugar Mile” (2005) arranges a large number of individual lyric poems into a dramatic scenario. In both cases the generic transition is coupled with a further generic extension – the elaboration of a distinctly narrative sequentiality. In two important aspects the generic extension of these examples affects the rendering of a particular experience, namely the perception of and reaction to massive violence and destruction. One aspect concerns the organization of speech situation and perspective, especially the relation between a superordinate authorial voice and possible subordinate voices, the other aspect pertains to the status of the represented experience in the ambiguity between factuality and fictionality, characteristic of the stance of the lyric utterance in various periods throughout the history of poetry. In both respects the generic expansion in Harrison’s “The Shadow of Hiroshima” and in Maxwell‘s “The Sugar Mile” can be shown to utilize the representational potentials of lyric poetry in distinctly alternative directions.

This contribution examines the question of how contemporary lyric poetry expands upon established generic concepts by considering the work of Monika Rinck, one of the most striking voices among a generation of exceedingly talented poets who made their debut in the 2000s. In her poetry, we find numerous examples of how the expectations of lyric are deliberately undermined: among them, formal features reminiscent of prose, such as her tendency to use extremely long lines and prose-typical abbreviations, as well as her explicit interest in the discursive exploration of ‘concepts.’ As her essays suggest, this interest manifests itself most readily in Rinck’s efforts to avoid the totalizing economization of society (as well as art and language) and has, as a result, motivated the development of her own style within experimental language poetry. However, while Rinck has played a leading role in expanding the contemporary concept of poetry, the poetic principles to which she refers in her theoretical writings and poems are by no means new. In this article, her poem „Augenfühlerfisch“ (“eye-tentacle fish”) serves not only to illustrate her tendency to expand poetry into discursive prose but demonstrates how it is rooted in a long-standing philosophical tradition. The terminology used in the poem can be traced back to early modern epistemology and particularly to the foundation of scientific aesthetics by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In referring to Baumgarten’s definition of poetry as “fully sensuous speech” [„vollkommen sinnliche Rede“] (as well as the specific deployment of this definition by Johann Adolf Schlegel), it becomes clear that Rinck reactivates an epistemological potential in lyric that had been hidden by the paradigm of Erlebnislyrik [experiential lyric]. Moreover, Rinck is able to relax the Erlebnislyrik’s pretense to sincerity in part thanks to the same prose features, such as the multiplication of voices, already mentioned above.

This article asks what “world lyric in transition” could mean to literary scholarship by clarifying the terms “lyric,” “world lyric,” and “transition.”

More than any other literary form, contemporary poetry is in transition: intermingling with narrative and dramatic genres, combining prose and verse, and even incorporating other media, such as visual art, music, film and digital technology, shifting the borders between public and private spheres, aesthetic and discursive approaches, and producer and recipient. On the basis of case studies, this issue addresses the challenges of poetry in transition and stimulates new approaches in lyric theory and methodology.

How do Germanophone contemporary writers conceive of their poetry in relation to their proper lives and experiences? Comparing two cycles of poems from the beginning of the years 2000 dealing with invasive medical treatments their empirical authors supposedly have undergone themselves – Ulrike Draesner’s „bläuliche sphinx (metal)“ on a missed abortion and Thomas Kling’s „Gesang von der Bronchoskopie“ on a biopsy of the lungs –, this paper explores how poetic language is used to shape and to offer experiences that are staged as escaping entire translation into linguistic propositions, thus claiming a kind of ‘complementary knowledge’ that is conceived as exclusively conveyed, or rather generated, by poetry.

Can we learn something from poetry? Can poems convey to their readers insight, knowledge, orientation, understanding or even wisdom? The paper assumes that general answers to these questions are possible but often lacking in substance. Instead, it is worthwhile to consider (a) different types of cognitive achievements and (b) sub-genres of poetry to which specific cognitive achievements have been attributed in certain aesthetic traditions as well as in literary criticism. For this purpose, the paper introduces a modern descriptive vocabulary for various types of cognitive significance and advocates an orientation to the concept of “knowledge” instead of more vague terms like “insight” or “understanding”. In a second step, the paper deals with three sub-genres of lyric poetry, whose cognitive value has repeatedly been claimed in aesthetic traditions as well as in literary studies: “didactic poetry”, “philosophical poetry” (Germ. „Gedankenlyrik“) and “poetry of moods”. By means of concrete examples, the paper shows how each of the three sub-genres privileges a certain type of cognitive significance or a certain “mechanism” of knowledge communication. In a third step, the paper points out which basic features of poetry, such as fictionality, argumentativeness, and literariness, are essential and which are irrelevant to the different types of cognitive significance. Finally, the paper discusses (a) whether the three sub-genres of lyric poetry can be defined without reference to their cognitive functions and (b) whether it would be more appropriate to postulate corresponding practices of reading lyric poetry that are linked but not restricted to these sub-genres of lyric poetry and therefore can basically be applied to every poem.

Evaluation in lyrical poetry is mostly uncharted territory, although subgenres such as panegyric or elegy suggest that it has a rich tradition. This contribution proposes a definition of evaluation in lyrical poetry and explores possible forms and functions of such evaluations in selected examples. The analyses suggest that contemporary poetry, although it may be full of evaluative expressions, provides few clues to the actual object of evaluation or the axiology of evaluation, which makes evaluation in poetry appear vague, incomplete or enigmatic. Despite this tendency towards vagueness, evaluation in poetry may help to convey knowledge to its recipients. Among others, poems by Erika Burkart, Daniela Danz and Wulf Kirsten will demonstrate that evaluation may serve as an enhancement of represented experiences, in particular by tapping into a phenomenological knowledge of ‘what-it-feels-like’ to be in such and such a situation.

This article examines the features of cognition gained through poetic creativity. First, three aspects of the theoretical considerations of Russian poet Olʼga Sedakova are considered: the attributes of the poetic state, the subject of poetical creation and of poetical reception, and the relationship of poetical creation and mystical experience. Second, parallels to her literary work are demonstrated in an overview, but also discussed in a concrete analysis of one of her poems («Vzgljad kota»). It is shown that Sedakova is entangled in contradictions in her theoretical work because she reproduces the openness and ambiguity of poetic writing in her theoretical texts. Finally, it is demonstrated that the poetic state can be characterized on the basis of her theoretical and poetical work as non-propositionally, founded in a pre-conscious mental structure, and can be qualified with Leibniz’ concept of the cognitio clara et confusa.

The ability of poetry – on the basis of its generic capability to bring together playfulness and awareness, an anticipated future (Ahnung) and the present – has had consequences for the history of German poetry insofar as poetry could function as a seismograph of tectonic shifts in times of societal crisis. Such was the case in the 1980s, when the East German state entered a phase of agony and there was ever more apparent disquiet in society. Multiple moments of consolidation shaped the poetry of the GDR which ought to be investigated for its epistemological potential: first, the return of political “poems for the times” (Zeitgedichte) in satirical diagnoses, second, poetic anticipation in accumulated collections of surreal visual constructs in poetry and the emphasis of grotesque effects, third, the exorbitant adventure to bring to life a space of thought and language beyond authoritarian surveillance – that is, the ambition to free the diffuse, the Proteus-esque, the marginalized, and the secretive from ossified discourse structures. A fourth tendency further resides in the historical-philosophically grounded self-determination of position and reassurance (Standortbestimmung und Vergewisserung) in poetry. Repeatedly these are bound to decided rejections of every kind of teleological progress, at times with apocalyptic scenarios. Premonition and anticipated knowledge intertwine when, for example, Volker Braun foresees the fall of the Berlin Wall in a poem written in 1988.

The article considers the question whether poets lie against the background of the possible difference between poetical and discursive knowledge. Starting from Plato’s thesis, namely that poets lie, the article refers to Rorty, who, in contrast to Plato and with the example of Nabokov, recognizes in poetry a special kind of knowledge. It is opposed to discursive knowledge, which is closely related to prose. In the second part Parmenides’ didactic poem “On Nature” is seen as an example of proposing discursive truth in poetic words. Heidegger read Parmenides’ poem as a case for the evidence of truth in non-ambiguous poetical words (cf. the example “a-letheia” – un-concealedness, truth). Popper, however, interpreted the same text very differently, namely as a critical reference to the principal ambiguity of the word in human language and as the first known instance of the presentation of the deductive method. In this context the works of Nietzsche and Solov’ev are seen as opposed to each other, as Nietzsche in “Zarathustra” identified philosophical and poetical knowledge, whereas Solov’ev in his main work kept them separate from each other. The last part of the article studies the relation of poetical and discursive knowledge in poems of Gennadij Ajgi with their closeness to the dream, of Vera Stepanova with the intriguing opening to the co-presence of the Poetical I and the Other in one and the same word and of Durs Grünbein, who exposes the ambiguity of poetical language as a means to show that even untruth can open a way to come to truth. Then the lie of poetical words can be their way to say the truth.

This text examines various positions and opinions on the question of the relationship between lyric and knowledge. In this respect, we can, on the one hand, determine traditional positions which contend that poetry may be understood as a tool of thought or at least offer access to knowledge. On the other hand, there are positions that strongly advocate the view that knowledge depends on methodically secured insight (cognition) that cannot be realized in poetry. This article adopts Gabriel’s (2013) mediating position, which assumes that there are other forms of non-propositional knowledge besides propositional knowledge, such as ‘knowing-what-it-is-like’ and others. Following the definition of lyric by Zymner (2009), the focus is then set on the issue of how lyric may convey nonpropositional knowledge. An analysis of a poem by Herta Müller will provide an example for an imparting of lyrical knowledge by showing (‚Aufweisen‘).

From the point of view of a philosophy of literature the position of lyric poetry is specific. While epistemic approaches focus on fiction and its forms of cognition, lyric poetry is often reduced to conveying emotions or atmosphere. While arguing for the epistemic content of lyric poetry, the paper will focus on the concept of representation (‚Vergegenwärtigung‘). Emphasis will be placed on the non-propositional component of cognition as well as on a specific understanding of experience in the form of knowing, ‘what-it-islike’. While didactic poetry displays a propositional character, nonsense-poetry with its emphasis on analogy as well as the poetry of experience (‚Erlebnisdichtung‘) fall on the non-propositional side. The form of cognition that is central, here, resembles that of Bertrand Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, albeit as one of indirect acquaintance. In contrast to phenomenal experience and an emotivistic reading of poetry the non propositional knowledge it conveys is based on cognitive procedures such as imagination and/or projection. In sum, then, the epistemic impact of literature is not restricted to fiction but can also be said to apply to lyric poetry.

The relationship between poetry and cognition appears, at first glance, as hardly compelling as that of art and science, of feeling and thinking, or even of intuition and analysis. For this reason, its analysis is fundamentally concerned with questions from philosophical and literary criticism perspectives: Which forms of “cognition” are possible in poetry? In what way and in what forms can poetry also be a medium of generation and/or mediation of cognition, experience or even knowledge and truth? And which processes, matters, or “information” are thereby privileged? Are there subgenres of poetry, for example historical poetry, reflective poetry or didactic poetry, that are especially relevant as regards cognitive functions? And can cognition also be mediated through aura, Stimmung or experience?

Lyrik gilt vielfach als hermetisch, gefühlszentriert oder ästhetisch überdeterminiert. Daher ist das Verhältnis von Lyrik und Erkenntnis auf den ersten Blick so wenig zwingend wie das von Kunst und Wissenschaft, von Fühlen und Denken oder auch von Intuition und Analyse. Die Beiträge des Bandes widmen sich aus philosophischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive Praktiken und Formen, die sich in der Lyrik, insbesondere in der Gegenwartslyrik, möglicher Erkenntnisfunktionen bedienen. Dabei geht es um grundsätzliche Fragen zum Verhältnis von Lyrik und Erkenntnis: Welche Formen von ‚Erkenntnis‘ sind in der Lyrik überhaupt möglich? Inwiefern und mit welchen Formen kann Lyrik auch ein Mittel der Generierung und/oder Vermittlung von Erkenntnis, Erfahrung oder gar Wissen und Wahrheit sein und welche Verfahren, Inhalte oder ‚Informationen‘ werden dabei bevorzugt? Gibt es Subgenres der Lyrik, beispielsweise Geschichtslyrik, Gedankenlyrik oder Lehrdichtung, die im Hinblick auf Erkenntnisfunktionen besonders relevant sind? Und kann Erkenntnis auch durch Aura, Stimmung oder Erlebnis vermittelt werden?

Income composition can have a significant impact on workers’ well-being, productivity, and career paths. Wages often include a variety of components, such as unconditional bonuses, profit-sharing payments, and incentives based on the individual performance of employees. Each of these may influence employee labour outcomes differently and the worker composition may matter for managers when designing the salary package. Simultaneously, workers’ employment choices and well-being are influenced by income outside the job, such as inheritances and lottery winnings, as well as by external factors like technological change. This dissertation includes five empirical studies that investigate these issues, yielding new insights on the role of monetary gifts, financial incentives, labour market institutions, and technology disruptions in affecting employees’ labour and well-being outcomes.

Many developed countries, including Germany, face a steady rise in the share of individuals obtaining higher education. While rising education itself bears a series of advantages as extensively studied in previous literature, it is also conceptually linked to a higher likelihood of working in an occupation that does not match one’s formal qualifications. Previous studies have predominantly evaluated how demographic or job‐related aspects correlate with the likelihood of being educationally ﴾mis﴿matched. However, they have largely ignored institutional facets of the educational system or industrial organization. Moreover, little is known about how private wealth affects educational mismatch or whether job satisfaction is homogenously affected among individuals once such a mismatch occurs. The five projects collected in this thesis aim to answer these open questions in the literature for Germany, using data from the Socio‐Economic Panel and employing different time intervals between 1984 and 2022. Beginning with the educational system in early childhood, Chapter 2 evaluates the impact of school‐starting age on the likelihood of over‐ and undereducation. It exploits the exogenous variation in school‐entry rules across federal states and years in Germany with regression discontinuity designs. The results report a negative impact of school‐starting age on the likelihood of undereducation, but no systematic relationship with overeducation. Subsequently, Chapter 3 explores the variation in education costs by leveraging the quasi‐experimental setting induced by the time‐limited introduction of tuition fees in several German federal states between 2006 and 2014. The increase in education costs among treated graduates results in a significantly higher likelihood of overeducation, which endures even several years post‐graduation. Chapter 4 focuses on the industrial relations system and examines the correlation between trade union membership and the likelihood and extent of educational ﴾mis﴿match. The results reveal that trade union members report significantly less overeducation at both the intensive and extensive margin and also a higher likelihood of being matched compared to non‐members. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis provides evidence that this correlation is driven by improved bargaining power instead of informational advantages. Chapter 5 focuses on private wealth as a determinant of educational mismatch by investigating the impact of a wealth shock through inheritances, lottery winnings or gifts on the likelihood of over‐ and undereducation. Due to the diminishing marginal returns of wages with increasing windfall gains the likelihood of undereducation is expected to decrease, while that of overeducation is expected to increase. Empirically, these suppositions are supported for overeducation, as its likelihood increases significantly after the windfall gain. Further analyses reveal that this effect is driven by individuals switching occupations while increasing their leisure time, and it materializes only for medium to large windfall gains. Contrary to the previous chapters, Chapter 6 focuses on educational mismatch, more precisely on overeducation, as the independent variable. In particular, it investigates the correlation between overeducation and job satisfaction. The results align with the previously established negative correlation for private sector employees exclusively. In contrast, interaction and subsample analyses reveal a positive correlation for public sector employees. This link is driven by individuals with a high degree of altruistic motivation and family orientation.

Measuring the economic activity of a country requires high-quality data of businesses. In the case of Germany, this is not only required at national level, but also at federal state level and for different economic sectors. Important sources for high-quality business data are the business register and, among others, also 14 business surveys which are conducted by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. However, the quality requirements of the Federal Statistical Office are in contrast to the interests of the businesses themselves. For them, answering to a survey's questionnaire is an additional cost factor, also known as response burden. A high response burden should be avoided, since it can have a negative impact on the quality of the businesses' responses to the surveys. Therefore, sample coordination can be used as a method to control the distribution of response burden while securing high-quality data. When applying already existing business survey coordination systems, developed by different statistical institutes, legal and administrative standards of German official statistics have to be taken into account. These standards consider different sampling fractions, rotation fractions, periodicity, and stratification of the aforementioned 14 business surveys. Therefore, the aim of this doctoral thesis is to check the existing business survey coordination systems for their applicability in the context of German official statistics and, if necessary, to modify them accordingly. These modifications include the introduction of individual burden indicators which aim to take the individual perception of response burden into account. For this purpose, several synthetic data sets have been created to test the application of the modified versions of the different business survey coordination systems through Monte Carlo simulation studies. These data sets include a large panel data set, reflecting the landscape of businesses in Rhineland-Palatinate and three smaller, synthetic data sets. The latter have been created with the help of the R package BuSuCo which has been developed within the scope of this thesis. The above mentioned simulation studies are evaluated based on different measures for estimation quality as well as for the concentration and distribution of response burden.

Die Arbeit untersucht den bundesdeutschen Diskurs zur europäischen Integration seit 1990 aus diskurslinguistischer Perspektive und versteht ihn als Aushandlungsraum europäischer Identitätskonstruktionen. Ausgangspunkt ist die Annahme, dass institutionelle Vertiefung und geografische Erweiterung der EU nicht allein als verrechtlichte Integrationsschritte zu begreifen sind, sondern stets auch identitätspolitische Dimensionen tragen. Ziel der Studie ist es, die sprachliche Konstituierung der EU als identitätspolitisches Referenzsystem sichtbar zu machen und damit eine diskurslinguistische Ergänzung zur interdisziplinären Integrationsforschung zu leisten. Auf Grundlage eines diachronen Korpus, das zentrale integrationspolitische Etappen und Krisenphasen umfasst, wird ein Mixed-Methods-Ansatz entwickelt, der korpusgeleitete Verfahren mit der hermeneutischen Annotation diskurslinguistischer Kategorien verbindet. Analysiert werden nicht nur lexikalisch-semantische Repräsentationen Europas, sondern vor allem diskursive Grundfiguren wie Einheit, Vielfalt, Eigenes und Fremdes sowie deren Verbindung zu politischen Sinnzuschreibungen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, in welchem Maße sich im deutschen Diskurs ein stabiler identitätspolitischer Bezugspunkt zur EU herausgebildet hat, wie sich normative Leitbilder und funktionale Rationalitäten überlagern und wie europäische Integration sprachlich zwischen symbolischer Aufladung und strategischer Instrumentalisierung verhandelt wird.

Perennial crops eliminate soil disturbance and reduce the amount of synthetic chemicals that are applied to the soil, improving soil biodiversity and food web structure. Additionally, perennial cropping is characterised by all year-round surface coverage which benefits soil biota in terms of habitat and food sources. Perennial intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium, IWG) was domesticated and commercialised by The Land Institute in Kansas as Kernza® and serves as an example for these nature-based solutions. It develops an extensive root system that has a higher nutrient retention, possibly reducing nutrient runoff. It thereby follows a more resource-conservative strategy with improved belowground-oriented resource allocation in its root system. This may reduce the need for excessive fertiliser as the crop has a higher nitrogen efficiency, among other things. IWG promoted the earthworm community and its diversity, more specifically, the occurrence of epigeic species (litter inhabitants), since those species benefit from the increased soil coverage and elimination of disturbances in the soil. As IWG creates a dense and extensive root system, as shown by the increased occurrence of root-feeding nematodes, endogeic species (horizontal burrowers) are supported through the provision of a reliable food source. IWG was characterised as a mostly undisturbed system with a highly structured food web through nematode analysis, as expressed through the promotion of structure indicators, for example, that are sensitive to disturbances in the soil and are therefore supported under no-till management. The root microbiome is continuously being shaped by the host as the crop regrows from the roots each vegetation period. This creates a symbiotic relationship and a beneficial feedback loop for the crop. Resultantly, the root-endophytic microbiome under IWG had a higher network complexity, connectivity and stability compared to annual wheat. The regrowth from the roots for IWG requires increased nutrient and energy storage, which was indicated by increased starch values. Correspondingly, the longer residence time of the roots in the soil resulted in higher lignin values. Furthermore, the decomposition pathway was dominated by fungivorous nematodes which may correspond to stimulated nutrient cycling and a heterogeneous resource environment, as seen for low input systems. Overall, perennial wheat cultivation improved soil biodiversity already after an establishment of 3-6 years. As those benefits were present for all three countries, the varying soil and climate conditions do not seem to interfere with the positive effect of perennial wheat on the soil ecosystem, demonstrating a wide transferability and adaptability of the crop onto other study sites as well. Enhanced complexity and connectivity of the food web in comparison to annual wheat may indicate a resistance against abiotic stress, suggesting IWG cultivation as a viable option for a sustainable and resilient agriculture. The improvement in nutrient cycling and the resource-efficient cultivation strategy for IWG could enable cultivation on marginal land where annual crop cultivation is not possible as the soils are susceptible to erosion and nutrient runoff. This opens up new possibilities for agricultural cultivation on previously unused land, thus contributing to food security in the future.

Die Verfügbarkeit von ortho-Phosphat (o-PO₄) trägt wesentlich zur Eutrophierung von Fließgewässern bei und gefährdet damit das Erreichen des „guten ökologischen Zustands“ gemäß der EU-Wasserrahmenrichtlinie. Da die kommunalen Kläranlagen zentrale Eintragsquellen darstellen, gewinnt die Reduktion von o-PO₄ an dieser Stelle an Bedeutung. Neben der chemischen Phosphorelimination bietet insbesondere die vierte Reinigungsstufe, primär zur Entfernung von Mikroschadstoffen konzipiert, einen Synergieeffekt mit potenziellen Phosphorentfernungsraten von bis zu 85 %. Zur Bewertung des Einflusses einer solchen Reinigungsstufe wurde ein Modell für ausgewählte saarländische Oberflächenwasserkörper (OWK) entwickelt, das den Trockenwetterfall als eutrophierungsrelevantes Szenario abbildet. Ein zentraler Bestandteil ist ein neu erarbeiteter Retentionsansatz, der biochemische und physikalische Prozesse wie Adsorption, Sedimentation und biologische Assimilation berücksichtigt. Auf Basis der Differenz zwischen emissionsseitig bilanziertem und gemessenem o-PO₄-Gehalt wurden für jeden OWK Verminderungsraten je Fließmeter abgeleitet und schließlich eine Gleichung zur Abschätzung der Retention in Abhängigkeit der Einzugsgebietsgröße formuliert. Die Validierung zeigt hinreichende Modellgenauigkeit, wenngleich negative Frachtdifferenzen in einigen Gewässern auf zusätzliche, nicht eindeutig quantifizierbare Einträge – etwa aus Landwirtschaft oder Kanalverlusten – hindeuten. Die Szenarienanalyse belegt, dass eine vierte Reinigungsstufe grundsätzlich zur Reduktion von o-PO₄ an den Messstellen beiträgt. Eine Unterschreitung des geltenden Orientierungswertes wird jedoch nur erreicht, wenn sämtliche Kläranlagen eines OWK nachgerüstet werden – und auch dann nur in einigen Fällen. Damit stellt die vierte Reinigungsstufe allein keine ausreichende Alternative zu den Maßnahmen des 3. Bewirtschaftungsplans des Saarlandes dar, kann jedoch als ergänzende Strategie zur Verringerung der Phosphoreinträge dienen.

Spatial microsimulation is an important tool for integrating geographical information into the evaluation of public policies and the analysis of social phenomena in urban regions. These models simulate the behavior and interaction between units of the region, such as individuals, households or firms, under specific conditions that may or not involve projections over time. This requires a representative base data set for their respective units. In this thesis, we focus on the geo-referencing step of the population in the construction of this data set, where we define the location of the individuals so that the allocation obtained is representative in relation to the population of the region. To do this, we consider the assignment of households to dwellings with specific coordinates by solving a maximum weight matching problem where side constraints are included so that the allocation obtained satisfies statistical structures intrinsic to the considered region. The model of this problem represents each feasible assignment of household to dwelling as a binary variable, which results in billions of variables for medium-sized municipalities such as the city of Trier, Germany. Therefore, standard solvers for mixed-integer linear optimization are not able to solve it due to their high time and memory consumption. Hence, we develop two approaches capable of producing high-quality allocations using a reasonable amount of computational resources, one based on specific decomposition algorithms, and the other characterized by the application of an approximation algorithm in the framework of Lagrangian relaxation of the side constraints. We theoretically explore the allocations obtained by both approaches and perform an extensive computational study using synthetic data sets and real-world data sets associated with the city of Trier. The results show that the developed methods are able to obtain near-optimal solutions using significantly less memory and time than the solver Gurobi, which enables them to tackle significantly larger instances, with approximately 100 000 households and dwellings. Furthermore, the allocations obtained for the real-world data sets correspond to a realistic population distribution, which strengthens the practical applicability of our methods.

Einige Forschungsergebnisse zeigen, dass emotionale Empfindungen kognitive Bereiche beeinflussen oder mit diesen im Zusammenhang stehen. Aufbauend auf den Ergebnissen wurden zwei Studien konzipiert. In Studie 1 wurde der Zusammenhang zwischen den Valenzen der dispositionalen emotionalen Empfindungen und der globalen Selbstbewertung des Gedächtnisses (Metagedächtnis) bei Lehramtsstudierenden (N = 218) untersucht. Die dispositionalen Empfindungen wurden mittels des deutschen Positive and Negativ Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Krohne, Egloff, Kohlmann & Tausch, 1996) und die globale Selbstbewertung des Gedächtnisses mit dem deutschen Squire Subjective Memory Questionnaire (SSMQ) (Wolf, 2017) erfasst. Angenommen wurde, dass die positive Valenz im Gegensatz zu der negativen Valenz im positiven Zusammenhang mit der höheren Gedächtniseinschätzung stehen. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen die Hypothesen. In Studie 2 wurde die aktuelle Valenz mittels des Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS) (Kurdi, Lozano & Banaji, 2017) induziert, um Veränderungen des Metagedächtnisses und der tatsächlichen Gedächtnisleistung bei Lehramtsstudierenden (N = 44) zu untersuchen. Angenommen wurde, dass die positive Valenz positiv, die negative Valenz negativ und die neutrale Valenz nicht auf das Metagedächtnis und die Gedächtnisleistung wirkt. Weitere Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Metagedächtnis und der Gedächtnisleistung sowie der induzierten Valenz und der Gedächtnisleistung wurden angenommen. Die Messinstrumente aus Studie 1 blieben dieselben. Die Gedächtnisleistung wurde mittels eines sinnarmen Silbentests nach Ebbinghaus (1885) operationalisiert. Die Ergebnisse bestätigen die Hypothesen nicht. Die Emotionsinduktion hatte keinen Erfolg. Die Ergebnisse können damit nicht auf eine veränderte Valenz bezogen werden. Wie in Studie 1 zeigte sich ein Zusammenhang zwischen den dispositionalen Empfindungen und dem Metagedächtnis. Weitere explorative Ergebnisse, vor allem im Bezug auf das Geschlecht, wurden dargestellt. Die Ergebnisse sind bedeutsam für die Professionalisierung von Lehramtsstudierenden.

Diese Studie untersucht die aktuelle Situation auf dem Wohnungsmarkt und die Wohnungspolitik in Rheinland-Pfalz. Sie zeigt, dass in den Städten hohe Mieten und Immobilienpreise, geringe Wohnflächen und eine starke Mietbelastung insbesondere einkommensschwacher Haushalte dominieren. Etwas anders gelagert stellt sich die Lange in den ländlichen Regionen dar: Zwar spielt Eigentum hier eine größere Rolle und der Wohnungsmarkt ist insgesamt entspannter, jedoch schränkt der kleine Mietwohnungsmarkt die Möglichkeiten für Haushalte mit geringem Einkommen erheblich ein. Zudem breiten sich Preissteigerungen zunehmend aus den Städten in umliegende ländliche Räume aus, insbesondere im Umland von Mainz, entlang des Rheins und im Umfeld von Luxemburg. Die in Rheinland-Pfalz angewandten wohnungspolitischen Instrumente – von Mietspiegel und Mietpreisbremse bis zur sozialen Wohnraumförderung – haben nur einen dämpfenden Effekt auf die Wohnungsmarktentwicklung, beheben aber nicht die strukturellen Ursachen der Wohnungsfrage. Insbesondere der Rückgriff auf private Investor:innen und zeitlich befristete Sozialbindungen erweisen sich als grundlegende Konstruktionsfehler. Für eine zukunftsfähige soziale Wohnungspolitik müssen Strukturen gefördert werden, die jenseits des Marktmechanismus agieren. Nur so kann eine verlässliche soziale Wohnraumversorgung umgesetzt werden.

In most textbooks optimal sample allocation is tailored to rather theoretical examples. However, in practice we often face large-scale surveys with conflicting objectives and many restrictions on the quality and cost at population and subpopulation levels. This multiobjectiveness results in a multitude of efficient sample allocations, each giving different weight to a single survey purpose. Additionally, since the input data to the allocation problem often relies on supplementary information derived from estimation, historical data, or expert knowledge, allocations might be inefficient when specified for sampling. This doctoral thesis presents a framework for optimal allocation to standard sampling schemes that allows for specifying the tradeoff between different objectives and analyzing their sensitivity to other problem components, aiming to support a decision-maker in identifying an at-most preferred sample allocation. It dedicates a full chapter to each of the following core questions: 1) How to efficiently incorporate quality and cost constraints for large-scale surveys, say, for thousands of strata with hundreds of precision and cost constraints? 2) How to handle vector-valued objectives with their components addressing different, possibly conflicting survey purposes? 3) How to consider uncertainty in the input data? The techniques presented can be used separately or in combination as a general problem-solving framework for constrained multivariate and multidomain, possibly uncertain, sample allocation. The main problem is formulated in a way that highlights the different components of optimal sample allocation and can be taken as a gateway to develop solution strategies to each of the questions above, while shifting the focus between different problem aspects. The first question is addressed through a conic quadratic reformulation, which can be efficiently solved for large problem instances using interior-point methods. Based on this the second question is tackled using a weighted Chebyshev minimization, which provides insight into the sensitivity of the problem and enables a stepwise procedure for considering nonlinear decision functionals. Lastly, uncertainty in the input data is addressed through regularization, chance constraints and robust problem formulations.

The present dissertation deals with variable stress patterns in English complex adjectives such as celebratory, identifiable or imaginative. This variation is usually described in terms of retaining the stress from the embedded base (idéntify -> idéntifiable) or deviating from the stress of the embedded base (idéntify -> identifíable). While several accounts have explored this variation, none of them have been able to identify a plausible reason for why it occurs. Additionally, the role of individual speaker differences has been disregarded in the discussion. This dissertation therefore explores the empirically observable extent of the variation and investigates possible causes of it with a special focus on individual differences between speakers. It uses data from a complex online experiment that included five different tasks to assess speakers' stress production, perception, morphological processing, vocabulary size and other factors. It furthermore tests the predictions of previous accounts on the large set of authentic utterances from speakers collected using this online experiment. The data show that individual differences in vocabulary size between speakers are a significant predictor of a speaker's tendency to retain the stress of the embedded base.

Biotic communities experienced significant changes in recent decades. Climate change, the overexploitation of natural resources and the immigration of invasive species are major drivers for this change and present unknown challenges for communities worldwide. To assess the impact of these drivers, standardised long-term studies are required, which are currently lacking for many species and ecosystems. Analysing environmental samples and the DNA of associated organisms using metabarcoding and high-throughput sequencing provides a cost-efficient and rapid way to generate the high-resolution biodiversity data which is so direly needed. In this thesis, I demonstrate the great potential of using samples from the German Environ- mental Specimen Bank (ESB), a long-term monitoring archive that has been collecting and cryogenically storing highly standardised environmental samples since 1985. Modern analytical methods enable retrospective long-term biodiversity monitoring using these samples. In the first chapter, I illustrate metabarcoding as a central method, discussing its strengths and drawbacks, how to avoid them, and new application approaches. This chapter provides the methodological basis for the following studies. In subsequent chapters, I present time series analyses of communities associated with these environmental samples. While for Chapter two the focus is on terrestrial arthropod communities, in Chapter three aquatic and terrestrial communities across the tree of life are analysed. A null model was developed for this survey for robust conclusions. The studies covered the last three decades and revealed substantial compositional changes across all ecosystems. These changes deviated significantly from the model, indicating that the changes are occurring faster than expected. Moreover, a trend toward homogenization in many terrestrial communities was uncovered. Climate change and the immigration of invasive species in combination with the loss of site-specific species are suspected to be the main drivers for this. In a follow-up study, changes of arthropod communities in German and South Korean terrestrial ecosystems were compared using ESB leaf samples from these two countries. Since both ESBs are harmonised in sample collection and processing, comparative analyses were applicable. This research covered the last decade and revealed substantial declines in species richness in Korea. Abiotic and biotic factors are discussed as potential drivers of these results. Finally, the possibility of assessing tree health by analysing changes in functional fungal groups using German ESB samples was investigated. The results indicate that increasing infestation of specific functional groups is a proxy for declining tree health, with further analyses planned. In this dissertation, I present the great potential of samples from long-term monitoring archives to conduct retrospective biodiversity trend analyses across the tree of life. As technologies evolve, these samples will help to understand past and predict future ecosystem changes.

In den letzten Jahren hat die Nutzung von Drohnen deutlich zugenommen. Dies liegt unter anderem an der Leistungssteigerung, der guten Verfügbarkeit und an dem einfachen Einsatz von Drohnen. Damit sind auch Anwendungen in der Forschung möglich geworden, die zuvor unmöglich oder mit hohen Kosten verbunden waren. Als Sensor zur Datenaufzeichnung findet im Bereich der Forschung häufig eine Kamera Verwendung. Zusammen mit einer Drohne können Bereiche einfach und kostengünstig überflogen und dabei erkundet, beobachtet oder überwacht werden. Neben der Kamera als Sensor werden auch häufig Multispektralkameras und Lidar eingesetzt. Dagegen findet Radar im Bereich von kleinen Drohnen kaum Anwendung. Ziel dieser Forschungsarbeit war es zu untersuchen, ob neuste Radartechnik einen Mehrwert in der Fernerkundung mit kleinen Drohnen bieten kann. Hierfür wurden moderne Radarsensoren aus dem Automobilbereich ausgewählt. Als Drohnen wurden sowohl Quadrocopter als auch eine Starrflügler-Drohne eingesetzt. Für die Analyse, Berechnung und Auswertung der Daten wurde MATLAB verwendet. Der erste Ansatz beruhte auf einer Starrflügler-Drohne, die sich durch ihren freien Zugriff auf die Steuerung auszeichnet. Dadurch können auch spezielle Anforderungen an die Flugregelung berücksichtigt werden. Allerdings können mit einer Starrflügler-Drohne keine langsamen oder sogar statische Luftaufnahmen erstellt werden, um Erfahrung mit den Radardaten zu erlangen. Aus diesem Grund wurde anschließend ein Radar-Messsystem entworfen, das unabhängig von der Drohne eingesetzt werden kann. Zusammen mit einem Quadrocopter konnten so statische Radarmessungen durchgeführt werden, um die Verwendbarkeit der Radardaten in der Fernerkundung zu bestätigen. Das Messsystem konnte so aber nur für 2-dimensionale Anwendungen eingesetzt werden. In der weiteren Forschungsarbeit wurde untersucht, ob es möglich ist, mit einem Radarsensor der nur in 2-dimensionen misst eine 3-dimensionale Aufzeichnungen zu erstellen. Als Versuchsobjekt wurde eine Hütte gewählt, die Anhand der Radardaten dargestellt werden sollte. Dafür wurde ein Prozess zur Datenverarbeitung mit elf Schritten entworfen, womit die Hütte auf 0,6 Meter genau rekonstruiert werden konnte. Im letzten Teil der Forschungsarbeit wurde untersucht, ob sich die Genauigkeit des Messsystems erhöhen lässt, um noch mehr Anwendungsfälle bedienen zu können. Dafür wurde ein neuer Radarsensor eingesetzt, der eine höhere Genauigkeit besitzt. Die Forschungsarbeit konzentrierte sich darauf, die Abhängigkeit der Radardaten zum ungenauen Lagesensor aufzulösen. Dabei wurde die Fluglage über die Radardaten selbst berechnet, womit die Fluglage genauer bestimmt werden kann als allein über den Lagesensor. Erst damit kann die höhere Genauigkeit des neuen Radarsensors auch tatsächlich ausgenutzt werden. Mit den Ergebnissen der Forschungsarbeit sowie den vorgestellten Radarsensoren, stehen der Fernerkundung mit kleinen Drohnen, neben den klassischen Sensoren, zukünftig auch Radarsensoren zur Verfügung. Mit dem Messsystem und den Erkenntnissen aus der Forschungsarbeit werden bereits erste spezifische Anwendungen in Forschungsprojekten untersucht. Darüber hinaus konnten auch Anwendungsfälle außerhalb der Fernerkundung identifiziert werden. Die Weiterentwicklung im Bereich des autonomen Fahrens wird für Leistungssteigerungen bei Radarsensoren sorgen. Damit stehen auch der Fernerkundung zukünftig noch bessere Radarsensoren zur Verfügung.

Within this thesis the hedging behaviour of airlines from 2005 to 2019 is analysed by using an unbalanced panel dataset consisting of a total of 78 airlines from 39 countries. The focus of the analysis is on financial and operational hedging as well as the influence of both on CO2 emissions and the development of emitted CO2 emissions. For the analysis Probit models with random effects and OLS models with fixed effects were used. The results regarding the relationship between leverage and financial hedging indicate a negative relationship between everage and financial fuel hedging and a non-linear convex relationship for highly leveraged airlines, which is contrary to the theory of financial distress. In addition, the study provides evidence that airlines using other types of derivatives, such as interest rate derivatives, engage in more fuel hedging. In terms of operational hedging, the analysis suggests that operating a diversified fleet is a complement to, rather than a substitute for, financial hedging. With regard to alliance membership, the results do not show that alliance membership is a substitute for financial hedging, as members of alliances are more likely to engage in hedging transactions and to a greater extent. The analysis shows that the relative CO2 emissions fall in the period under review, but this does not apply to the absolute amount. No general statement can be made about the influence of financial and operational hedging on CO2 emissions, as the results are mixed.

When natural phenomena and data-based relations are driven by dynamics which are not purely local, they cannot be described satisfactorily by partial differential equations. As a consequence, mathematical models governed by nonlocal operators are of interest. This thesis is concerned with nonlocal operators of the form $\mathcal{L}u(x) = PV \int_{\mathbb{R}^d} (u(x)-u(y)) K(x,dy), x \in \mathbb{R}^d$, which are determined through a family of Borel measures $K=(K(x, \cdot))_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and which act on the vector space of Borel measurable functions $u: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$. For a large class of families $K$, namely those where $K$ is a symmetric transition kernel satisfying a specific non-degeneracy condition, a variational theory for nonlocal equations of the type $\mathcal{L}u=f$ is established which builds upon gadgets from both measure theory and classical analysis. While measure theory is used to provide a nonlocal integration by parts formula that allows to set up a reasonable variational formulation of the above equation in dependency of the particular boundary condition (Dirichlet, Robin, Neumann) considered, Hilbert space theory and fixed-point approaches are utilized to develop sufficient conditions for the existence of variational solutions. This theory is then applied to two specific realizations of $\mathcal{L}$ of interest before a weak maximum principle is established which is finally used to study overlapping domain decomposition methods for the nonlocal and homogeneous Dirichlet problem.

Immer wieder tauchen Fragen nach dem Stüve-Diagramm und seiner Benutzung auf. Es gibt zwar neben der Vorlesung “Einführung in die Meteorologie” auch erklärende Darstellungen in den empfohlenen Lehrbüchern und im Internet. Diese scheinen aber offenbar nicht zufriedenstellend zu sein. Deshalb habe ich nachfolgend versucht, die Antworten auf die häufigsten Fragen in Form einer Anleitung zusammen zu fassen. Ich danke em. Prof. Dr. Alfred Helbig, der im Rahmen seiner früheren Tätigkeit im operationellen Dienst umfangreiche praktische Erfahrung mit Radiosonden-Aufstiegen erworben hat, sowie Dr. Micha Gryschka (Institut für Meteorologie und Klimatologie, Leibniz Universität Hannover) für die hilfreichen Kommentare zum Manuskript.

Mit Fokus auf historischen Liedern aus Deutschland, Frankreich, England, Irland, den USA, Österreich, den Niederlanden, Slowenien, Polen, Italien, Neuseeland und der Schweiz zeichnet dieses Buch ein breites und lebendiges Panorama der Frühen Neuzeit. Die Sammlung spannt den Bogen von klassischen Lerninhalten bis hin zu aktuellen Forschungsperspektiven: Reformation, Amerikanische und Französische Revolution, Höfische Kultur, Kriminalität, Seefahrt, militärische und diplomatische Konflikte sind ebenso Thema wie die Geschlechterordnung, globale Migration oder historische Identitäts- und Fremdheitsvorstellungen. Eine systematische Verschlagwortung erleichtert den Zugriff und erlaubt vielfältige Kombinationen für die akademische und schulische Lehre. Jedes der 101 Lieder wird mit Informationen zum historischen Kontext, zur Überlieferung und zu online verfügbaren Vertonungen präsentiert. Hinzu kommen Aufgabenstellungen und Anregungen für die Diskussion im Kurs oder Seminar. Auch das lange und mitunter ambivalente Nachleben neuzeitlicher Lieder im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert wird beleuchtet. Darüber hinaus bietet der Band methodische Hinweise und Anregungen zur eigenständigen Recherche und Analyse historischer Lieder, beispielsweise in Seminar- und Abschlussarbeiten.

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is a symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach that has been successfully applied across various domains, including medical diagnosis, product configuration, and customer support, to solve problems based on experiential knowledge and analogy. A key aspect of CBR is its problem-solving procedure, where new solutions are created by referencing similar experiences, which makes CBR explainable and effective even with small amounts of data. However, one of the most significant challenges in CBR lies in defining and computing meaningful similarities between new and past problems, which heavily relies on domain-specific knowledge. This knowledge, typically only available through human experts, must be manually acquired, leading to what is commonly known as the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck. One way to mitigate the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck is through a hybrid approach that combines the symbolic reasoning strengths of CBR with the learning capabilities of Deep Learning (DL), a sub-symbolic AI method. DL, which utilizes deep neural networks, has gained immense popularity due to its ability to automatically learn from raw data to solve complex AI problems such as object detection, question answering, and machine translation. While DL minimizes manual knowledge acquisition by automatically training models from data, it comes with its own limitations, such as requiring large datasets, and being difficult to explain, often functioning as a "black box". By bringing together the symbolic nature of CBR and the data-driven learning abilities of DL, a neuro-symbolic, hybrid AI approach can potentially overcome the limitations of both methods, resulting in systems that are both explainable and capable of learning from data. The focus of this thesis is on integrating DL into the core task of similarity assessment within CBR, specifically in the domain of process management. Processes are fundamental to numerous industries and sectors, with process management techniques, particularly Business Process Management (BPM), being widely applied to optimize organizational workflows. Process-Oriented Case-Based Reasoning (POCBR) extends traditional CBR to handle procedural data, enabling applications such as adaptive manufacturing, where past processes are analyzed to find alternative solutions when problems arise. However, applying CBR to process management introduces additional complexity, as procedural cases are typically represented as semantically annotated graphs, increasing the knowledge-acquisition effort for both case modeling and similarity assessment. The key contributions of this thesis are as follows: It presents a method for preparing procedural cases, represented as semantic graphs, to be used as input for neural networks. Handling such complex, structured data represents a significant challenge, particularly given the scarcity of available process data in most organizations. To overcome the issue of data scarcity, the thesis proposes data augmentation techniques to artificially expand the process datasets, enabling more effective training of DL models. Moreover, it explores several deep learning architectures and training setups for learning similarity measures between procedural cases in POCBR applications. This includes the use of experience-based Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) methods to fine-tune the deep learning models. Additionally, the thesis addresses the computational challenges posed by graph-based similarity assessments in CBR. The traditional method of determining similarity through subgraph isomorphism checks, which compare nodes and edges across graphs, is computationally expensive. To alleviate this issue, the hybrid approach seeks to use DL models to approximate these similarity calculations more efficiently, thus reducing the computational complexity involved in graph matching. The experimental evaluations of the corresponding contributions provide consistent results that indicate the benefits of using DL-based similarity measures and case retrieval methods in POCBR applications. The comparison with existing methods, e.g., based on subgraph isomorphism, shows several advantages but also some disadvantages of the compared methods. In summary, the methods and contributions outlined in this work enable more efficient and robust applications of hybrid CBR and DL in process management applications.

The goal of this work is to compare operators that are defined on probably varying Hilbert spaces. Distance concepts for operators as well as convergence concepts for such operators are explained and examined. For distance concepts we present three main notions. All have in common that they use space-linking operators that connect the spaces. At first, we look at unitary maps and compare the unitary orbits of the operators. Then, we consider isometric embeddings, which is based on a concept of Joachim Weidmann. Then we look at contractions but with more norm equations in comparison. The latter idea is based on a concept of Olaf Post called quasi-unitary equivalence. Our main result is that the unitary and isometric distances are equal provided the operators are both self-adjoint and have 0 in their essential spectra. In the third chapter, we focus specifically on the investigation of these distance terms for compact operators or operators in p-Schatten classes. In this case, the interpretation of the spectra as null sequences allows further distance investigation. Chapter four deals mainly with convergence terms of operators on varying Hilbert spaces. The analyses in this work deal exclusively with concepts of norm resolvent convergence. The main conclusion of the chapter is that the generalisation for norm resolvent convergence of Joachim Weidmann and the generalisation of Olaf Post, called quasi-unitary equivalence, are equivalent to each other. In addition, we specify error bounds and deal with the convergence speed of both concepts. Two important implications of these convergence notions are that the approximation is spectrally exact, i.e., the spectra converge suitably, and that the convergence is transferred to the functional calculus of the bounded functions vanishing at infinity.

In this dissertation, I analyze how large players in financial markets exert influence on smaller players and how this affects the decisions of the large ones. I focus on how the large players process information in an uncertain environment, form expectations and communicate these to smaller players through their actions. I examine these relationships empirically in the foreign exchange market and in the context of a game-theoretic model of an investment project. In Chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between the foreign exchange trading activity of large US-based market participants and the volatility of the nominal spot exchange rate. Using a novel dataset, I utilize the weekly growth rate of aggregate foreign currency positions of major market participants to proxy trading activity in the foreign exchange market. By estimating the heterogeneous autoregressive model of realized volatility (HAR-RV), I find evidence of a positive relationship between trading activity and volatility, which is mainly driven by unexpected changes in trading activity and is asymmetric for some of the currencies considered. My results contribute to the understanding of the drivers of exchange rate volatility and the role of large players in the flow of information in financial markets. In Chapters 3 and 4, I consider a sequential global game of an investment project to examine how a large creditor influences the decisions of small creditors with her lending decision. I pay particular attention to the timing of the large player’s decision, i.e. whether she makes her decision to roll over a credit before or after the small players. I show that she faces a trade-off between signaling to and learning from small creditors. By being a focal point for coordination, her actions have a substantial impact on the probability of coordination failure and the failure of the investment project. I investigate the sensitivity of the equilibrium by comparing settings with perfect and imperfect learning. The results highlight the importance of signaling and provide a new perspective on the idea of catalytic finance and the influence of a lender-of-last-resort in self-fulfilling debt crises.

Introduction: Apart from a few studies with limited sample sizes, we have little data on attitudes toward lesbian and gay (LG) people in Greece. Methods: This study examines this topic in 949 heterosexual Greek participants. Based on previous research in cultural contexts other than Greece, we hypothesized that four demographics (gender, age, education, area of residence) and religious and political orientation predict a substantial amount of variance in homophobia (i.e., anti-LG attitudes). Results: We verified all observed variables except area of residence as significant predictors. Regarding the “intergroup contact hypothesis,” we distinguished the direct effects of the predictor variables from indirect effects mediated by contact with lesbians and gay men. All variables except area of residence showed a direct effect and, except for education, also an indirect effect on homophobia. The strongest effects were found for religious and political orientation, followed by gender. Highly religious, right-wing oriented, and male participants reported the highest levels of homophobia, partially mediated by their low level of contact with LG people. Discussion/Conclusion: The results confirm and further explain the detrimental role the Greek Orthodox Church, right-wing political parties, and traditional gender roles play in the acceptance of sexual minorities.

Background: Suicide represents a critical public health concern, and machine learning (ML) models offer the potential for identifying at-risk individuals. Recent studies using benchmark datasets and real-world social media data have demonstrated the capability of pretrained large language models in predicting suicidal ideation and behaviors (SIB) in speech and text. Objective: This study aimed to (1) develop and implement ML methods for predicting SIBs in a real-world crisis helpline dataset, using transformer-based pretrained models as a foundation; (2) evaluate, cross-validate, and benchmark the model against traditional text classification approaches; and (3) train an explainable model to highlight relevant risk-associated features. Methods: We analyzed chat protocols from adolescents and young adults (aged 14-25 years) seeking assistance from a German crisis helpline. An ML model was developed using a transformer-based language model architecture with pretrained weights and long short-term memory layers. The model predicted suicidal ideation (SI) and advanced suicidal engagement (ASE), as indicated by composite Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale scores. We compared model performance against a classical word-vector-based ML model. We subsequently computed discrimination, calibration, clinical utility, and explainability information using a Shapley Additive Explanations value-based post hoc estimation model. Results: The dataset comprised 1348 help-seeking encounters (1011 for training and 337 for testing). The transformer-based classifier achieved a macroaveraged area under the curve (AUC) receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 0.89 (95% CI 0.81-0.91) and an overall accuracy of 0.79 (95% CI 0.73-0.99). This performance surpassed the word-vector-based baseline model (AUC-ROC=0.77, 95% CI 0.64-0.90; accuracy=0.61, 95% CI 0.61-0.80). The transformer model demonstrated excellent prediction for nonsuicidal sessions (AUC-ROC=0.96, 95% CI 0.96-0.99) and good prediction for SI and ASE, with AUC-ROCs of 0.85 (95% CI 0.97-0.86) and 0.87 (95% CI 0.81-0.88), respectively. The Brier Skill Score indicated a 44% improvement in classification performance over the baseline model. The Shapley Additive Explanations model identified language features predictive of SIBs, including self-reference, negation, expressions of low self-esteem, and absolutist language. Conclusions: Neural networks using large language model–based transfer learning can accurately identify SI and ASE. The post hoc explainer model revealed language features associated with SI and ASE. Such models may potentially support clinical decision-making in suicide prevention services. Future research should explore multimodal input features and temporal aspects of suicide risk.

Background: Psychoeducation positively influences the psychological components of chronic low back pain (CLBP) in conventional treatments. The digitalization of health care has led to the discussion of virtual reality (VR) interventions. However, CLBP treatments in VR have some limitations due to full immersion. In comparison, augmented reality (AR) supplements the real world with virtual elements involving one’s own body sensory perception and can combine conventional and VR approaches. Objective: The aim of this study was to review the state of research on the treatment of CLBP through psychoeducation, including immersive technologies, and to formulate suggestions for psychoeducation in AR for CLBP. Methods: A scoping review following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines was performed in August 2024 by using Livivo ZB MED, PubMed, Web of Science, American Psychological Association PsycINFO (PsycArticle), and PsyArXiv Preprints databases. A qualitative content analysis of the included studies was conducted based on 4 deductively extracted categories. Results: We included 12 studies published between 2019 and 2024 referring to conventional and VR-based psychoeducation for CLBP treatment, but no study referred to AR. In these studies, educational programs were combined with physiotherapy, encompassing content on pain biology, psychological education, coping strategies, and relaxation techniques. The key outcomes were pain intensity, kinesiophobia, pain catastrophizing, degree of disability, quality of life, well-being, self-efficacy, depression, attrition rate, and user experience. Passive, active, and gamified strategies were used to promote intrinsic motivation from a psychological point of view. Regarding user experience from a software development perspective, user friendliness, operational support, and application challenges were recommended.

Investment theory and related theoretical approaches suggest a dynamic interplay between crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and investment traits like need for cognition. Although cross-sectional studies have found positive correlations between these constructs, longitudinal research testing all of their relations over time is scarce. In our pre-registered longitudinal study, we examined whether initial levels of crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and need for cognition predicted changes in each other. We analyzed data from 341 German students in grades 7–9 who were assessed twice, one year apart. Using multi-process latent change score models, we found that changes in fluid intelligence were positively predicted by prior need for cognition, and changes in need for cognition were positively predicted by prior fluid intelligence. Changes in crystallized intelligence were not significantly predicted by prior Gf, prior NFC, or their interaction, contrary to theoretical assumptions. This pattern of results was largely replicated in a model including all constructs simultaneously. Our findings support the notion that intelligence and investment traits, particularly need for cognition, positively interact during cognitive development, but this interplay was unexpectedly limited to Gf.

Job crafting is the behavior that employees engage in to create personally better fitting work environments, for example, by increasing challenging job demands. To better understand the driving forces behind employees’ engagement in job crafting, we investigated implicit and explicit power motives. While implicit motives tend to operate at the unconscious, explicit motives operate at the unconscious level. We focused on power motives, as power is an agentic motive characterized by the need to influence your environment. Although power is relevant to job crafting in its entirety, in this study, we link it to increasing challenging job demands due to its relevance to job control, which falls under the umbrella of power. Using a cross-sectional design, we collected survey data from a sample of Lebanese nurses (N = 360) working in 18 different hospitals across the country. In both implicit and explicit power motive measures, we focused on integrative power that enable people to stay calm and integrate opposition. The results showed that explicit power predicted job crafting (H1) and that implicit power amplified this effect (H2). Furthermore, job crafting mediated the relationship between congruently high power motives and positive work-related outcomes (H3) that were interrelated (H4). Our findings unravel the driving forces behind one of the most important dimensions of job crafting and extend the benefits of motive congruence to work-related outcomes.

The turnover and stabilization of organic matter (OM) in soils depend on mass and energy fluxes. Understanding the energy content of soil organic matter (SOM) is therefore of crucial importance, but this has hardly been studied so far, especially in mineral soils. In this study, combustion calorimetry (bomb calorimetry) was applied to determine the energy content (combustion enthalpy, ΔCH) of various materials: litter inputs, forest floor layers (OL, OF, OH), and bulk soil and particulate organic matter (POM) from topsoils (0–5 cm). Samples were taken from 35-year-old monocultural stands of Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), black pine (Pinus nigra), European beech (Fagus sylvatica), and red oak (Quercus rubra) grown under highly similar soil, landscape and boundary conditions. This allowed to investigate the influence of the degree of transformation and litter quality on the ΔCH of SOM. Tree species fuel the soil C cycle with high-energy litter (38.9 ± 1.1 kJ g−1C) and fine root biomass (35.9 ± 1.1 kJ g−1C). As plant material is transformed to SOM, ΔCH decreases in the order: OL (36.8 ± 1.6 kJ g−1C) ≥ OF (35.9 ± 3.7 kJ g−1C) > OH (30.6 ± 7.0 kJ g−1C) > 0–5 cm bulk soil (22.9 ± 8.2 kJ g−1C). It indicates that the energy content of OM decreases with transformation and stabilization, as microorganisms extract energy from organic compounds for growth and maintenance, resulting in lower-energy bulk SOM. The POM fraction has 1.6-fold higher ΔCH compared to the bulk SOM. Tree species significantly affect ΔCH of SOM in the mineral soil with the lowest values under beech (12.7 ± 3.4 kJ g−1C). The energy contents corresponded to stoichiometric and isotopic parameters as proxies for the degree of transformation. In conclusion, litter quality, in terms of elemental composition and energy content, defines the pathway and degree of the energy-driven microbially mediated transformation and stabilization of SOM.

The viviparous eelpout Zoarces viviparus is a common fish across the North Atlantic and has successfully colonized habitats across environmental gradients. Due to its wide distribution and predictable phenotypic responses to pollution, Z. viviparus is used as an ideal marine bioindicator organism and has been routinely sampled over decades by several countries to monitor marine environmental health. Additionally, this species is a promising model to study adaptive processes related to environmental change, specifically global warming. Here, we report the chromosome-level genome assembly of Z. viviparus, which has a size of 663 Mb and consists of 607 scaffolds (N50 = 26 Mb). The 24 largest represent the 24 chromosomes of the haploid Z. viviparus genome, which harbors 98% of the complete Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologues defined for ray-finned fish, indicating that the assembly is highly contiguous and complete. Comparative analyses between the Z. viviparus assembly and the chromosome-level genomes of two other eelpout species revealed a high synteny, but also an accumulation of repetitive elements in the Z. viviparus genome. Our reference genome will be an important resource enabling future in-depth genomic analyses of the effects of environmental change on this important bioindicator species.

Introduction: Conventional agricultural land-use may negatively impact biodiversity and the environment due to the increased disturbances to the soil ecosystem by tillage, for example. Cultivation of the perennial grain intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium, IWG, Kernza®) is a nature-based solution for sustainable agriculture, improving nutrient retention mainly through its extensive root system. Nematodes serve as sensitive bioindicators, detecting early changes in the soil food web, reflecting in changes in their community structure. Materials and Methods:IWG and annual wheat sites in South France, Belgium and South Sweden were investigated in April 2022 for two depths (5–15 cm; 25–35 cm) to evaluate the difference in nematode community structure among the cropping systems. Results: Sites with IWG cultivation held an accumulation of structure indicators (c-p 3–5 nematodes) compared to sites with annual wheat cultivation. A generalised linear mixed model revealed significantly more root feeders, especially for the subsoil, under IWG as a result of the perennial cultivation. The maturity index, plant-parasitic index, channel index and structure index were greater for IWG sites. The enrichment index was greater for annual wheat sites due to the dominance of bacterivores and enrichment indicators (c-p 1 nematodes). The nematode community structure (weighted faunal profile analysis) indicates IWG sites as being a generally undisturbed system with efficient nutrient cycling and balanced distribution of feeding types, as well as higher metabolic footprint values for root feeders (including plant-parasitic nematodes) and fungivores. Annual wheat sites, on the other hand, held indicators of a disturbed system with increased occurrence of opportunistic species and a more bacterial driven pathway. The topsoil had an increased occurrence of structure indicators in both cropping systems. Conclusion: IWG creates favourable conditions for a diverse food web, including improved nutrient cycling and a heterogeneous resource environment, regardless of climatic conditions, establishing it as a stable and resilient agricultural management system.

Introduction: This study examined the sources and factors of resilience in Russian sexual and gender minorities. We hypothesized that, through their involvement in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community (source of resilience), LGBT people establish friendships that provide them with social support (factor of resilience), which in turn should contribute to their mental health. Method: The study sample consisted of 1,127 young and middle-aged LGBT adults (18 to 50 years) from Russia. We collected the data online and anonymously. Results: Partial mediation could be confirmed. LGBT people who were involved in “their” community reported more social support from friends, which partially mediated the positive association between community involvement and mental health. The mediation remained significant when we controlled for demographics and outness as potential covariates. Additional analyses showed that the present sample reported lower mental health but not less social support than Russian nonminority samples recruited in previous research. Conclusion: Our study underlines the importance of the LGBT community in times of increasing stigmatization of sexual and gender minorities.

The cold pressor test (CPT) elicits strong cardiovascular reactions via activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), yielding subsequent increases in heart rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP). However, little is known on how exposure to the CPT affects cardiac ventricular repolarization. Twenty-eight healthy males underwent both a bilateral feet CPT and a warm water (WW) control condition on two separate days, one week apart. During pre-stress baseline and stress induction cardiovascular signals (ECG lead II, Finometer BP) were monitored continuously. Salivary cortisol and subjective stress ratings were assessed intermittently. Corrected QT (QTc) interval length and T-wave amplitude (TWA) were assessed for each heartbeat and subsequently aggregated individually over baseline and stress phases, respectively. CPT increases QTc interval length and elevates the TWA. Stress-induced changes in cardiac repolarization are only in part and weakly correlated with cardiovascular and cortisol stress-reactivity. Besides its already well-established effects on cardiovascular, endocrine, and subjective responses, CPT also impacts on cardiac repolarization by elongation of QTc interval length and elevation of TWA. CPT effects on cardiac repolarization share little variance with the other indices of stress reactivity, suggesting a potentially incremental value of this parameter for understanding psychobiological adaptation to acute CPT stress.

Using validated stimulus material is crucial for ensuring research comparability and replicability. However, many databases rely solely on bidimensional valence ratings, ranging from negative to positive. While this material might be appropriate for certain studies, it does not reflect the complexity of attitudes and therefore might hamper the unambiguous interpretation of some study results. In fact, most databases cannot differentiate between neutral (i.e., neither positive nor negative) and ambivalent (i.e., simultaneously positive and negative) attitudes. Consequently, even presumably univalent (only positive or negative) stimuli cannot be clearly distinguished from ambivalent ones when selected via bipolar rating scales. In the present research, we introduce the Trier Univalence Neutrality Ambivalence (TUNA) database, a database containing 304,262 validation ratings from heterogeneous samples of 3,232 participants and at least 20 (M = 27.3, SD = 4.84) ratings per self-report scale per picture for a variety of attitude objects on split semantic differential scales. As these scales measure positive and negative evaluations independently, the TUNA database allows to distinguish univalence, neutrality, and ambivalence (i.e., potential ambivalence). TUNA also goes beyond previous databases by validating the stimulus materials on affective outcomes such as experiences of conflict (i.e., felt ambivalence), arousal, anger, disgust, and empathy. The TUNA database consists of 796 pictures and is compatible with other popular databases. It sets a focus on food pictures in various forms (e.g., raw vs. cooked, non-processed vs. highly processed), but includes pictures of other objects that are typically used in research to study univalent (e.g., flowers) and ambivalent (e.g., money, cars) attitudes for comparison. Furthermore, to facilitate the stimulus selection the TUNA database has an accompanying desktop app that allows easy stimulus selection via a ultitude of filter options.

The French Enlightenment is a pivotal period in European intellectual and literary history, which can be studied through this dataset of French novels first published between 1751 and 1800. This collection contains 200 French novels in TEI/XML, encoded according to the ‘level-1 schema’ of the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), and carefully compiled to reflect the known historical publication of French Novels in that period regarding publication year, gender of author and narrative form. The dataset is connected to a bigger knowledge graph of 331,671 Resource Description Framework triples (RDF) built within the project ‘Mining and Modeling Text’ at Trier University, Germany (2019–2023).

Globalization significantly transforms labor markets. Advances in production technologies, transportation, and political integration reshape how and where goods and services are produced. Local economic conditions and diverse policy responses create varying speeds of change, affecting regions' attractiveness for living and working -- and promoting mobility. Competition for talent necessitates a deep understanding of why individuals choose specific destinations, how to ensure their effective labor market integration, and what workplace factors affect workers' well-being. This thesis focuses on two crucial aspects of labor market change -- Migration and workplace technological change. It contributes to our understanding of the determinants of labor mobility, the factors facilitating migrant integration, and the role of workplace automation for worker well-being. Chapter 2 investigates the relationship between minimum wages (MWs) and regional worker mobility in the EU. EU citizens are free to work anywhere in the common market, which allows them to take advantage of the significant variation in MWs across the EU. However, although MWs are set at the national level, it is also their local relevance that varies substantially -- depending on factors such as the share of affected workers or the extent to which they shift local compensation levels. These variations may attract workers from elsewhere, from within a country or from abroad. Analyzing regional variations in the Kaitz index, a measure of local MW impact, reveals that higher MWs can significantly increase inflows of low-skilled EU workers, particularly in central Europe. Chapter 3 examines the inequality in returns to skills experienced by immigrants, focusing on the role of linguistic proximity between migrants' origin and destination countries. Harmonized individual-level data from nine linguistically diverse migrant-hosting economies allows for an analysis of the wage gaps faced by immigrants from various origins, implicitly indicating how well they and their skills are integrated into the local labor markets. The analysis reveals that greater linguistic distance is associated with a higher wage penalty for highly skilled immigrants and a lower position in the wage distribution for those without tertiary education. Chapter 4 investigates an institutional factor potentially relevant for the integration of immigrants -- the labor market impact of Confucius Institutes (CIs), Chinese government-sponsored institutions that promote Chinese language and culture abroad. CIs have been found to foster trade and cultural exchange, indicating their potential relevance in shaping attitudes and trust of natives towards China and Chinese individuals. Examining the relationship between local CI presence and the wages of Chinese immigrants in local labor markets of the United States, the analysis reveals that CIs associate with significantly reduced wages for nearby residing Chinese immigrants. An event study demonstrates that the mere announcement of a new CI negatively impacts local wages for Chinese immigrants, independent of the CI's actual opening. Chapter 5 explores how working in automatable jobs affects life satisfaction in Germany. Following earlier literature, we classify occupations by potential for automation, and define the top third of occupations in this metric as \textit{automatable jobs}. We find workers in highly automatable jobs reporting a lower life satisfaction. Moreover, we detect a non-linearity, where workers in moderately automatable jobs (the second third of the distribution) experience a positive association with life satisfaction. Overall, the negative relationship of automation is most pronounced among younger and blue-collar workers, irrespective of the non-linearity.

Der Trierer Wohnungsmarkt ist in den vergangenen Jahren durch steigende Mieten gekennzeichnet. Dies führt zu Herausforderungen für die Bevölkerung, insbesondere für einkommensschwächere Haushalte. In diesem Atlas zeigen wir diese Entwicklung der Angebotsmieten auf und verdeutlichen, dass der Mietwohnungsmarkt in Teilmärkte segmentiert ist. Angesichts der Preissteigerungen über alle Segmente hinweg ist es notwendig, dass die Diskussion um bezahlbaren Wohnraum und gezielte stadtpolitische Maßnahmen stärker in den Fokus rückt, um langfristig eine soziale Stadtentwicklung Triers zu gewährleisten. Mit diesem Atlas wollen wir daher stadtpolitisch Aktiven und anderen Interessierten Materialien an die Hand geben, um die Wohnungspolitik der Stadt einordnen zu können.

This dissertation addresses the measurement and evaluation of the energy and resource efficiency of software systems. Studies show that the environmental impact of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) is steadily increasing and is already estimated to be responsible for 3 % of the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although it is the hardware that consumes natural resources and energy through its production, use, and disposal, software controls the hardware and therefore has a considerable influence on the used capacities. Accordingly, it should also be attributed a share of the environmental impact. To address this softwareinduced impact, the focus is on the continued development of a measurement and assessment model for energy and resource-efficient software. Furthermore, measurement and assessment methods from international research and practitioner communities were compared in order to develop a generic reference model for software resource and energy measurements. The next step was to derive a methodology and to define and operationalize criteria for evaluating and improving the environmental impact of software products. In addition, a key objective is to transfer the developed methodology and models to software systems that cause high consumption or offer optimization potential through economies of scale. These include, e. g., Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and mobile apps, as well as applications with high demands on computing power or data volumes, such as distributed systems and especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. In particular, factors influencing the consumption of software along its life cycle are considered. These factors include the location (cloud, edge, embedded) where the computing and storage services are provided, the role of the stakeholders, application scenarios, the configuration of the systems, the used data, its representation and transmission, or the design of the software architecture. Based on existing literature and previous experiments, distinct use cases were selected that address these factors. Comparative use cases include the implementation of a scenario in different programming languages, using varying algorithms, libraries, data structures, protocols, model topologies, hardware and software setups, etc. From the selection, experimental scenarios were devised for the use cases to compare the methods to be analyzed. During their execution, the energy and resource consumption was measured, and the results were assessed. Subtracting baseline measurements of the hardware setup without the software running from the scenario measurements makes the software-induced consumption measurable and thus transparent. Comparing the scenario measurements with each other allows the identification of the more energyefficient setup for the use case and, in turn, the improvement/optimization of the system as a whole. The calculated metrics were then also structured as indicators in a criteria catalog. These indicators represent empirically determinable variables that provide information about a matter that cannot be measured directly, such as the environmental impact of the software. Together with verification criteria that must be complied with and confirmed by the producers of the software, this creates a model with which the comparability of software systems can be established. The gained knowledge from the experiments and assessments can then be used to forecast and optimize the energy and resource efficiency of software products. This enables developers, but also students, scientists and all other stakeholders involved in the life cycleof software, to continuously monitor and optimize the impact of their software on energy and resource consumption. The developed models, methods, and criteria were evaluated and validated by the scientific community at conferences and workshops. The central outcomes of this thesis, including a measurement reference model and the criteria catalog, were disseminated in academic journals. Furthermore, the transfer to society has been driven forward, e. g., through the publication of two book chapters, the development and presentation of exemplary best practices at developer conferences, collaboration with industry, and the establishment of the eco-label “Blue Angel” for resource and energy-efficient software products. In the long term, the objective is to effect a change in societal attitudes and ultimately to achieve significant resource savings through economies of scale by applying the methods in the development of software in general and AI systems in particular.

Although universality has fascinated over the last decades, there are still numerous open questions in this field that require further investigation. In this work, we will mainly focus on classes of functions whose Fourier series are universal in the sense that they allow us to approximate uniformly any continuous function defined on a suitable subset of the unit circle. The structure of this thesis is as follows. In the first chapter, we will initially introduce the most important notation which is needed for our following discussion. Subsequently, after recalling the notion of universality in a general context, we will revisit significant results concerning universality of Taylor series. The focus here is particularly on universality with respect to uniform convergence and convergence in measure. By a result of Menshov, we will transition to universality of Fourier series which is the central object of study in this work. In the second chapter, we recall spaces of holomorphic functions which are characterized by the growth of their coefficients. In this context, we will derive a relationship to functions on the unit circle via an application of the Fourier transform. In the second part of the chapter, our attention is devoted to the $\mathcal{D}_{\textup{harm}}^p$ spaces which can be viewed as the set of harmonic functions contained in the $W^{1,p}(\D)$ Sobolev spaces. In this context, we will also recall the Bergman projection. Thanks to the intensive study of the latter in relation to Sobolev spaces, we can derive a decomposition of $\mathcal{D}_{\textup{harm}}^p$ spaces which may be seen as analogous to the Riesz projection for $L^p$ spaces. Owing to this result, we are able to provide a link between $\mathcal{D}_{\textup{harm}}^p$ spaces and spaces of holomorphic functions on $\mathbb{C}_\infty \setminus \s$ which turns out to be a crucial step in determining the dual of $\mathcal{D}_{\textup{harm}}^p$ spaces. The last section of this chapter deals with the Cauchy dual which has a close connection to the Fantappié transform. As an application, we will determine the Cauchy dual of the spaces $D_\alpha$ and $D_{\textup{harm}}^p$, two results that will prove to be very helpful later on. Finally, we will provide a useful criterion that establishes a connection between the density of a set in the direct sum $X \oplus Y$ and the Cauchy dual of the intersection of the respective spaces. The subsequent chapter will delve into the theory of capacities and, consequently, potential theory which will prove to be essential in formulating our universality results. In addition to introducing further necessary terminologies, we will define capacities in the first section following [16], however in the frame of separable metric spaces, and revisit the most important results about them. Simultaneously, we make preparations that allow us to define the $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacity which will turn out to be equivalent to the classical Riesz $\alpha$-capacity. The $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacity proves to be more adapted to the $D_\alpha$ spaces. It becomes apparent in the course of our discussion that the $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacity is essential to prove uniqueness results for the class $D_\alpha$. This leads to the centerpiece of this chapter which forms the energy formula for the $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacity on the unit circle. More precisely, this identity establishes a connection between the energy of a measure and its corresponding Fourier coefficients. We will briefly deal with the complement-equivalence of capacities before we revisit the concept of Bessel and Riesz capacities, this time, however, in a much more general context, where we will mainly rely on [1]. Since we defined capacities on separable metric spaces in the first section, we can draw a connection between Bessel capacities and $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacities. To conclude this chapter, we would like to take a closer look at the geometric meaning of capacities. Here, we will point out a connection between the Hausdorff dimension and the polarity of a set, and transfer it to the $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacity. Another aspect will be the comparison of Bessel capacities across different dimensions, in which the theory of Wolff potentials crystallizes as a crucial auxiliary tool. In the fourth chapter of this thesis, we will turn our focus to the theory of sets of uniqueness, a subject within the broader field of harmonic analysis. This theory has a close relationship with sets of universality, a connection that will be further elucidated in the upcoming chapter. The initial section of this chapter will be dedicated to the notion of sets of uniqueness that is specifically adapted to our current context. Building on this concept, we will recall some of the fundamental results of this theory. In the subsequent section, we will primarily rely on techniques from previous chapters to determine the closed sets of uniqueness for the class $\mathcal{D}_{\alpha}$. The proofs we will discuss are largely influenced by [16, p.\ 178] and [9, pp.\ 82]. One more time, it will become evident that the introduction of the $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-capacity in the third chapter and the closely associated energy formula on the unit circle, were the pivotal factors that enabled us to carry out these proofs. In the final chapter of our discourse, we will present our results on universality. To begin, we will recall a version of the universality criterion which traces back to the work of Grosse-Erdmann (see [26]). Coupled with an outcome from the second chapter, we will prove a result that allows us to obtain the universality of a class using the technique of simultaneous approximation. This tool will play a key role in the proof of our universality results which will follow hereafter. Our attention will first be directed toward the class $D_\alpha$ with $\alpha$ in the interval $(0,1]$. Here, we summarize that universality with respect to uniform convergence occurs on closed and $\alpha$-polar sets $E \subset \s$. Thanks to results of Carleson and further considerations, which particularly rely on the favorable behavior of the $\mathrm{Li}_\alpha$-kernel, we also find that this result is sharp. In particular, it may be seen as a generalization of the universality result for the harmonic Dirichlet space. Following this, we will investigate the same class, however, this time for $\alpha \in [-1,0)$. In this case, it turns out that universality with respect to uniform convergence occurs on closed and $(-\alpha)$-complement-polar sets $E \subset \s$. In particular, these sets of universality can have positive arc measure. In the final section, we will focus on the class $D_{\textup{harm}}^p$. Here, we manage to prove that universality occurs on closed and $(1,p)$-polar sets $E \subset \s$. Through results of Twomey [68] combined with an observation by Girela and Pélaez [23], as well as the decomposition of $D_{\textup{harm}}^p$, we can deduce that the closed sets of universality with respect to uniform convergence of the class $D_{\textup{harm}}^p$ are characterized by $(1,p)$-polarity. We conclude our work with an application of the latter result to the class $D^p$. We will show that the closed sets of divergence for the class $D^p$ are given by the $(1,p)$-polar sets.