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After some of the major war criminals of the 20th century had been prosecuted for crimes against peace before the International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, the so-called 'mother of all crimes' vanished from the international scene just as quickly as it had appeared before. This suggested that the conviction of high-ranking state officials for the illegitimate use of force against other countries would remain a one-off event in the history of mankind. It was...

The cluster concept is associated with great hopes for growth and the resulting positive employment and income effects at regional level. Due to a concentration of companies and organizations in the same industry, competitive advantages can arise for the local companies, but these do not necessarily have to be permanent. Nevertheless, in anticipation of positive regional development, cluster funding has established itself as a central component of economic policy in recent years. Based on three case studies of the packaging...

The monotypic tropical tree species Hagenia abyssinica (Rosaceae) is an anemogamous and anemochorous broad-leaved dioecious tree species native to Africa. Fossil pollen evidence suggests that it immigrated into Ethiopia from the south during the late Pleistocene. The chloroplast haplotypes identified in Hagenia are grouped into two lineages and demonstrated a strong pattern of congruence between their geographical distribution and genealogical relationships. Restricted gene flow through seeds, contiguous range expansion, mutation and rare long-distance dispersal shaped the genetic structure in the...

The max-cut problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem defined on undirected weighted graphs. It consists in finding a subset of the graph's nodes such that the aggregate weight of the edges between the subset and its complement is maximized. This book deals with a new separation approach to be used within a branch-and-cut algorithm for solving max-cut problems to optimality. The method is based on graph contraction and allows the fast separation of so-called odd-cycle inequalities. In addition, we...

The disease diabetes mellitus represents a major health and economic problem. In industrialized countries, the prevalence is estimated at 6-8%. In the present work, the care situation of patients with type 2 diabetes was analyzed using the patient database "Disease Analyzer" and 6 published studies were summarized. In addition to examining the validity of the database, the temporal development of the prevalence of diabetes mellitus and antidiabetic therapies was analyzed, the most important oral antidiabetic substance classes and insulin therapies...

In past decades, miniaturization of materials was immanent in all fields of technology, especially in semiconductor industry. Nowadays, miniaturization of semiconducting compounds has reached a level where established manufacturing processes reach their technical limits. Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) offers an alternative method for the deposition of ultra-thin metallic films, which is a crucial step in the fabrication of semiconducting compounds. Based on a chemical reaction between surface and gas phase, ALD is a process which touches both synthetic chemistry and...

Tropical rainforests are hostspots of biodiversity. Therefore, their species' richness and sustainability are of central importance. However, during the last decades, the destruction of tropical forest, mainly by illegal logging, has severely degraded the tropical rainforests. In terms of forest certification, timber identification of tree species and their origin are recently being applied for monitoring and control of illegal activities and thereby aiming at the conservation of tropical forests. The development of molecular methods (e.g. genetic fingerprints) as tools for...

This book contributes to the empirical literature on poverty, mortality and labor supply in developing countries. Each of the three essays included in this book make use of new household data sets that were collected to innovatively address a well-defined research problem. The first chapter investigates the relationship between undernutrition and child mortality in sub-Sahara Africa and explains why children around Lake Victoria have very low chances to survive up to age 5 despite being extremely wellnourished. The second chapter...

The drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus) is an endangered, terrestrial primate endemic to the Lower Guinean rainforests between the Cross and Sanaga Rivers and on the island of Bioko in Central Africa. Rarely studied in the wild, the current status and ecological needs of the species are poorly understood. The book presents data on drill diet, seed handling, group size and structure, and conservation status from a study in the Korup National Park, Cameroon. Ecological findings are compared to reports from the...

Simulation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is based on the Bloch equation. Solving the Bloch equation numerically is not difficult, but realistic imaging experiments bear a high computational burden. In his dissertation, Cristoffer Cordes presents simulation methods that exploit hardware restrictions and the common structure of MRI sequences while not enforcing any approximations. These strategies use the reoccurrence of radiofrequency pulses, partial availability of analytical solutions, a reformulation of the problem in Fourier space and finally an inclusion of the...

This study report examines the emergency service of public and private ambulance services in Namibia. The structure, allocation and location of the emergency services and the resulting behavior of the population are the focus of the research. The investigation uses a policy analysis to describe and explain the system configuration at the time of the survey and the emergence of the system. To achieve this, the policy cycle as well as the policy network get subjected to a consideration and...

The demographic change forced Germany and other industrialized countries to bring their pension systems back on a sustainable track. This development has increased the responsibility of each individual regarding old-age income. The affected individuals are forced to intensify their savings to close the increasing gap between public pension income and the standard of living experienced during one's working life. This book investigates several empirical and methodological aspects of households' saving behavior including some in relation to the background of the...