Peter Krause

Many of the world's states—from Algeria to Ireland to the United States—are the result of robust national movements that achieved independence. Many other national movements have failed in their attempts to achieve statehood, including the Basques, the Kurds, and the Palestinians. In Rebel Power, Peter Krause offers a powerful new theory to explain this variation focusing on the internal balance of power among nationalist groups, who cooperate with each other to establish a new state while simultaneously competing to lead it. The most powerful groups push to achieve states while they are in position to rule them, whereas weaker groups unlikely to gain the spoils of office are likely to become spoilers, employing risky, escalatory violence to forestall victory while they improve their position in the movement hierarchy. Hegemonic movements with one dominant group are therefore more likely to achieve statehood than internally competitive, fragmented movements due to their greater pursuit of victory and lesser use of counterproductive violence. Krause conducted years of fieldwork in government and nationalist group archives in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, as well as more than 150 interviews with participants in the Palestinian, Zionist, Algerian, and Irish national movements. This research generated comparative longitudinal analyses of these four national movements involving 40 groups in 44 campaigns over a combined 140 years of struggle. Krause identifies new turning points in the history of these movements and provides fresh explanations for their use of violent and nonviolent strategies, as well as their numerous successes and failures. Rebel Power is essential reading for understanding not only the history of national movements but also the causes and consequences of contentious collective action today, from the Arab Spring to the civil wars and insurgencies in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Many of the world's states—from Algeria to Ireland to the United States—are the result of robust national movements that achieved independence. Many other national movements have failed in their attempts to achieve statehood, including the Basques, the Kurds, and the Palestinians. In Rebel Power, Peter Krause offers a powerful new theory to explain this variation focusing on the internal balance of power among nationalist groups, who cooperate with each other to establish a new state while simultaneously competing to lead it. The most powerful groups push to achieve states while they are in position to rule them, whereas weaker groups unlikely to gain the spoils of office are likely to become spoilers, employing risky, escalatory violence to forestall victory while they improve their position in the movement hierarchy. Hegemonic movements with one dominant group are therefore more likely to achieve statehood than internally competitive, fragmented movements due to their greater pursuit of victory and lesser use of counterproductive violence. Krause conducted years of fieldwork in government and nationalist group archives in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, as well as more than 150 interviews with participants in the Palestinian, Zionist, Algerian, and Irish national movements. This research generated comparative longitudinal analyses of these four national movements involving 40 groups in 44 campaigns over a combined 140 years of struggle. Krause identifies new turning points in the history of these movements and provides fresh explanations for their use of violent and nonviolent strategies, as well as their numerous successes and failures. Rebel Power is essential reading for understanding not only the history of national movements but also the causes and consequences of contentious collective action today, from the Arab Spring to the civil wars and insurgencies in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Evolution strategies have more than 50 years of history in the field of evolutionary computation. Since the early 1990s, many algorithmic variations of evolution strategies have been developed, characterized by the fact that they use the so-called derandomization concept for strategy parameter adaptation. Most importantly, the covariance matrix adaptation strategy (CMA-ES) and its successors are the key representatives of this group of contemporary evolution strategies. This book provides an overview of the key algorithm developments between 1990 and 2012, including brief descriptions of the algorithms, a unified pseudocode representation of each algorithm, and program code which is available for download. In addition, a taxonomy of these algorithms is provided to clarify similarities and differences as well as historical relationships between the various instances of evolution strategies. Moreover, due to the authors’ focus on industrial applications of nonlinear optimization, all algorithms are empirically compared on the so-called BBOB (Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking) test function suite, and ranked according to their performance. In contrast to classical academic comparisons, however, only a very small number of objective function evaluations is permitted. In particular, an extremely small number of evaluations, such as between one hundred and one thousand for high-dimensional functions, is considered. This is motivated by the fact that many industrial optimization tasks do not permit more than a few hundred evaluations. Our experiments suggest that evolution strategies are powerful nonlinear direct optimizers even for challenging industrial problems with a very small budget of function evaluations. The book is suitable for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners.

Es ist gar nicht schwer, gute Ideen in kleinen Vorhaben in die Tat umzusetzen. Man schafft sich selbst und anderen damit sofort und einfach Freude. Man wird aktiv, bringt Farbe in den Alltag und entdeckt vielleicht, dass man viel mehr kann, als man immer geglaubt hat. Die Erfahrung, mit den eigenen F higkeiten anderen einfach so eine Freude zu machen, bringt neuen Schwung und Leben in den Tag. Dieses Buch ist so aufgebaut, dass mit kleinen Lektionen und Aufgaben neue Erfahrungen dar ber erm glicht werden, wie wohltuend es ist, im kleinen, privaten Rahmen, zusammen mit Familie oder Freunden an der Verbesserung des Lebens mitzuwirken. Es wird aufgezeigt, wie jeder Mensch in seinem Alltag damit beginnen kann, kulturkreativ zu sein.

Evolution strategies have more than 50 years of history in the field of evolutionary computation. Since the early 1990s, many algorithmic variations of evolution strategies have been developed, characterized by the fact that they use the so-called derandomization concept for strategy parameter adaptation. Most importantly, the covariance matrix adaptation strategy (CMA-ES) and its successors are the key representatives of this group of contemporary evolution strategies. This book provides an overview of the key algorithm developments between 1990 and 2012, including brief descriptions of the algorithms, a unified pseudocode representation of each algorithm, and program code which is available for download. In addition, a taxonomy of these algorithms is provided to clarify similarities and differences as well as historical relationships between the various instances of evolution strategies. Moreover, due to the authors’ focus on industrial applications of nonlinear optimization, all algorithms are empirically compared on the so-called BBOB (Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking) test function suite, and ranked according to their performance. In contrast to classical academic comparisons, however, only a very small number of objective function evaluations is permitted. In particular, an extremely small number of evaluations, such as between one hundred and one thousand for high-dimensional functions, is considered. This is motivated by the fact that many industrial optimization tasks do not permit more than a few hundred evaluations. Our experiments suggest that evolution strategies are powerful nonlinear direct optimizers even for challenging industrial problems with a very small budget of function evaluations. The book is suitable for academic and industrial researchers and practitioners.

Trier, die alteste deutsche Stadt, barg im Rahmen ihrer Universitat auch eine Juristische Fakultat. Diese hatte zwar seit ihrer Grundung gegen erhebliche Konkurrenz zu kampfen, vermittelte jedoch solide Kenntnisse und zog deshalb Studenten von weither an, v.a. aus Metz, Toul, Verdun, Luttich und Westfalen. Trotz geringer Gehalter waren die Professoren wohlhabend, da ihre Kenntnisse in der Rechtsberatung kirchlicher und staatlicher Stellen gefragt waren und von dort die notigen Einkunfte flossen. Das Buch zeichnet die Geschichte dieser Fakultat bis zu ihrer Auflosung 1798 nach, bietet Kurzbiographien aller Professoren sowie eine Liste der Rektoren, Dekane, Professoren, Doktoren und Studenten. Damit stellt die Studie zugleich eine ergiebige Quelle fur die Landes-, Familien- und Bildungsgeschichte dar. Das hier erstmals veroffentlichte Statutenbuch erschliesst die inneren Verhaltnisse dieser ehrwurdigen Fakultat.