Germany

This lab course (Praktikum) trains in video encoding and transmission over communication networks. A particular focus will be on wireless and mobile networks, which are becoming increasingly important. After a successful completion the students are capable of encoding video clips, assessing the video quality using objective video quality metrics, and streaming the video. The students will further acquire the basics in the field of wireless communication - interference, broadcast communication medium, rate and power control. They will build up technical expertise on MAC and routing protocol behaviour in wireless mesh networking environments through various experiment set-up and performance evaluations.

Economic inequalities are prevalent and persistent around the world. In this seminar, we will tackle the question of how economic inequality intersects with the political realm. In the first half of the seminar, students will gain an overview of the national and global structure of inequality along indicators like income and wealth. We will analyze, what perceptions of inequality people have and which beliefs accompany them. Furthermore, we will engage with theories on how one’s economic circumstances might impact political preferences and behavior.  In the second half, we will look at studies connecting people’s economic realities and their policy preferences, policy responsiveness, political participation and voting behavior. We will especially focus on redistributive and economic policy priorities as well as radical voting patterns.

This lecture introduces and analyzes the different aspects categorized under social psychology. Some topics include social cognition, aggression versus prosocial behavior, group dynamics, and how attitudes develop and vary. Additionally, students will learn how to analyze different studies and theories and apply them to themselves and other real life scenarios.

This course aims to introduce students to the sociological study of social inequalities. That is, to gain a broad understanding of the social processes through which some end up having more resources than others and through which some become included and some excluded. In the introductory sessions, we will begin by defining social inequality and its relevant dimensions, learning about its trends in Europe and the world as well as its pernicious effects for society. Students will also learn key sociological concepts such as social class, social mobility, and ethnoracial categorization processes. In the second part of the course students will be introduced to some of sociology’s most studied mechanisms that help explain the perpetuation of inequalities in a wide range of contexts such as cumulative advantage, opportunity hoarding, discrimination, boundary making, and social networks. As a next step we will learn about some of the most relevant engines of inequality such as families and schools, labor markets, tax systems, extreme weather events, and migration systems. We will end the course by learning about how to tackle inequality. We will discuss how acceptance or opposition to it comes about and reflect on sociology’s relevance in addressing societal disparities.

How does constrained writing paradoxically open up language? What overt and covert strategies have authors used to create work that is highly formal but also highly playful? The Paris-based literary movement OuLiPo has been the headquarters of constrained writing since its inception in the middle of the last century. The group is well-known for writers like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino but has also had a considerable presence in English, from members like Harry Matthews and Ian Monk to the Feminist OuLiPo collective, Foulipo. In this seminar we will focus on OuLiPo and OuLiPo-adjacent output in English; readings include Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature edited by Warren F. Motte.

In this course, you will create a graphical action game in Python. In the process, you will learn fundamental concepts and tools that programmers use. The course will guide you step by step from a first prototype to a working game. By the end of the course, you will deploy your game to a live website. No previous programming knowledge is required.

Borders within and surrounding Europe have moved repeatedly throughout history, but rarely so frequently or so violently as during the 20th century. This class examines how processes of bordering and de-bordering since the First World War have shaped European states and peoples. It explores notions of territoriality, the construction and dismantling of borders, migration and forced migration, subversive social practices and ambiguous identities in borderlands. Case studies covered in class and in further readings focus primarily on East-Central Europe, including the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, German-Polish borderlands, divided Cold War Germany, and the European Union.

Biomechanics, as a growing field of engineering, has many applications in the health and sport sectors. This broad field of study includes the design of artificial implants, the development of human tissues in the lab, the measurement of human movement and the detection and treatment of pathological conditions, the understanding of the performance of our muscles and how to employ it in sport, the diagnosis of injuries, the imaging of biological tissues and the detection of their pathological state, etc. In this course, the fundamental principles of biomechanics and their application to real life situations will be covered including: basic understanding of the application of mechanical principles in biology, understanding of anatomical and biomechanical terminology, application of biomechanical principles to human movement, basic understanding of the mechanical properties of biological tissues and the techniques used to determine them, and more recent advanced topics such as mechanics of cells, tissue imaging and tissue engineering. Participants should have successfully completed courses in engineering mechanics and materials science and possess knowledge on programming software.

This lecture provides the basics of areodynamics of bluff bodies, ground vehicles and buildings. The focus is on passenger cars. The students will be enabled to analyze and identify sources of aerodynamics forces for these objects in order to improve performance, reduce energy consumption or to incease passenger comfort. The methods include wind tunnel experiments and numerical simulation (CFD). The students will be trained in reading and summarizing scientific publications through presentations.

The course deals with flows around blunt (bluff) bodies, which either move along the ground (e.g. automobiles, trucks, trains) or lie stationary in the path of a flow (e.g. buildings). The content include: - Introduction to the aerodynamics of blunt bodies. - Fundamental mechanisms for lift and drag of automobiles. - Methods of reducing drag by means of lift production. - Aspects to the design of automobiles taking into account the flow around and through the body. - Overview of numeric and experimental methods of investigation. - Introduction of the aerodynamics of high-speed trains - Introduction to aerodynamics of buildings and environment Experiments with a 25% scaled car model will be carried out in the large wind tunnel of the TU-Berlin.

This seminar course will engage with key readings and positions in the wider field of anthropology of ethics and morality as they have been shaped and discussed within and beyond anthropology. We shall be engaged in critical readings of programmatic texts and different kinds of approaches, focusing in particularly on the readings of ethnographies (as articles, or key chapters). Readings will include work on the ‘ethnography of moralities’, and particularly approaches focusing on the workings of ethics in ordinary everyday life (e.g. Lambek, Das, Keane, Fassin), as well as the anthropology of Islam (e.g. Mahmood; Hirschkind; Marsden, Schielke), and overall conceptual approaches (e.g. Laidlaw; Faubion). We may also engage with earlier writings (to grasp the history of intellectual trajectories), and with particular writings on human sharing, suffering and persevering, trying to assess what we can gain from here. Critical readings of these approaches and their critical reception, particularly within the field of interpretive and existentialist anthropology, will guide our course discussions – which seek to address aspects of ethnographic description and critical conceptualization in a balanced manner. Thereby, we will also pursue recent questions about the integration of ethical perspectives and/or moral universes from the global South into theorizing (asking how much/ how far this may have been done); and we will consider decolonial demands for theory to work with and be built on concepts from the global South (e.g. Menon 2022). Which kind of concepts, and what kind of writers from there could enrich, enhance, or re-focus recent approaches and debates in an adequate manner? These are open questions, for critical and open-minded engagements in close readings.