Frank Hopfgartner Books

Income Redistribution income is a main characteristic of the modern welfare state. With the latest reforms in the social security system, the German government passed legislation implying less redistribution towards citizens with low incomes. In light of the heated public debate, the author asks whether Hartz IV-like reforms really mirror the general perception of government responsibilities. Analyzing pooled survey data, she investigates determinants of West Germans preferences for income redistribution and detects a pronounced downward trend over time. Since the trend strongly differs from that of other democratic countries and since strong fluctuations in the early 1990s are observed, the author investigates whether the German Reunification might account for country-specific differences. By means of a politico-economic approach, hypotheses are developed and preferences are linked to the personal income situation, economic growth or social attitudes. While the micro-econometric analysis identifies a Reunification effect, general findings are of relevance to all parties interested in learning more about the Germans perception of the welfare state – including policy makers.

With the improving capabilities of current hardware systems, there are ever growing possibilities to store and manipulate videos in a digital format, leading to a growing number of video archives. People build their own digital libraries from materials created through digital cameras and camcorders, and use systems such as YouTube to place this material on the web. Unfortunately, this data creation prowess is not matched by any comparable tools to organise and retrieve video information. There is a need to create new retrieval engines to assist the users in searching and finding video scenes they would like to see from many different video files. Unlike text retrieval systems, retrieval on digital video datasets is facing a serious problem: The Semantic Gap. This is the difference between low-level data representation of videos and the higher level concepts user associates with video. This book introduces several approaches to bridge this semantic gap, explains different evaluation strategies and presents state-of-the-art video retrieval tools. The target audience is everyone who is interested in getting to know the research approaches that led to the popular video retrieval tools.