Though environmental inequality research has gained extensive interest in the United States, it has received far less attention in Europe and Germany. The main objective of this book is to extend the research on environmental inequality in Germany. This book aims to shed more light on the question of whether minorities in Germany are affected by a disproportionately high burden of environmental pollution, and to increase the general knowledge about the causal mechanisms, which contribute to the unequal distribution of environmental hazards across the population. To improve our knowledge about environmental inequality in Germany, this book extends previous research in several ways. First, to evaluate the extent of environmental inequality, this book relies on two different data sources. On the on hand, it uses household-level survey data and self-reports about the impairment through air pollution. On the other hand, it combines aggregated census data and objective register-based measures of industrial air pollution by using geographic information systems (GIS). Consequently, this book offers the first analysis of environmental inequality on the national level that uses objective measures of air pollution in Germany. Second, to evaluate the causes of environmental inequality, this book applies a panel data analysis on the household level, thereby offering the first longitudinal analysis of selective migration processes outside the United States. Third, it compares the level of environmental inequality between German metropolitan areas and evaluates to which extent the theoretical arguments of environmental inequality can explain differing levels of environmental inequality across the country. By doing so, this book not only investigates the impact of indicators derived by the standard strand of theoretical reasoning but also includes structural characteristics of the urban space. All studies presented in this book confirm the disproportionate exposure of minorities to environmental pollution. Minorities live in more polluted areas in Germany but also in more polluted parts of the communities, and this disadvantage is most severe in metropolitan regions. Though this book finds evidence for selective migration processes contributing to the disproportionate exposure of minorities to environmental pollution, it also stresses the importance of urban conditions. Especially cities with centrally located industrial facilities yield a high level of environmental inequality. This poses the question of whether environmental inequality might be the result of two independent processes: 1) urban infrastructure confines residential choices of minorities to the urban core, and 2) urban infrastructure facilitates centrally located industries. In combination, both processes lead to a disproportionate burden of minority households.

Computational problems that involve dynamic data, such as physics simulations and program development environments, have been an important subject of study in programming languages. Recent advances in self-adjusting computation made progress towards achieving efficient incremental computation by providing algorithmic language abstractions to express computations that respond automatically to dynamic changes in their inputs. Selfadjusting programs have been shown to be efficient for a broad range of problems via an explicit programming style, where the programmer uses specific primitives to identify, create and operate on data that can change over time. This dissertation presents implicit self-adjusting computation, a type directed technique for translating purely functional programs into self-adjusting programs. In this implicit approach, the programmer annotates the (toplevel) input types of the programs to be translated. Type inference finds all other types, and a type-directed translation rewrites the source program into an explicitly self-adjusting target program. The type system is related to information-flow type systems and enjoys decidable type inference via constraint solving. We prove that the translation outputs well-typed self-adjusting programs and preserves the source program’s input-output behavior, guaranteeing that translated programs respond correctly to all changes to their data. Using a cost semantics, we also prove that the translation preserves the asymptotic complexity of the source program. As a second contribution, we present two techniques to facilitate the processing of large and dynamic data in self-adjusting computation. First, we present a type system for precise dependency tracking that minimizes the time and space for storing dependency metadata. The type system improves the scalability of self-adjusting computation by eliminating an important assumption of prior work that can lead to recording spurious dependencies. We present a type-directed translation algorithm that generates correct selfadjusting programs without relying on this assumption. Second, we show a probabilistic-chunking technique to further decrease space usage by controlling the fundamental space-time tradeoff in self-adjusting computation. We implement implicit self-adjusting computation as an extension to Standard ML with compiler and runtime support. Using the compiler, we are able to incrementalize an interesting set of applications, including standard list and matrix benchmarks, ray tracer, PageRank, sparse graph connectivity, and social circle counts. Our experiments show that our compiler incrementalizes existing code with only trivial amounts of annotation, and the resulting programs bring asymptotic improvements to large datasets from real-world applications, leading to orders of magnitude speedups in practice.

Eine Anpassung von Wasserversorgungs- und Abwasserentsorgungssystemen im ländlichen Raum kann aufgrund vielfältiger Herausforderungen wie demografischen, siedlungsstrukturellen und klimatischen Veränderungen erforderlich werden. Im Zuge dessen können auch die Nachhaltigkeit und Ressourceneffizienz der bestehenden Systeme gesteigert werden. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Ableitung von Handlungsempfehlungen zur Unterstützung der notwendigen Anpassungsprozesse der Abwasserentsorgung ländlicher Gemeinden. Dazu werden verschiedene Transformationspfade für Abwassersysteme aufgezeigt und analysiert. In dieser Arbeit wird ein softwaregestütztes Entscheidungs- und Optimierungssystem angewendet und evaluiert, dass optimale Anpassungsmöglichkeiten aufgezeigt. Das gemischt-ganzzahlige lineare Optimierungsmodell berechnet für jede Gemeinde in Abhängigkeit von dem ausgewählten Szenario und vorgegebenen Zielen den optimalen Transformationspfad mit seiner zeitlichen und räumlichen Umsetzung. In den Szenarien werden zukünftige Entwicklungen der Bevölkerung, der Siedlungsstruktur, des Wasserbedarfs, der Kosten technischer Anlagen und des Klimawandels berücksichtigt. Die Zielfunktion bildet sich aus der gewichteten Summe ökonomischer, ökologischer und sozialer Bewertungskriterien. Die beispielhafte Anwendung des Modells erfolgt für zwei repräsentative ländliche Modellkommunen in Rheinland-Pfalz. Durch eine detaillierte Auswertung und Evaluierung von ausgewählten Kombinationen von Szenarien und Bewertungskriterien kann das Spektrum an möglichen Transformationspfaden von der Erhaltung des zentralen Systems bis hin zu dezentralen und ressourcenorientierten Systemen aufgezeigt werden. Sensitivitätsbetrachtungen zeigen, dass die Auswahl und Gewichtung der Bewertungskriterien und die lokalen Randbedingungen der Gemeinde einen größeren Einfluss auf die resultierende Transformationspfade haben als die Auswahl der Szenarien. Der Zustand des Entwässerungssystems wie der Anteil alter Kanäle, ein großer Anteil Mischsystem, große Durchmesser und eine große Kanallänge pro Einwohner sowie eine niedrige Siedlungsdichte fördern dezentrale Strukturen und sind geeignete Voraussetzungen für einen Systemwechsel. Bei der Priorisierung der Ziele Flexibilität, Wasserbilanz und Wasserrecycling wird die Dezentralisierung eines Systems mit Kleinkläranlagen favorisiert. Ein ressourcenorientiertes System mit einer Grau- und Schwarzwassertrennung ist nur zukünftig vorteilhaft, wenn die Ziele Wasserrecycling, Nährstoffrecycling und/oder Energieeffizienz priorisiert werden. Wenn ein Systemwechsel vollzogen werden soll, müssen auch die Auswirkungen auf die Wasserversorgung und Abwasserreinigung untersucht werden. Es kann gezeigt werden, dass bei einer abnehmenden Bevölkerung dezentrale und ressourcenorientierte Systeme im ländlichen Raum eine Alternative darstellen. Zur Begleitung von Transformationsprozessen ist die Verwendung einer adäquaten Methodik zum Aufzeigen von verschiedenen Systemalternativen (z.B. mathematische Optimierung) zielführend.

Im Fokus dieser Promotionsarbeit stand die Synthese neuer kationischer Eisenkomplexe, die sowohl einen Cyclopentadienyl-, als auch einen Phenylliganden besitzen. Der Sechsringligand wurde dabei mit stickstoff- oder phosphorhaltigen Substituenten funktionalisiert. Dabei konnten erstmals Eisenarenkomplexe mit Azidobenzolliganden isoliert und charakterisiert werden. Die Umsetzung mit heterocyclischen Nucleophilen zeigte bei den 1,2,3-Triazolen die Möglichkeit in 1- und 2-Position eine Bindungsknüpfung einzugehen. Dies konnte durch die Verwendung von Imidazolidsalzen umgangen werden und so konnte eine Reihe mono- und disubstituierter Eisenkomplexe mit Methylimidazol und Benzimidazol synthetisiert werden. Durch Alkylierung und Benzylierung gelang auf diesem Weg der Zugang zu di- und trikationischen Eisenarenkomplexen, welche die Vorstufe zu NHC-Komplexen bilden. Für die Funktionalisierung mit phosphorhaltigen Gruppen konnte ein Syntheseweg erarbeitet und auf disubstituierte Komplexe übertragen werden. Es gelang durch die Koordination von Gold einen kationischen heterobimetallischen Komplex zu synthetisieren und vollständig zu charakterisieren. Dieser zeigte in mehreren Cyclisierungsreaktionen hohe katalytische Aktivität, welche über der literaturbekannter Katalysatoren lag. Mitunter konnten vergleichbare Umsätze unter milderen Bedingungen erzielt werden.

Increasing costs due to the rising attrition of drug candidates in late developmental phases alongside post-marketing withdrawal of drugs challenge the pharmaceutical industry to further improve their current preclinical safety assessment strategies. One of the most common reasons for the termination of drug candidates is drug induced hepatotoxicity, which more often than not remains undetected in early developmental stages, thus emphasizing the necessity for improved and more predictive preclinical test systems. One reason for the very limited value of currently applied in vitro test systems for the detection of potential hepatotoxic liabilities is the lack of organotypic and tissue-specific physiology of hepatocytes cultured in ordinary monolayer culture formats. The thesis at hand primarily deals with the evaluation of both two- and three-dimensional cell culture approaches with respect to their relative ability to predict the hepatotoxic potential of drug candidates in early developmental phases. First, different hepatic cell models, which are routinely used in pharmaceutical industry (primary human hepatocytes as well as the three cell lines HepG2, HepaRG and Upcyte hepatocytes), were investigated in conventional 2D monolayer culture with respect to their ability to detect hepatotoxic effects in simple cytotoxicity studies. Moreover, it could be shown that the global protein expression levels of all cell lines substantially differ from that of primary human hepatocytes, with the least pronounced difference in HepaRG cells. The introduction of a third dimension through the cultivation of spheroids enables hepatocytes to recapitulate their typical native polarity and furthermore dramatically increases the contact surface of adjacent cells. These differences in cellular architecture have a positive influence on hepatocyte longevity and the expression of drug metabolizing enzymes and transporters, which could be proven via immunofluorescent (IF) staining for at least 14 days in PHH and at least 28 days in HepaRG spheroids, respectively. Additionally, the IF staining of three different phase III transporters (MDR1, MRP2 and BSEP) indicated a bile canalicular network in spheroids of both cell models. A dose-dependent inducibility of important cytochrome P450 isoenzymes in HepaRG spheroids could be shown on the protein level via IF for at least 14 days. CYP inducibility of HepaRG cells cultured in 2D and 3D was compared on the mRNA level for up to 14 days and inducibility was generally lower in 3D compared to 2D under the conditions of this study. In a comparative cytotoxicity study, both PHH and HepaRG spheroids as well as HepaRG monolayers have been treated with five hepatotoxic drugs for up to 14 days and viability was measured at three time points (days 3, 7 and 14). A clear time- and dose-dependent onset of the drug-induced hepatotoxic effects was observable in all conditions tested, indicated by a shift of the respective EC50 value towards lower doses by increasing exposure. The observed effects were most pronounced in PHH spheroids, thus indicating those as the most sensitive cell model in this study. Moreover, HepaRG cells were more sensitive in spheroid culture compared to monolayers, which suggests a potential application of spheroids as long-term test system for the detection of hepatotoxicities with slow onset. Finally, the basal protein expression levels of three antigens (CYP1A2, CYP3A4 and NAT 1/2) were analyzed via Western Blotting in HepaRG cells cultured in three different cell culture formats (2D, 3D and QV) in order to estimate the impact of the cell culture conditions on protein expression levels. In the QV system enables a pump-driven flow of cell culture media, which introduces both mechanical stimuli through shear and molecular stimuli through dynamic circulation to the monolayer. Those stimuli resulted in a clearly positive effect on the expression levels of the selected antigens by an increased expression level in comparison to both 2D and 3D. In contrast, HepaRG spheroids showed time-dependent differences with the overall highest levels at day 7. The studies presented in this thesis delivered valuable information on the increased physiological relevance in dependence on the cell culture format: three-dimensionality as well as the circulation of media lead to a more differentiated phenotype in hepatic cell models. Those cell culture formats are applicable in preclinical drug development in order to obtain more relevant information at early developmental stages and thus help to create a more efficient drug development process. Nonetheless, further studies are necessary to thoroughly characterize, validate and standardize such novel cell culture approaches prior to their routine application in industry.