Jan Peter Toennies: an ebullient serendipitous adventurer

The Peter Principle: An Experiment

The Peter Principle: An Experiment The Peter Principle states that, after a promotion, the observed output of promoted employees tends to fall. Lazear (2004) models this principle as resulting from a regression to the mean of the transitory component of ability. Our experiment reproduces this model in the laboratory by means of various treatments in which we alter the variance of the transitory...

Thomas Dover: Physician and Merchant Adventurer

∗ Jan

We formulate a complete path integral bosonization procedure for any fermionic theory in two dimensions. The classical action of the bosons in the bosonized theory is −i times the logarithm of the Jacobian of a local chiral transformation, with the boson fields as transformation parameters. Three examples, the Schwinger model, the massive Thirring model and massive non-Abelian bosonization, are...

Serendipitous Interoperability

This article will discuss issues of interoperability of Web Services. Semantic Web technologies, when applied to current Web Service architectures, will enable true automation and interoperation, and will “futureproof” systems unlike a priori standardization approaches. We will extend the Semantic Web approach to Web Services to Ubiquitous Computing: By abstracting device functionality via soft...

Searching for Serendipitous Analogies

Analogical reasoning is an acknowledged process behind many episodes of creativity. Typically, the creator chances upon information unrelated to the given problem – and solves the problem by analogy with this accidental source of inspiration. Current models of analogical retrieval do not explain how semantically unrelated source domains are retrieved. We present the RADAR algorithm that maps do...