@phdthesis{Brachs2015, author = {Brachs, Maria}, title = {Genome wide expression analysis and metabolic mechanisms predicting body weight maintenance}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-100767}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {106}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Obesity is a major health problem for many developing and industrial countries. Increasing rates reach almost 50 \% of the population in some countries and related metabolic diseases including cardiovascular events and T2DM are challenging the health systems. Adiposity, an increase in body fat mass, is a major hallmark of obesity. Adipose tissue is long known not only to store lipids but also to influence whole-body metabolism including food intake, energy expenditure and insulin sensitivity. Adipocytes can store lipids and thereby protect other tissue from lipotoxic damage. However, if the energy intake is higher than the energy expenditure over a sustained time period, adipose tissue will expand. This can lead to an impaired adipose tissue function resulting in higher levels of plasma lipids, which can affect other tissue like skeletal muscle, finally leading to metabolic complications. Several studies showed beneficial metabolic effects of weight reduction in obese subjects immediately after weight loss. However, weight regain is frequently observed along with potential negative effects on cardiovascular risk factors and a high intra-individual response. We performed a body weight maintenance study investigating the mechanisms of weight maintenance after intended WR. Therefore we used a low caloric diet followed by a 12-month life-style intervention. Comprehensive phenotyping including fat and muscle biopsies was conducted to investigate hormonal as well as metabolic influences on body weight regulation. In this study, we showed that weight reduction has numerous potentially beneficial effects on metabolic parameters. After 3-month WR subjects showed significant weight and fat mass reduction, lower TG levels as well as higher insulin sensitivity. Using RNA-Seq to analyse whole fat and muscle transcriptome a strong impact of weight reduction on adipose tissue gene expression was observed. Gene expression alterations over weight reduction included several cellular metabolic genes involved in lipid and glucose metabolism as well as insulin signalling and regulatory pathways. These changes were also associated with anthropometric parameters assigning body composition. Our data indicated that weight reduction leads to a decreased expression of several lipid catabolic as well as anabolic genes. Long-term body weight maintenance might be influenced by several parameters including hormones, metabolic intermediates as well as the transcriptional landscape of metabolic active tissues. Our data showed that genes involved in biosynthesis of unsaturated fatty acids might influence the BMI 18-month after a weight reduction phase. This was further supported by analysing metabolic parameters including RQ and FFA levels. We could show that subjects maintaining their lost body weight had a higher RQ and lower FFA levels, indicating increased metabolic flexibility in subjects. Using this transcriptomic approach we hypothesize that low expression levels of lipid synthetic genes in adipose tissue together with a higher mitochondrial activity in skeletal muscle tissue might be beneficial in terms of body weight maintenance.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Luft2015, author = {Luft, Laura Charlotte}, title = {Bridging the gap between science and nature conservation practice}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {173}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Radenacker2015, author = {Radenacker, Anke}, title = {Economic consequences of family dissolution}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-100217}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {v, 134}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Welfare states and policies have changed greatly over the past decades, mostly characterized by retrenchments in terms of government spending or in terms of restricted access to certain benefits. In the area of family policies, however, a lot of countries have simultaneously expanded provisions and transfers for families. Bringing together the macro analysis of policy variation and household income changes on the micro-level, the main research question of the dissertation is to what extent economic consequences following separation and divorce in families with children have changed between the 1980s and the 2000s in Germany and the United States. The second research question of the dissertation regards the differences in dissolution outcomes between married and cohabiting parents in Germany. The dissertation thus aims to link institutional regulations of welfare states with the actual income situation of families. To achieve this, a research design was developed that has never been used for the analysis of the economic consequences of family dissolution. For this, the two longest running panel datasets, German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP) and the US American Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), have been used. The analytic strategy applied to estimate the effects of family dissolution on household income is a difference-in-difference design combined with coarsened exact matching (CEM). To begin with, the dissertation confirmed many findings of previous research, for example regarding the gender differences in family dissolution outcomes. Mothers experience clearly higher relative income losses and consequently higher risks of poverty than fathers. This finding is universal, that is it holds for both countries, for all time periods observed, and for all measures of economic outcome that were employed. Another confirmed finding is the higher level of welfare state intervention in Germany compared to the United States. The dissertation also revealed a number of novel findings. The results show that the expansion of family policies in Germany over time has not been accompanied by substantially decreasing income losses for mothers. Though income losses have slightly decreased over time, they have become more persistent during the years following family dissolution. The impact of the German welfare state has meanwhile been quite stable. American mothers' income losses took place on a slightly lower level than those of German mothers. Only during the 1980s their relative losses were clearly lower than those of German mothers. And also American mothers did not recover as much from their income losses during the 2000s than they used to during the 1980s. For them, the 1996 welfare reform brought a considerable decrease in welfare state support. Accordingly, the results for American mothers can certainly be described as a shift from public to private provision. The general finding of previous studies that fathers do not have to suffer income losses, or if at all rather moderate ones compared to mothers, can be confirmed. Nevertheless, both German and US American fathers face a deterioration of the economic consequences of family dissolution over time. German fathers' relative income changes are still positive though they have decreased over time. One reason for this decrease is the increasing loss of partner earnings following union dissolution. Also among American fathers, income gains still prevail in the year of family dissolution. Two years later, however, they have been facing income losses already since the 1980s which have furthermore increased considerably over time. Zooming in on Germany, family dissolution outcomes by marital status show negligible differences between cohabiting and married mothers in disposable income, but considerable differences in losses of income before taxes and transfers. It is the impact of the welfare state that equalizes the differences in income losses between these two groups of mothers. For married mothers, losses are not as high in the year of event but they have difficulties to recover from these losses. Without the income buffering of the welfare state, married mothers would, three years after family dissolution, remain with relative income losses double as high as for cohabiting mothers. Compared to mothers, differences between married and cohabiting fathers are visible in changes of income before as well as after taxes and transfers. The welfare state does not alter the difference between the two groups of fathers. With regard to both income concepts, cohabiting fathers fare worse than married fathers. Cohabiting fathers suffer moderate income losses of disposable income while married fathers experience moderate income gains. Accounting for support payments is decisive for fathers' income changes. If these payments are not deducted from disposable income, both married and cohabiting fathers experience gains in disposable income following family dissolution.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Matuschek2015, author = {Matuschek, Hannes}, title = {Applications of reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces and their approximations}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {83}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Reimer2015, author = {Reimer, Anna Maria}, title = {The poetics of the real and aesthetics of the reel}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-95660}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {298}, year = {2015}, abstract = {The dissertation proposes that the spread of photography and popular cinema in 19th- and 20th-century-India have shaped an aesthetic and affective code integral to the reading and interpretation of Indian English novels, particularly when they address photography and/or cinema film, as in the case of the four corpus texts. In analyzing the nexus between 'real' and 'reel', the dissertation shows how the texts address the reader as media consumer and virtual image projector. Furthermore, the study discusses the Indian English novel against the backdrop of the cultural and medial transformations of the 20th century to elaborate how these influenced the novel's aesthetics. Drawing upon reception aesthetics, the author devises the concept of the 'implied spectator' to analyze the aesthetic impact of the novels' images as visual textures. No God in Sight (2005) by Altaf Tyrewala comprises of a string of 41 interior monologues, loosely connected through their narrators' random encounters in Mumbai in the year 2000. Although marked by continuous perspective shifts, the text creates a sensation of acute immediacy. Here, the reader is addressed as implied spectator and is sutured into the narrated world like a film spectator ― an effect created through the use of continuity editing as a narrative technique. Similarly, Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2002) coll(oc)ates disparate narrative perspectives and explores photography as an artistic practice, historiographic recorder and epistemological tool. The narrative appears guided by the random viewing of old photographs by the protagonist and primary narrator, the photographer Paresh Bhatt. However, it is the photographic negative and the practice of superimposition that render this string of episodes and different perspectives narratively consequential and cosmologically meaningful. Photography thus marks the perfect symbiosis of autobiography and historiography. Tabish Khair's Filming. A Love Story (2007) immerses readers in the cine-aesthetic of 1930s and 40s Bombay film, the era in which the embedded plot is set. Plotline, central scenes and characters evoke the key films of Indian cinema history such as Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" or Raj Kapoor's "Awara". Ultimately, the text written as film dissolves the boundary between fiction and (narrated) reality, reel and real, thereby showing that the images of individual memory are inextricably intertwined with and shaped by collective memory. Ultimately, the reconstruction of the past as and through film(s) conquers trauma and endows the Partition of India as a historic experience of brutal contingency with meaning. The Bioscope Man (Indrajit Hazra, 2008) is a picaresque narrative set in Calcutta - India's cultural capital and birthplace of Indian cinema at the beginning of the 20th century. The autodiegetic narrator Abani Chatterjee relates his rise and fall as silent film star, alternating between the modes of tell and show. He is both autodiegetic narrator and spectator or perceiving consciousness, seeing himself in his manifold screen roles. Beyond his film roles however, the narrator remains a void. The marked psychoanalytical symbolism of the text is accentuated by repeated invocations of dark caves and the laterna magica. Here too, 'reel life' mirrors and foreshadows real life as Indian and Bengali history again interlace with private history. Abani Chatterjee thus emerges as a quintessentially modern man of no qualities who assumes definitive shape only in the lost reels of the films he starred in. The final chapter argues that the static images and visual frames forwarded in the texts observe an integral psychological function: Premised upon linear perspective they imply a singular, static subjectivity appealing to the postmodern subject. In the corpus texts, the rise of digital technology in the 1990s thus appears not so much to have displaced older image repertories, practices and media techniques, than it has lent them greater visibility and appeal. Moreover, bricolage and pastiche emerge as cultural techniques which marked modernity from its inception. What the novels thus perpetuate is a media archeology not entirely servant to the poetics of the real. The permeable subject and the notion of the gaze as an active exchange as encapsulated in the concept of darshan - ideas informing all four texts - bespeak the resilience of a mythical universe continually re-instantiated in new technologies and uses. Eventually, the novels convey a sense of subalternity to a substantially Hindu nationalist history and historiography, the centrifugal force of which developed in the twentieth century and continues into the present.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Kamranfar2015, author = {Kamranfar, Iman}, title = {Functional analysis of gene regulatory networks controlled by stress responsive transcription factors in Arabidopsis thaliana}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {151}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Sakschewski2015, author = {Sakschewski, Boris}, title = {Impacts of major anthropogenic pressures on the terrestrial biosphere and its resilience to global change}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {159}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Bittermann2015, author = {Bittermann, Klaus}, title = {Semi-empirical sea-level modelling}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-93881}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {v, 88}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Semi-empirical sea-level models (SEMs) exploit physically motivated empirical relationships between global sea level and certain drivers, in the following global mean temperature. This model class evolved as a supplement to process-based models (Rahmstorf (2007)) which were unable to fully represent all relevant processes. They thus failed to capture past sea-level change (Rahmstorf et al. (2012)) and were thought likely to underestimate future sea-level rise. Semi-empirical models were found to be a fast and useful tool for exploring the uncertainties in future sea-level rise, consistently giving significantly higher projections than process-based models. In the following different aspects of semi-empirical sea-level modelling have been studied. Models were first validated using various data sets of global sea level and temperature. SEMs were then used on the glacier contribution to sea level, and to infer past global temperature from sea-level data via inverse modelling. Periods studied encompass the instrumental period, covered by tide gauges (starting 1700 CE (Common Era) in Amsterdam) and satellites (first launched in 1992 CE), the era from 1000 BCE (before CE) to present, and the full length of the Holocene (using proxy data). Accordingly different data, model formulations and implementations have been used. It could be shown in Bittermann et al. (2013) that SEMs correctly predict 20th century sea-level when calibrated with data until 1900 CE. SEMs also turned out to give better predictions than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th assessment report (AR4, IPCC (2007)) models, for the period from 1961-2003 CE. With the first multi-proxy reconstruction of global sea-level as input, estimate of the human-induced component of modern sea-level change and projections of future sea-level rise were calculated (Kopp et al. (2016)). It turned out with 90\% confidence that more than 40 \% of the observed 20th century sea-level rise is indeed anthropogenic. With the new semi-empirical and IPCC (2013) 5th assessment report (AR5) projections the gap between SEM and process-based model projections closes, giving higher credibility to both. Combining all scenarios, from strong mitigation to business as usual, a global sea-level rise of 28-131 cm relative to 2000 CE, is projected with 90\% confidence. The decision for a low carbon pathway could halve the expected global sea-level rise by 2100 CE. Present day temperature and thus sea level are driven by the globally acting greenhouse-gas forcing. Unlike that, the Milankovich forcing, acting on Holocene timescales, results mainly in a northern-hemisphere temperature change. Therefore a semi-empirical model can be driven with northernhemisphere temperatures, which makes it possible to model the main subcomponent of sea-level change over this period. It showed that an additional positive constant rate of the order of the estimated Antarctic sea-level contribution is then required to explain the sea-level evolution over the Holocene. Thus the global sea level, following the climatic optimum, can be interpreted as the sum of a temperature induced sea-level drop and a positive long-term contribution, likely an ongoing response to deglaciation coming from Antarctica.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Bosch2015, author = {Bosch, Sina}, title = {Morphosyntactic feature structure in the native and non-native mental lexicon}, pages = {VI, 166}, year = {2015}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Feldmann2015, author = {Feldmann, Johannes}, title = {Stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet}, pages = {v, 165}, year = {2015}, language = {en} }