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Seasonal variations in landslide activity remain understudied compared to recent advances in landslide early warning at hourly to daily timescales.
Here, we learn the seasonal pattern of monthly landslide activity in the Pacific Northwest from five heterogeneous landslide inventories with differing spatial and temporal coverage and reporting protocols combined in a Bayesian multi-level model.
We find that landslide activity is distinctly seasonal, with credible increases in landslide intensity, inter-annual variability, and probability marking the onset of the landslide season in November.
Peaks in landslide probability in January and intensity in February lag the annual peak in mean monthly precipitation and landslide activity is more variable in winter than in summer, when landslides are rare.
For a given monthly rainfall, landslide intensity at the season peak in February is up to 10 times higher than at the onset in November, underlining the importance of antecedent seasonal hillslope conditions.
The development of interface technologies is driven by the goal of making interaction more positive through natural action-control mappings.
In Virtual Reality (VR), the entire body is potentially involved for interaction, using such mappings with a maximum of degrees of freedom. The downside is the increase in interaction complexity, which can dramatically influence interface design.
A cognitive perspective on detailed aspects of interaction patterns is lacking in common interface design guidelines, although it can be helpful to make this complexity controllable and, thus, make interaction behavior predictable.
In the present study, the distinction between grounding, embodiment, and situatedness (the GES framework) is applied to organize aspects of interactions and to compare them with each other.
In two experiments, zooming into or out of emotional pictures through changes of arm span was examined in VR. There are qualitatively different aspects during such an interaction: i) perceptual aspects caused by zooming are fundamental for human behavior (Grounding: closer objects appear bigger) and ii) aspects of gestures correspond to the physical characteristics of the agents (Embodiment: little distance of hands signals little or, in contrast, "creating more detail").
The GES-framework sets aspects of Grounding against aspects of Embodiment, thus allowing to predict human behavior regarding these qualitatively different aspects.
For the zooming procedure, the study shows that Grounding can overrule Embodiment in interaction design.
Thus, we propose GES as a cognitive framework that can help to inform interaction guidelines for user interface design in VR.
Sulfur mustard (SM) and its derivatives are potent genotoxic agents, which have been shown to trigger the activation of poly (ADP-ribose) polymerases (PARPs) and the depletion of their substrate, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+). NAD+ is an essential molecule involved in numerous cellular pathways, including genome integrity and DNA repair, and thus, NAD+ supplementation might be beneficial for mitigating mustard-induced (geno)toxicity. In this study, the role of NAD+ depletion and elevation in the genotoxic stress response to SM derivatives, i.e., the monofunctional agent 2-chloroethyl-ethyl sulfide (CEES) and the crosslinking agent mechlorethamine (HN2), was investigated with the use of NAD+ booster nicotinamide riboside (NR) and NAD+ synthesis inhibitor FK866. The effects were analyzed in immortalized human keratinocytes (HaCaT) or monocyte-like cell line THP-1. In HaCaT cells, NR supplementation, increased NAD+ levels, and elevated PAR response, however, did not affect ATP levels or DNA damage repair, nor did it attenuate long- and short-term cytotoxicities. On the other hand, the depletion of cellular NAD+ via FK866 sensitized HaCaT cells to genotoxic stress, particularly CEES exposure, whereas NR supplementation, by increasing cellular NAD+ levels, rescued the sensitizing FK866 effect. Intriguingly, in THP-1 cells, the NR-induced elevation of cellular NAD+ levels did attenuate toxicity of the mustard compounds, especially upon CEES exposure. Together, our results reveal that NAD+ is an important molecule in the pathomechanism of SM derivatives, exhibiting compound-specificity. Moreover, the cell line-dependent protective effects of NR are indicative of system-specificity of the application of this NAD+ booster.
kappa-casein (kappa-CN) is one of the key components in bovine milk, playing a unique role in the structuration of casein micelles.
It contains in its chemical structure up to sixteen amino acid residues (mainly serine and threonine) susceptible to modifications, including glycosylation and phosphorylation, which may further be formed during milk processing.
In this study, changes in post-translational modification (PTM) of kappa-CN during bovine milk fermentation were investigated. One-to-five-day fermented milk samples were produced.
A traditional bottom-up proteomics approach was used to establish a multiple-reaction monitoring (MRM) method for relative quantification of kappa-CN PTM. Endoproteinase Glu-C was found to efficiently digest the kappa-CN molecule.
The developed LC-MS method was validated by performing assessments of linearity, precision, repeatability, reproducibility, limit of detection (LOD), and limit of quantification (LOQ).
Among the yielded peptides, four of them containing serine and threonine residues were identified and the unmodified as well as the modified variants of each of them were relatively quantified. These peptides were (1) IPTINTIASGEPTSTTE ([140, 158]), (2) STVATLE ([162, 168]), (3) DSPE ([169, 172]), and (4) INTVQVTSTAV ([180, 190]). Distribution analysis between unmodified and modified peptides revealed that over 50% of kappa-CN was found in one of its modified forms in milk.
The fermentation process further significantly altered the composition between unmodified/modified kappa-CN, with glycoslaytion being predominant compared to phosphorylation (p < 0.01).
Further method development towards alpha and beta-CN fractions and their PTM behavior would be an asset to better understand the changes undergone by milk proteins and the micellar structure during fermentation.
We consider the initial value problem for the Navier-Stokes equations over R-3 x [0, T] with time T > 0 in the spatially periodic setting.
We prove that it induces open injective mappings A(s): B-1(s) -> B-2(s-1) where B-1(s), B-2(s-1) are elements from scales of specially constructed function spaces of Bochner-Sobolev typeparametrized with the smoothness index s is an element of N.
Finally, we prove that a map Asis surjective if and only if the inverse image A(s)(- 1) (K) of any pre compact set K from the range of the map Asis bounded in the Bochner space L-s([0, T], L-r(T-3))with the Ladyzhenskaya-Prodi-Serrin numbers s, r.
Information regarding the spatial distribution of soil water content is key in many disciplines and applications including soil and atmospheric sciences, hydrology, and agricultural engineering.
Thus, within the past decades various experimental methods and strategies have been developed to map spatial variations in soil moisture distribution and to monitor temporal changes.
Our study examines the combination of electrical resistivity mapping and point observations of soil moisture to infer the spatial and the temporal variability of soil moisture.
Over a period of around two years, we performed field measurements on six days to collect repeated electrical resistivity mapping data for a nine-hectare test site south-east of Berlin, Germany.
Permanently installed TDR probes, temporary TDR measurements within permanently installed tubes, and gravimetric measurements using soil samples provided soil moisture data at various selected points.
In addition, soil analysis and classification results are available for 132 regularly distributed positions up to depths of 1.2 m.
We compare and link three-dimensional resistivity models obtained via data inversion to soil composition and soil moisture as provided by our point data.
Both the soil samples and the resistivity models indicate a two-layer medium characterized by a sandy top layer with varying thickness and a loamy bottom soil.
For all six field campaigns, we observe similar resistivity patterns reflecting the temporally stable influence of soil texture.
While the overall patterns are stable, the range of resistivity values changes with soil moisture. Finally, to estimate spatial models of soil moisture, we link our soil moisture and resistivity data using empirical petrophysical models relying on a second order polynomial function.
We observe a mean prediction error for soil moisture of +/-0.034 m3 & BULL; m? 3 using all observation points while we notice that point-specific models further reduce the error.
Thus, we conclude that our experimental and data analysis strategies represent a reliable approach to establish site-specific models and to estimate three-dimensional moisture distribution including temporal variations.
The work is devoted to the use of electrokinetic phenomena in liquid crystals to create a new class of microfluidics devices - optofluidics, designed to control electromagnetic radiation, including the THz frequency range.
To achieve the goal, an optical method is used to study changes in the orientational structure in LC layers caused by a shear flow generated by electroosmotic pumps. Simula-tion of LC behaviour in an experimental cell containing electroosmotic pumps and flat layers of a nematic liquid crystal is fulfilled.
The experimental depend-ences of the intensity of polarized radiation passing through flat LC layers on the control voltage applied to the electroosmotic pump and the results of calcu-lations of the hydrodynamic and mechano-optical characteristics of the experi-mental LC cell are presented.
The propagation of THz irradiation across the multilayer structure of the optofluidic cell is considered taking into account the minimum number of re-reflections of waves from different layers and the ab-sorption of THz irradiation in a propylene and a liquid crystal.
A remarkable peculiarity of videoconferencing (VC) applications – the self-view – a.k.a. digital mirror, is examined as a potential reason behind the voiced exhaustion among users. This work draws on technostress research and objective self-awareness theory and proposes the communication role (sender vs. receiver) as an interaction variable. We report the results of two studies among European employees (n1 = 176, n2 = 253) with a one-year time lag. A higher frequency of self-view in a VC when receiving a message, i.e., listening to others, indirectly increases negative affect (study 1 & 2) and exhaustion (study 2) via the increased state of public self-awareness. Self-viewing in the role of message sender, e.g., as an online presenter, also increases public self-awareness, but its overall effects are less harmful. As for individual differences, users predisposed to public self-consciousness were more concerned with how other VC participants perceived them. Gender effects were insignificant.
We consider Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems, where computational challenges arise from the need for repeated evaluations of an expensive forward model.
This renders most Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches infeasible, since they typically require O(10(4)) model runs, or more.
Moreover, the forward model is often given as a black box or is impractical to differentiate.
Therefore derivative-free algorithms are highly desirable. We propose a framework, which is built on Kalman methodology, to efficiently perform Bayesian inference in such inverse problems.
The basic method is based on an approximation of the filtering distribution of a novel mean-field dynamical system, into which the inverse problem is embedded as an observation operator.
Theoretical properties are established for linear inverse problems, demonstrating that the desired Bayesian posterior is given by the steady state of the law of the filtering distribution of the mean-field dynamical system, and proving exponential convergence to it.
This suggests that, for nonlinear problems which are close to Gaussian, sequentially computing this law provides the basis for efficient iterative methods to approximate the Bayesian posterior.
Ensemble methods are applied to obtain interacting particle system approximations of the filtering distribution of the mean-field model; and practical strategies to further reduce the computational and memory cost of the methodology are presented, including low-rank approximation and a bi-fidelity approach.
The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated in several numerical experiments, including proof-of-concept linear/nonlinear examples and two large-scale applications: learning of permeability parameters in subsurface flow; and learning subgrid-scale parameters in a global climate model.
Moreover, the stochastic ensemble Kalman filter and various ensemble square-root Kalman filters are all employed and are compared numerically.
The results demonstrate that the proposed method, based on exponential convergence to the filtering distribution of a mean-field dynamical system, is competitive with pre-existing Kalman-based methods for inverse problems.
Nature conservation is currently shaping many terrestrial ecosystems in Africa.
This is particularly evident in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where conservation is intended to recover wildlife populations, with special focus on elephants.
Rising numbers of elephants induce woody biomass losses but increase soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks from decaying wood and dung.
We hypothesized that these increases under wildlife conservation in SSA go along with rising contents of plant residues in SOC, traceable by the molecular markers lignin and n-alkanes.
In contrast, agricultural intensification would reduce them due to lower C input and faster SOC turnover through tillage.
To test this, we analyzed lignin by the CuO oxidation method and n-alkanes by fast pressurized solvent extraction in topsoils (0-10 cm) of Arenosols and corresponding plant samples (trees, grasses and crops).
Sampling sites followed conservation gradients with low, medium and high elephant densities and intensification gradients with rangeland and cropland in the woodland savanna of the Namibian Zambezi Region.
Patterns of lignin-derived phenols were retained in the soil, whereas n-alkanes showed shifts in chain lengths. n-Alkanes also showed no clear increase or decrease under conservation or intensification, respectively.
Differently, lignin-derived phenols showed lower values under intensification than under conservation. Confirming our hypothesis, rising SOC contents with rising elephant densities (from 4.4 at low to 5.7 g kg(-1) SOC at high elephant densities) went along with an increasing accumulation of lignin-derived phenols (24.4-34.8 g kg(-1) VSCOC).
This increase is associated with the input of woody debris to the soil, as indicated by V-units and carbon isotopes, modulated by clay and woody biomass.
We conclude, that increasing input of woody residues into soil by browsing behaviour of elephants is an important mechanism for controlling SOC supply in the context of wildlife conservation and is traceable with lignin-derived phenols, but not with n-alkanes.
We report on the effect of spatially correlated noise on the velocities of self-propelled particles.
Correlations in the random forces acting on self-propelled particles can induce directed collective motion, i.e., swarming.
Even with repulsive coupling in the velocity directions, which favors a disordered state, strong correlations in the fluctuations can align the velocities locally leading to a macroscopic, turbulent velocity field.
On the other hand, while spatially correlated noise is aligning the velocities locally, the swarming transition to globally directed motion is inhibited when the correlation length of the noise is nonzero, but smaller than the system size.
We analyze the swarming transition in d-dimensional space in a mean field model of globally coupled velocity vectors.
Rhizophagus irregularis is one of the most extensively studied arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) that forms symbioses with and improves the performance of many crops. Lack of transformation protocol for R. irregularis renders it challenging to investigate molecular mechanisms that shape the physiology and interactions of this AMF with plants.
Here, we used all published genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics resources to gain insights into the metabolic functionalities of R. irregularis by reconstructing its high-quality genome-scale metabolic network that considers enzyme constraints. Extensive validation tests with the enzyme-constrained metabolic model demonstrated that it can be used to (i) accurately predict increased growth of R. irregularis on myristate with minimal medium; (ii) integrate enzyme abundances and carbon source concentrations that yield growth predictions with high and significant Spearman correlation (rS = 0.74) to measured hyphal dry weight; and (iii) simulate growth rate increases with tighter association of this AMF with the host plant across three fungal structures.
Based on the validated model and system-level analyses that integrate data from transcriptomics studies, we predicted that differences in flux distributions between intraradical mycelium and arbuscles are linked to changes in amino acid and cofactor biosynthesis.
Therefore, our results demonstrated that the enzyme-constrained metabolic model can be employed to pinpoint mechanisms driving developmental and physiological responses of R. irregularis to different environmental cues.
In conclusion, this model can serve as a template for other AMF and paves the way to identify metabolic engineering strategies to modulate fungal metabolic traits that directly affect plant performance.
IMPORTANCE Mounting evidence points to the benefits of the symbiotic interactions between the arbuscular mycorrhiza fungus Rhizophagus irregularis and crops; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying the physiological responses of this fungus to different host plants and environments remain largely unknown.
We present a manually curated, enzyme-constrained, genome-scale metabolic model of R. irregularis that can accurately predict experimentally observed phenotypes.
We show that this high-quality model provides an entry point into better understanding the metabolic and physiological responses of this fungus to changing environments due to the availability of different nutrients.
The model can be used to design metabolic engineering strategies to tailor R. irregularis metabolism toward improving the performance of host plants.
Using novel longitudinal data, this paper studies the short- and medium-term effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 on social trust of adolescents in Germany. Comparing adolescents who responded to our survey shortly before the start of the war with those who responded shortly after the conflict began and applying difference-in-differences (DiD) models over time, we find a significant decline in the outcome after the war started. These findings provide new evidence on how armed conflicts influence social trust and well-being among young people in a country not directly involved in the war.
Language development in children with a heritage language background is often characterized by a shift towards the majority language once children enter formal educational contexts.
In Germany, educational programs that target heritage languages are scarce.
It is therefore of interest whether children with a heritage language background can benefit from a bilingual program targeting their heritage language.
In this paper, we report data on the lexical skills of Italian heritage children in two educational contexts, bilingual Italian-German kindergartens and a bilingual Italian-German elementary school.
We examine (1) developmental trajectories of children's lexical skills in German and Italian, (2) differences between noun and verb development, (3) differences between lexical production and comprehenand Italian, kindergarteners showed balanced receptive vocabulary skills.
By contrast, elementary school-children had a larger German than Italian vocabulary. Both groups demonstrated a clear dominance of nouns over verbs.
While school children already performed at ceiling in German at the end of first grade, across the school years, their Italian vocabulary increased, nouns in particular.
Critical anthropology? On the relation between philosophical anthropology and critical theory
(2022)
This article compares Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner's foundation of Philosophical Anthropology.
While Horkheimer's and Plessner's paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno's << negative dialectics >> and Plessner's << negative anthropology >> (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another.
Jurgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner's philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he later reaffirmed it. Faced with the << life power >> in << high capitalism >> (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a << critical anthropology >> (H. Schnädelbach).
Lanthanide based ceria nanomaterials are important practical materials due to the redox properties that are useful in the avenues pertaining to technology and life sciences. Sub 10 nm spherical and highly monodisperse Ce1−xYbxO2−y (0.04 ≤ x ≤ 0.22) nanoparticles were synthesized by thermal decomposition, annealed separately at 773 K and 1273 K for 2 hours and characterized. Elemental mapping for Yb3+ doped ceria nanoparticles shows homogeneous distribution of Yb3+ atoms in the ceria with low Yb3+ content annealed at 773 K and 1273 K for 2 hours. However, clusters are observed for 773 K annealed ceria samples with high concentration of Yb3+. These clusters are not detected in 1273 K annealed nanomaterials. Introducing small amounts of Yb3+ ions into the ceria lattice as spectroscopic probes can provide detailed information about the atomic structure and local environments allowing the monitoring of small structural changes, such as clustering. The emission spectra observed at room temperature and at 4 K have a manifold of bands that corresponds to the 2F5/2 → 2F7/2 transition of Yb3+ ions. Some small shifts are observed in the Stark splitting pattern depending on the sample and the annealing conditions. The deconvolution by PARAFAC analysis yielded luminescence decay kinetics as well as the associated luminescence spectra of three species for each of the low Yb3+ doped ceria samples annealed at 773 K and one species for the 1273 K annealed samples. However, the ceria samples with high concentration of Yb3+ annealed at the two temperatures showed only one species with lower decay times as compared to the low Yb3+ doped ceria samples.
Cell division and the resulting changes to the cell organization affect the shape and functionality of all tissues.
Thus, understanding the determinants of the tissue-wide changes imposed by cell division is a key question in developmental biology.
Here, we use a network representation of live cell imaging data from shoot apical meristems (SAMs) in Arabidopsis thaliana to predict cell division events and their consequences at the tissue level.
We show that a support vector machine classifier based on the SAM network properties is predictive of cell division events, with test accuracy of 76%, which matches that based on cell size alone.
Furthermore, we demonstrate that the combination of topological and biological properties, including cell size, perimeter, distance and shared cell wall between cells, can further boost the prediction accuracy of resulting changes in topology triggered by cell division.
Using our classifiers, we demonstrate the importance of microtubule-mediated cell-to-cell growth coordination in influencing tissue-level topology.
Together, the results from our network-based analysis demonstrate a feedback mechanism between tissue topology and cell division in A. thaliana SAMs.
In plants, the trehalose biosynthetic pathway plays key roles in the regulation of carbon allocation and stress adaptation.
Engineering of the pathway holds great promise to increase the stress resilience of crop plants.
The synthesis of trehalose proceeds by a two-step pathway in which a trehalose-phosphate synthase (TPS) uses UDP-glucose and glucose-6-phosphate to produce trehalose-6 phosphate (T6P) that is subsequently dephosphorylated by trehalose-6 phosphate phosphatase (TPP).
While plants usually do not accumulate high amounts of trehalose, their genome encodes large families of putative trehalose biosynthesis genes, with many members lacking obvious enzymatic activity.
Thus, the function of putative trehalose biosynthetic proteins in plants is only vaguely understood. To gain a deeper insight into the role of trehalose biosynthetic proteins in crops, we assessed the enzymatic activity of the TPS/TPP family from tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) and investigated their expression pattern in different tissues as well as in response to temperature shifts. From the 10 TPS isoforms tested, only the 2 proteins belonging to class I showed enzymatic activity, while all 5 TPP isoforms investigated were catalytically active.
Most of the TPS/TPP family members showed the highest expression in mature leaves, and promoter-reporter gene studies suggest that the two class I TPS genes have largely overlapping expression patterns within the vasculature, with only subtle differences in expression in fruits and flowers.
The majority of tomato TPS/TPP genes were induced by heat stress, and individual family members also responded to cold.
This suggests that trehalose biosynthetic pathway genes could play an important role during temperature stress adaptation.
In summary, our study represents a further step toward the exploitation of the TPS and TPP gene families for the improvement of tomato stress resistance.
There is consensus that word retrieval starts with activation of semantic representations.
However, in adults without language impairment, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects of the semantic attributes of to-be-retrieved words.
This paper, therefore, addresses the question of which item-inherent semantic factors influence word retrieval.
Specifically, it reviews the literature on a selection of these factors: imageability, concreteness, number of semantic features, typicality, intercorrelational density, featural distinctiveness, concept distinctiveness, animacy, semantic neighbourhood density, semantic similarity, operativity, valence, and arousal.
It highlights several methodological challenges in this field, and has a focus on the insights from studies with people with aphasia where the effects of these variables are more prevalent.
The paper concludes that further research simultaneously examining the effects of different semantic factors that are likely to affect lexical co-activation, and the interaction of these variables, would be fruitful, as would suitably scaled computational modelling of these effects in unimpaired language processing and in language impairment.
Such research would enable the refinement of theories of semantic processing and word production, and potentially have implications for diagnosis and treatment of semantic and lexical impairments.
For the first time, synchrotron X-ray refraction radiography (SXRR) has been paired with in-situ heat treatment to monitor microstructure and porosity evolution as a function of temperature.
The investigated material was a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) manufactured AlSi10Mg, where the initial eutectic Si network is known to disintegrate and spherodize into larger particles with increasing temperature.
Such alloy is also prone to ther-mally induced porosity (TIP).
We show that SXRR allows detecting the changes in the Si-phase morphology upon heating, while this is currently possible only using scanning electron microscopy. SXRR also allows observing the growth of pores, usually studied via X-ray computed tomography, but on much smaller fields-of-view.
Our results show the great potential of in-situ SXRR as a tool to gain in-depth knowledge of the susceptibility of any material to thermally induced damage and/or microstructure evolution over statistically relevant volumes.
Photo-iniferter (PI)-RAFT polymerization, the direct activation of chain transfer agents via light, is a fascinating polymerization technique, as it overcomes some restriction of conventional RAFT polymerization.
As such, we elucidated the role of reversible deactivation in this context using a monomer-CTA pair with low chain transfer capabilities.
Tests with varying targeted degrees of polymerization (DP) or monomer concentrations revealed no significant improvement of polymerization control using the PI-process. Control can however be achieved via slow monomer addition, increasing the number of activation/deactivation events per monomer addition.
More importantly, the livingness of the polymerization was found to be extraordinarily high, enabling the straightforward and rapid synthesis of multiblock copolymers with up to 20 blocks and a high number of repeating units per block (DP = 25-100) maintaining an overall excellent definition (M-n = 90 300 g mol(-1), D = 1.29).
This study highlights the enormous potential of PI-RAFT polymerization for the synthesis of polymeric materials.
Residential segregation is a wide-spread phenomenon that can be observed in almost every major city.
In these urban areas residents with different racial or socioeconomic background tend to form homogeneous clusters.
Schelling's famous agent-based model for residential segregation explains how such clusters can form even if all agents are tolerant, i.e., if they agree to live in mixed neighborhoods.
For segregation to occur, all it needs is a slight bias towards agents preferring similar neighbors.
Very recently, Schelling's model has been investigated from a game-theoretic point of view with selfish agents that strategically select their residential location.
In these games, agents can improve on their current location by performing a location swap with another agent who is willing to swap.
We significantly deepen these investigations by studying the influence of the underlying topology modeling the residential area on the existence of equilibria, the Price of Anarchy and on the dynamic properties of the resulting strategic multi-agent system. Moreover, as a new conceptual contribution, we also consider the influence of locality, i.e., if the location swaps are restricted to swaps of neighboring agents.
We give improved almost tight bounds on the Price of Anarchy for arbitrary underlying graphs and we present (almost) tight bounds for regular graphs, paths and cycles. Moreover, we give almost tight bounds for grids, which are commonly used in empirical studies.
For grids we also show that locality has a severe impact on the game dynamics.
The majority of middle-age children do not meet current physical activity guidelines. There is growing evidence that adults' physical activity is partially influenced by automatic affective processes, which are derived from affective experiences with physical activity.
However, little is known about whether these processes are interrelated with children's physical activity level.
A prospective design was used to examine whether automatic affective processes assessed by an evaluative priming procedure predict physical activity of children.
Physical activity of 48 children (8.71 +/- 0.71 years; 65% girls) was measured for 1 week with activity trackers.
In a linear regression model, automatic affective processes (beta = 0.36) significantly predicted physical activity, accounting for 11.02% of variance.
These results indicate that physical-activity-related automatic affective processes are associated with children's physical activity, as has previously been found in adults.
This study emphasizes the importance of fostering positive affective experiences associated with physical activity during childhood.
The educational sector currently faces a massive digital transformation with various digital offerings entering the market. To provide some orientation in this transforming space, a national digital education platform (NDEP) is under development in Germany as part of a nationwide flagship project. On the one hand, in efficiently connecting the relevant stakeholders to each other and to value-adding education-related offerings, various benefits emerge. On the other hand, monopolising the educational sector and influencing the respective market through a state-controlled platform bears potential regulatory risks from misuse of power by the platform to malpractice by the users. Against this background, we aim to identify and systematise these potential drawbacks prior to the platform’s actual development and implementation. We pursue a qualitative, interpretivist approach for policy analysis, based on ten elite interviews and two workshops. Our results are threefold: (1) We capture the consolidated NDEP architecture; (2) We categorise the range of relevant functions and value propositions of the NDEP; (3) We derive 23 regulatory areas of conflict across the three building blocks that result from the potential ecosystem and function scope configurations of the NDEP. As a contribution to research, we shed new interdisciplinary light on the governance and infrastructure of public-private platforms that enable innovation and collaboration while integrating respective market segments. As a contribution to practice, we provide clear guidance for policy-makers in strategizing the development and governance of and through national digital platforms in education.
Purpose
Rehabilitation professionals are faced with judging and describing the social-medicine status of their patients. Rehabilitation professionals must know the core concepts of acute unfitness for work, psychological capacities, and long-term work capacity.
Acquiring and applying this knowledge, requires training. The research question is if and to what extent medical professionals and students' knowledge changes after social medicine training.
Methods
This quasi-experimental study was carried out in the real-life context of social medicine training. Psychology students (n = 42), physicians/psychotherapists (i.e. state-licensed health professionals) (n = 44) and medical assistant professionals (n = 29) were trained. Their social medicine knowledge was measured before and after training by a 10-min expert-approved and content valid knowledge questionnaire.
Three free-text questions had to be answered on the essential aspects of present and prognostic work ability and psychological capacities.
Answers were rated for correctness by two experts. Paired t tests and variance analysis have been calculated for group comparisons.
Results
All groups improved their social medicine knowledge from the pre- to the post-test. The students started with the lowest level of knowledge in the pre-test.
After training, 69% of the physicians/psychotherapists and 56.8% of the medical assistant professionals, but only 7% of the students, obtained maximum scores for naming psychological capacities.
Conclusions
Social medicine knowledge increased after a training course consisting of eight lessons. The increase was greater for medical assistant professionals and physicians/psychotherapists than for students. Social medicine training must be adjusted to the trainee groups' knowledge levels.
Cities and other human settlements are major contributors to climate change and are highly vulnerable to its impacts. They are also uniquely positioned to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lead adaptation efforts. These compound challenges and opportunities require a comprehensive perspective on the public policy of human settlements. Drawing on core literature that has driven debate around cities and climate over recent decades, we put forward a set of boundary objects that can be applied to connect the knowledge of epistemic communities and support an integrated urbanism. We then use these boundary objects to develop the Goals-Intervention-Stakeholder-Enablers (GISE) framework for a public policy of human settlements that is both place-specific and provides insights and tools useful for climate action in cities and other human settlements worldwide. Using examples from Berlin, we apply this framework to show that climate mitigation and adaptation, public health, and well-being goals are closely linked and mutually supportive when a comprehensive approach to urban public policy is applied.
Tuning systems of traditional Georgian singing determined from a new corpus of field recordings
(2022)
In this study we examine the tonal organization of the 2016 GVM dataset, a newly-created corpus of high-quality multimedia field recordings of traditional Georgian singing with a focus on Svaneti. For this purpose, we developed a new processing pipeline for the computational analysis of non-western polyphonic music which was subsequently applied to the complete 2016 GVM dataset.
To evaluate under what conditions a single tuning system is representative of current Svan performance practice, we examined the stability of the obtained tuning systems from an ensemble-, a song-, and a corpus-related perspective.
Furthermore, we compared the resulting Svan tuning systems with the tuning systems obtained for the Erkomaishvili dataset (Rosenzweig et al., 2020) in the study by Scherbaum et al. (2020). In comparison to a 12-TET (12-tone-equal-temperament) system, the Erkomaishvili and the Svan tuning systems are surprisingly similar.
Both systems show a strong presence of pure fourths (500 cents) and fifths (700 cents), and 'neutral' thirds (peaking around 350 cents) as well as 'neutral' sixths.
In addition, the sizes of the melodic and the harmonic seconds in both tuning systems differ systematically from each other, with the size of the harmonic second being systematically larger than the melodic one.
"Bad" data has a direct impact on 88% of companies, with the average company losing 12% of its revenue due to it.
Duplicates - multiple but different representations of the same real-world entities are among the main reasons for poor data quality, so finding and configuring the right deduplication solution is essential.
Existing data matching benchmarks focus on the quality of matching results and neglect other important factors, such as business requirements. Additionally, they often do not support the exploration of data matching results.
To address this gap between the mere counting of record pairs vs. a comprehensive means to evaluate data matching solutions, we present the Frost platform.
It combines existing benchmarks, established quality metrics, cost and effort metrics, and exploration techniques, making it the first platform to allow systematic exploration to understand matching results.
Frost is implemented and published in the open-source application Snowman, which includes the visual exploration of matching results, as shown in Figure 1.
How much influence did the former communist state security service Darzhavna sigurnost (DS) have during the transformation period in Bulgaria?
For the first time in history, there is empirical data available that allow for an analysis of the role of the Bulgarian secret police and its "afterlife" after 1990.
Bulgarian intelligence archives, which were made partly accessible following the country's admission to the European Union in 2007, provide an excellent basis for an analysis of the relationship between the DS and the Soviet State Committee for Security, the transformation of the Bulgarian security apparatus in 1990, attempts to disclose the state security archives, and continuous infiltration of Bulgarian politics, institutions, and security apparatus by former agents of the communist intelligence and security apparatus.
The empirical data suggest that personal connections, dependencies, and informal networks of former DS agents and officials played an important role during the transformation period in Bulgaria and are at least partly responsible for political corruption, continuous Russian influence, a high degree of politicization of the Bulgarian security apparatus, misuse of intelligence and illegal surveillance practices, and a high degree of domestic and international mistrust and (dis-)loyalty.
Uncovering the digitalization impact on consumer decision-making for checking accounts in banking
(2022)
Checking account providers must understand the importance of digital and non-digital service attributes across different customer segments to achieve a product-market fit in digitalization. In particular, various latent personal characteristics influence customer choices in digital banking. However, there is only limited research on banking customer behavior beyond the technology acceptance model, and none that explores customer preferences for checking accounts experimentally. Against this background, we present the results of a discrete choice experiment on customer preferences towards checking accounts in Germany. The outcome of the paper is a detailed quantitative assessment of the relationships between checking account service attributes and a set of latent influencing factors on choice. While customer service experience, the scope of services, and professional expertise are identified as re-occurring critical aspects for customers when choosing their banking service provider, the type of provider and digital product innovation showed little impact on customer choice overall. In multigroup analyses, we reveal the moderating impact of influencing factors on the preference of checking account service attributes. Additional segmentation analyses point to six customer segments from which four still prefer a traditional operating model. The largest segment of traditional product-innovative customers prefers digitalized, i.e., data-driven checking accounts in a mixed-mode with human customer advisory and on-site branch services from a traditional bank. At the other end of the spectrum, a small innovative Fintech customer segment, influenced by non-pragmatism and social norms, prefers a purely digital operating model with data-driven applications in banking.
Detecting DNA of novel fungal pathogens using ResNets and a curated fungi-hosts data collection
(2022)
Background:
Emerging pathogens are a growing threat, but large data collections and approaches for predicting the risk associated with novel agents are limited to bacteria and viruses. Pathogenic fungi, which also pose a constant threat to public health, remain understudied.
Relevant data remain comparatively scarce and scattered among many different sources, hindering the development of sequencing-based detection workflows for novel fungal pathogens.
No prediction method working for agents across all three groups is available, even though the cause of an infection is often difficult to identify from symptoms alone.
Results:
We present a curated collection of fungal host range data, comprising records on human, animal and plant pathogens, as well as other plant-associated fungi, linked to publicly available genomes.
We show that it can be used to predict the pathogenic potential of novel fungal species directly from DNA sequences with either sequence homology or deep learning.
We develop learned, numerical representations of the collected genomes and visualize the landscape of fungal pathogenicity.
Finally, we train multi-class models predicting if next-generation sequencing reads originate from novel fungal, bacterial or viral threats.
Conclusions:
The neural networks trained using our data collection enable accurate detection of novel fungal pathogens.
A curated set of over 1400 genomes with host and pathogenicity metadata supports training of machine-learning models and sequence comparison, not limited to the pathogen detection task.
After a long history of floodplain degradation and substantial losses of inundation areas over the last decades, a rethinking of floodplain management has taken place in Germany.
Floodplains are now acknowledged as important areas for both biodiversity and society. This transformation has been significantly supported by nationwide research activities. A systematic assessment of the current floodplain management is still lacking.
We therefore developed a scheme to assess floodplain management through the steps of identification, analysis, implementation, and evaluation.
Reviewing the data and literature on nationwide floodplain-related research and activities, we defined key elements of floodplain management for Germany.
We concluded that research activities already follow a strategic nationwide approach of identifying and analyzing floodplains.
Progress in implementation is slow, however, and potentials are far from being reached.
Nevertheless, new and unique initiatives enable Germany to stay on the long-term path of giving rivers more space and improving floodplain conditions.
Pichia pastoris (syn. Komagataella phaffii) represents a commonly used expression system in the biotech industry. High clonal variation of transformants, however, typically results in a broad range of specific productivities for secreted proteins. To isolate rare clones with exceedingly high product titers, an extensive number of clones need to be screened.
In contrast to high-throughput screenings of P. pastoris clones in microtiter plates, secrete-and -capture methodologies have the potential to efficiently isolate high-producer clones among millions of cells through fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS).Here, we describe a novel approach for the non-covalent binding of fragment antigen-binding (Fab) proteins to the cell surface for the isolation of high-producing clones.
Eight different single-chain variable fragment (scFv)-based capture matrices specific for the constant part of the Fabs were fused to the Saccharomyces cerevisiae alpha -agglutinin (SAG1) anchor protein for surface display in P. pastoris. By encoding the capture matrix on an episomal plasmid harboring inherently unstable autonomously replicating sequences (ARS), this secrete-and -capture system offers a switchable scFv display.
Efficient plasmid clearance upon removal of selective pres-sure enabled the direct use of isolated clones for subsequent Fab production. Flow-sorted clones (n = 276) displaying high amounts of Fabs showed a significant increase in median Fab titers detected in the cell-free supernatant (CFS) compared to unsorted clones (n = 276) when cells were cultivated in microtiter plates (fac-tor in the range of-21-49). Fab titers of clones exhibiting the highest product titer observed for each of the two approaches were increased by up to 8-fold for the sorted clone.
Improved Fab yields of sorted cells vs. unsorted cells were confirmed in an upscaled shake flask cultivation of selected candidates (factor in the range of-2-3). Hence, the developed display-based selection method proved to be a valuable tool for efficient clone screening in the early stages of our bioprocess development.
In this paper, we define a variant of Roe algebras for spaces with cylindrical ends and use this to study questions regarding existence and classification of metrics of positive scalar curvature on such manifolds which are collared on the cylindrical end.
We discuss how our constructions are related to relative higher index theory as developed by Chang, Weinberger, and Yu and use this relationship to define higher rho-invariants for positive scalar curvature metrics on manifolds with boundary.
This paves the way for the classification of these metrics.
Finally, we use the machinery developed here to give a concise proof of a result of Schick and the author, which relates the relative higher index with indices defined in the presence of positive scalar curvature on the boundary.
The literature on social inequality in study abroad almost exclusively focuses on university students.
This paper systematically examines the role of socioeconomic status (SES) for study abroad intent (SAI) and uptake across all levels of pre-college education in Japan, thereby also providing a first in-depth empirical study on pre-college study abroad (PSA) in this country.
Drawing on theories of social inequality (especially the effectively main-tained inequality (EMI) thesis) in combination with elements from cumulative advantage and life course research, we understand the intention and final decision to study abroad as an outcome of SES-specific differ-ences in educational biographies, with higher SES families seeking transnational education for their children to achieve status advantages.
Using large-scale cross-sectional data for Japan (N = 15,450) for children aged three to eighteen years, binary and generalized ordered logit regressions show that children from high SES families are generally more likely to (1) express SAI (especially for college) and take up PSA; and (2) choose more exclusive forms of PSA, i.e. earlier and more lengthy stays. Findings further indicate that (3) the SES-gap in the likelihood to show SAI or take up PSA is highest at the pre-and high school levels.
Applying the KHB method we found that (4) the percentage of SES effects on SAI mediated through earlier PSA experience is marginal or even reversed at times. We conclude that early PSA experience is positively related to further SAI, with high SES students likely accumulating transnational human capital to a greater extent, possibly acquiring status advantages.
In sum, our results support the EMI and cumulative advantage perspectives, indicating undetected first-and second-level horizontal inequalities in Japanese education and call for similar research in other national contexts.
In this paper we consider surfaces which are critical points of the Willmore functional subject to constrained area.
In the case of small area we calculate the corrections to the intrinsic geometry induced by the ambient curvature.
These estimates together with the choice of an adapted geometric center of mass lead to refined position estimates in relation to the scalar curvature of the ambient manifold.
In the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida, the motor torque for flagellar rotation is generated by the two stators MotAB and MotCD.
Here, we construct mutant strains in which one or both stators are knocked out and investigate their swimming motility in fluids of different viscosity and in heterogeneous structured environments (semisolid agar).
Besides phase-contrast imaging of single-cell trajectories and spreading cultures, dual-color fluorescence microscopy allows us to quantify the role of the stators in enabling P. putida's three different swimming modes, where the flagellar bundle pushes, pulls, or wraps around the cell body.
The MotAB stator is essential for swimming motility in liquids, while spreading in semisolid agar is not affected. Moreover, if the MotAB stator is knocked out, wrapped mode formation under low-viscosity conditions is strongly impaired and only partly restored for increased viscosity and in semisolid agar.
In contrast, when the MotCD stator is missing, cells are indistinguishable from the wild type in fluid experiments but spread much more slowly in semisolid agar.
Analysis of the microscopic trajectories reveals that the MotCD knockout strain forms sessile clusters, thereby reducing the number of motile cells, while the swimming speed is unaffected. Together, both stators ensure a robust wild type that swims efficiently under different environmental conditions.
IMPORTANCE
Because of its heterogeneous habitat, the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida needs to swim efficiently under very different environmental conditions. In this paper, we knocked out the stators MotAB and MotCD to investigate their impact on the swimming motility of P. putida.
While the MotAB stator is crucial for swimming in fluids, in semisolid agar, both stators are sufficient to sustain a fast-swimming phenotype and increased frequencies of the wrapped mode, which is known to be beneficial for escaping mechanical traps. However, in contrast to the MotAB knockout, a culture of MotCD knockout cells spreads much more slowly in the agar, as it forms nonmotile clusters that reduce the number of motile cells.
Because of its heterogeneous habitat, the soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida needs to swim efficiently under very different environmental conditions. In this paper, we knocked out the stators MotAB and MotCD to investigate their impact on the swimming motility of P. putida.
High-growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and productivity growth. We investigate the relationship between product and labour market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, and the development of HGFs across European regions. Using data from Eurostat, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Economic Forum (WEF), and Gothenburg University, we show that both regulatory stringency and the quality of the regional government relate to the regional shares of HGFs. In particular, we find that the effect of labour and product market regulations is moderated by the quality of regional government. Depending on the quality of regional governments, regulations may have a ‘good, bad or ugly’ influence on the development of HGFs. Our findings contribute to the debate on the effects of regulations and offer important building blocks to develop tailored policy measures that may influence the development of HGFs in a region.
As the loop space of a Riemannian manifold is infinite-dimensional, it is a non-trivial problem to make sense of the "top degree component " of a differential form on it.
In this paper, we show that a formula from finite dimensions generalizes to assign a sensible "top degree component " to certain composite forms, obtained by wedging with the exponential (in the exterior algebra) of the canonical presymplectic 2-form on the loop space.
This construction is a crucial ingredient for the definition of the supersymmetric path integral on the loop space.
The functional significance of the two prominent language-related ERP components N400 and P600 is still under debate.
It has recently been suggested that one important dimension along which the two vary is in terms of automaticity versus attentional control, with N400 amplitudes reflecting more automatic and P600 amplitudes reflecting more controlled aspects of sentence comprehension.
The availability of executive resources necessary for controlled processes depends on sustained attention, which fluctuates over time.
Here, we thus tested whether P600 and N400 amplitudes depend on the level of sustained attention.
We reanalyzed EEG and behavioral data from a sentence processing task by Sassenhagen and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky [The P600 as a correlate of ventral attention network reorientation. Cortex, 66, A3-A20, 2015], which included sentences with morphosyntactic and semantic violations.
Participants read sentences phrase by phrase and indicated whether a sentence contained any type of anomaly as soon as they had the relevant information.
To quantify the varying degrees of sustained attention, we extracted a moving reaction time coefficient of variation over the entire course of the task.
We found that the P600 amplitude was significantly larger during periods of low reaction time variability (high sustained attention) than in periods of high reaction time variability (low sustained attention). In contrast, the amplitude of the N400 was not affected by reaction time variability.
These results thus suggest that the P600 component is sensitive to sustained attention whereas the N400 component is not, which provides independent evidence for accounts suggesting that P600 amplitudes reflect more controlled and N400 amplitudes reflect more automatic aspects of sentence comprehension.
We examine sub-caldera structure and seismicity in and around the Okataina Volcanic Centre (OVC), Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand, using seismic data collected over 4+ years with a temporary array of broadband and short-period seismometers, supplementing data from the permanent New Zealand seismometer network.
We derive a new 3-D image of P-wave seismic velocity for the upper crust in the region, using double-difference seismic tomography and utilising waveform cross-correlations. We subsequently relocate 6989 earthquakes which occurred in the region over the 2010-2021 time period, using the 3D velocity model.
The seismicity distribution shows spatial clusters west of Lake Rotomahana, as well as beneath Haroharo and the Makatiti Dome, inside the Okataina caldera. Beneath Makatiti Dome 90% of the events are shallower than 7.7 +/- 0.5 km.
Outside of the Okataina caldera event relocations highlight short (similar to 3-4 km long) streaks of activity in the Ngakuru graben, part of the active Taupo Rift southwest of Okataina caldera. Inside the OVC the relocated seismicity beneath Makatiti appears closely associated with low (similar to 10%) P-wave velocity anomalies, which we resolve in the similar to 5-to-8-km depth range beneath the Okataina caldera, and which are likely related to partial melt and/or fluid-volatile pathways.
Moment tensor analyses for two larger-magnitude events (M(L)4.5 and M(L)4.9) near Haroharo indicate normal faulting, with NNE-SSW fault strike, but with positive CLVD and positive isotropic components when allowing for a full moment tensor, consistent with a magmatic environment with degassing and/or fluid migration.
Adverbial connectives like therefore, which link a preceding 'external' to an 'internal' argument, can be regarded as anaphoric: The external argument is selected by an interpretation process akin to that of an event anaphor, and intervening material can appear between both arguments.
We report on a crowdsourcing experiment on the German connectives trotzdem and dennoch that studies factors that lead readers to assume such long-distance arguments: semantic plausibility of intervening material, 'subjective' versus 'objective' content, and the presence of an anaphoric morpheme in the connective.
We find that the type and content of the intervening material play an important role in argument choice.
We formulate offloading of computational tasks from a dynamic group of mobile agents (e.g., cars) as decentral-ized decision making among autonomous agents.
We design an interaction mechanism that incentivizes such agents to align private and system goals by balancing between competition and cooperation.
In the static case, the mechanism provably has Nash equilibria with optimal resource allocation. In a dynamic environment, this mechanism's requirement of complete information is impossible to achieve. For such environments, we propose a novel multi-agent online learning algorithm that learns with partial, delayed and noisy state information, thus greatly reducing information need.
Our algorithm is also capable of learning from long-term and sparse reward signals with varying delay. Empirical results from the simulation of a V2X application confirm that through learning, agents with the learning algorithm significantly improve both system and individual performance, reducing up to 30% of offloading failure rate, communication overhead and load variation, increasing computation resource utilization and fairness. Results also confirm the algorithm's good convergence and generalization property in different environments.
Mechanism comics as a task in a written exam in organic chemistry for pre-service chemistry teachers
(2022)
In this paper, we describe and evaluate a study on the use of mechanism comics for writing solutions to a task in a written exam for the course "Organic Chemistry I for Pre-Service Chemistry Teachers."
The students had to design a reaction mechanism for a reaction that was unknown to them and write captions explaining every step of their reaction mechanism.
The students' work was evaluated using the method of qualitative content analysis in four rounds by both authors. The majority of the captions were coded as "descriptive" and only a minority as "causal."
This means that the students mostly described "what" happened, but seldom "why" this happened. Implicit electron movement was also described more often than explicit electron movement. The majority of the captions were technically correct. In summary, the students were capable of designing and describing a reaction mechanism for a previously unknown reaction.
The quality of their reasoning could be improved, however. In the new course, the quality of students' mechanistic reasoning and then especially their explanations of "why" mechanistic steps occur will be given much clearer emphasis.
The aim of this case series approach was to analyze weekly changes in force-velocity relationship (FvR) parameters ((v) over bar, (F) over bar (0), (P) over bar (max)) and theoretical snatch performance (snatchth) assessed through a specific snatch pull test in preparation of the European and World Championships in 2 male elite weightlifters.
A second aim was to examine associations of training load (volume, volume load, average load), barbell -, and snatchth over a period of 2 macrocycles in preparation of the same competitions. FvR-parameters, snatchth, training load data, and body mass were assessed weekly over 40 weeks.
Using the smallest real difference approach, significant (p <= 0.05) decreases in (v) over bar (0) and increases in (v) over bar, (F) over bar (0), (P) over bar (max), and snatchth were found within macrocycles.
However, the large significant loss in body mass (approximate to 11%) in athlete 1 during macrocycle 2 represents most likely a main factor for diminished (P) over bar (max), and snatchth in macrocycle 2.
Based on cross-correlation analyses, barbell FvR-parameters and snatchth were significantly (p <= 0.05) associated with maximal strength, muscle power, and speed training load variables.
Moderate correlations (0.31-0.47) were found between training load and (P) over bar (max) and snatchth in athlete 2. It can be concluded that the applied training loads elicits improvements in <(P)(max) and snatchth because the athlete approached the main competitions.
However, because of the large loss in body mass, the relations between training load and barbell FvR-parameters and snatchth were less clear in athlete 1. It seems that a loss in body mass as a result of a change in bodyweight category mitigates <(P)over bar>(max) development during the macrocycle and hindered to reach peak snatchth at the main competitions.
We study the effect of energy and transport policies on pollution in two developing country cities. We use a quantitative equilibrium model with choice of housing, energy use, residential location, transport mode, and energy technology. Pollution comes from commuting and residential energy use. The model parameters are calibrated to replicate key variables for two developing country cities, Maputo, Mozambique, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In the counterfactual simulations, we study how various transport and energy policies affect equilibrium pollution. Policies may induce rebound effects from increasing residential energy use or switching to high emission modes or locations. In general, these rebound effects tend to be largest for subsidies to public transport or modern residential energy technology.
The field of healthcare is characterized by constant innovation, with gender-specific medicine emerging as a new subfield that addresses sex and gender disparities in clinical manifestations, outcomes, treatment, and prevention of disease. Despite its importance, the adoption of gender-specific medicine remains understudied, posing potential risks to patient outcomes due to a lack of awareness of the topic. Building on the Innovation Decision Process Theory, this study examines the spread of information about gender-specific medicine in online networks. The study applies social network analysis to a Twitter dataset reflecting online discussions about the topic to gain insights into its adoption by health professionals and patients online. Results show that the network has a community structure with limited information exchange between sub-communities and that mainly medical experts dominate the discussion. The findings suggest that the adoption of gender-specific medicine might be in its early stages, focused on knowledge exchange. Understanding the diffusion of gender-specific medicine among medical professionals and patients may facilitate its adoption and ultimately improve health outcomes.
On October 9, 2014, a Mw 7.1-6.7 seismic doublet occurred at the Juan Fernandez microplate, close to the triple junction with Pacific and Nazca plates. The Mw 7.1 earthquake is the largest earthquake ever to have been recorded in the region. Its thrust focal mechanism is also unusual for the region, although the northern part of the microplate is expected to undergo compression. The region is remote and seismological data is limited to a seismic station at similar to 600 km distance on Easter Island and teleseismic observations for the largest events. We use a combination of advanced seismological techniques to overcome the lack of local data and resolve earthquake source parameters for the doublet and its aftershock sequence, being able to reconstruct the chronology of the sequence and the geometry of affected fault segments. Our results depict a complex seismic sequence characterized by the interplay of thrust and strike-slip earthquakes along different structures, including a second, reversed strike slip-thrust seismic doublet in November 2014. Seismicity occurred within the microplate and only in the late part of the sequence migrated northward, towards the microplate boundary. The first largest doublet, whose rupture kinematic is well explained by stress changes imparted by the first subevent on the second one, may have activated unmapped E-W and NE-SW faults or an internal curved pseudofault, attributed to the longterm rotation of the microplate. Few large, thrust earthquakes are observed within the sequence, taking place in the vicinity of mapped compressional ridges. We suggest that compressional stresses in the northern part of the microplate and at its boundary are partially accommodated aseismically. However, the occasional occurrence of large, impulsive thrust earthquakes, with a considerable tsunamigenic potential, poses a relevant hazard for islands in the South Pacific region.
Turkish is a language described as relying predominantly on non-finite subordination in the domain of clause combining. However, there are also strategies of finite subordination, as well as means of syndetic and asyndetic paratactic clause combining, especially in the informal settings.
Clause combining is and has been one of the focal points of research on heritage Turkish (h-Turkish).
One point is particularly clear: In comparison with the monolingual setting, finite means of clause combining are more frequent in h-Turkish in Germany, the U.S., and the Netherlands, while non-finite means of clause combining are less frequent.
Overall, our results confirm the findings of earlier studies: heritage speakers in Germany and the U.S. prefer paratactic means of clause combining using connectors, as opposed to monolingual speakers.
Our results also reveal that age (adolescents vs. adults) and register (informal vs. formal) significantly modulate the use of connectors.
Moreover, we find that the shift in preferences in means of clause combining triggers an expansion in the system of connectors and leads to the development of new narrative connectors, such as o zaman and derken.
The system of syndetic paratactic clause combining is expanding in heritage Turkish. This expansion calls for multifaceted modeling of change in heritage languages, which integrates language-internal factors (register), dynamics of convergence with the contact languages, and extra-linguistic factors (age and language use).
Introduction:
Reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) are produced as a response to exercise and play a part in guiding the adaptive response to physical training.
Exercise in the heat has been shown to further increase accumulation of RONS in systemic circulation; however, a high antioxidative response or heat acclimatization mechanisms could attenuate this response.
In a previous study, we found reduced RONS concentrations in trained athletes following strenuous cycling in the heat. Therefore, this secondary analysis assessed whether these reduced RONS serum concentrations are induced by an increased serum antioxidant capacity.
Methods:
Twelve male cyclists (V?O2peak: 60 +/- 4 ml center dot kg-1 center dot min-1) completed a 60-minute constant workload trial (55% peak power output, ambient temperature 30.4 +/- 0.6 degrees C) with and without ice vest in a randomized order.
The core body temperature (Tcore) was measured by an ingestible capsule. Blood samples were collected before and after each trial to determine superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) activity, total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and RONS.
Due to the absence of between-group differences, data of both conditions were pooled. Results: Tcore statistically increased (p < 0.001) over the experimental trials (+6.0 +/- 1.6%, effect size (ES) = 5.6). Concentrations of RONS (-17.2 +/- 15.5%, p < 0.001, ES = 1.0) and TAC (-8.9 +/- 22.9%, p = 0.04, ES = 0.7) statistically decreased, while the activity of CAT (+15.5 +/- 84.0%, p = 0.90, ES = 0.04) and SOD (+9.2 +/- 58.7%, p = 0.98, ES = 0.01) remained unchanged.
Conclusions:
Reduced serum RONS concentrations after strenuous cycling in the heat were not associated with upregulation of serum antioxidant capacity in trained athletes.
The prooxidant-antioxidant balance may rather be regulated at a myocellular level and should be further assessed in future studies.
Azobenzene is a prototypical molecular photoswitch, widely used to trigger a variety of transformations at different length scales.
In systems like self-assembled monolayers or micelles, azobenzene chromophores may interact with each other, which gives rise to the emergence of exciton states.
Here, using first-principles calculations, we investigate how conformational disorder (induced, e.g., by thermal fluctuations) affects localization of these states, on an example of an H-type azobenzene tetramer.
We find that conformational disorder leads to (partial) exciton localization on a single-geometry level, whereas ensemble-averaging results in a delocalized picture. The pi pi* and n pi* excitons at high and low temperatures are discussed.
The regioselectivity of two mechanistically distinct alkenylation reactions catalyzed by in situ-formed cationic transition metal complexes was studied using
N-allyl-N-phenylethenesulfonamide as a model compound.
Orthogonal selectivity was observed for the Ru-catalyzed C-H-activating alkenylation with acetanilides, which occurs preferentially at the electron deficient double bond, and for a Pd-catalyzed Heck-type coupling with arene diazonium salts, which occurs preferentially at the more electron rich double bond of the N-allyl substituent.
Fast style transfer methods have recently gained popularity in art-related applications as they make a generalized real-time stylization of images practicable.
However, they are mostly limited to one-shot stylizations concerning the interactive adjustment of style elements.
In particular, the expressive control over stroke sizes or stroke orientations remains an open challenge.
To this end, we propose a novel stroke-adjustable fast style transfer network that enables simultaneous control over the stroke size and intensity, and allows a wider range of expressive editing than current approaches by utilizing the scale-variance of convolutional neural networks.
Furthermore, we introduce a network-agnostic approach for style-element editing by applying reversible input transformations that can adjust strokes in the stylized output. At this, stroke orientations can be adjusted, and warping-based effects can be applied to stylistic elements, such as swirls or waves.
To demonstrate the real-world applicability of our approach, we present StyleTune, a mobile app for interactive editing of neural style transfers at multiple levels of control. Our app allows stroke adjustments on a global and local level.
It furthermore implements an on-device patch-based upsampling step that enables users to achieve results with high output fidelity and resolutions of more than 20 megapixels.
Our approach allows users to art-direct their creations and achieve results that are not possible with current style transfer applications.
Background: Demographic changes are leading to growing care needs of older people and creating a challenge for healthcare systems worldwide. Nursing homes (NHs) need to provide care for growing numbers of residents while ensuring a high-quality care. We aimed to examine an innovative NH in Germany and apply a theory of change (ToC) approach to develop a best practice model (BPM) for therapeutic care in NHs.
Methods: A multimethod qualitative study conducted from February to July 2021 in Germany involved interviews with 14 staff members of an innovative NH and 10 directors and care managers of other NHs. The interview guidelines included questions on nursing practices, infrastructure, resources, interprofessional collaboration, and working culture. Additional material on the participating NH (website, promotion videos, newsletters, care documentation) were collected. Contextual literature on NH culture and therapeutic care in Germany, ToC methodology, and NH culture change were reviewed. Following a question-focused analysis of all material, we generated a ToC model towards a BPM of therapeutic care and meaningful living in NHs.
Results: were verified in interdisciplinary team meetings, with study participants and other stakeholders to establish consensus. Results The participating NH's care concept aims to improve residents' functional abilities and wellbeing as well as staff members' job satisfaction. Central components of their approach include therapeutic elements such as music and movement in all nursing activities, multidisciplinary collaboration, a broad therapy and social activity offer, the continuation of therapy in everyday activities, a focus on individual life history, values, needs, and skills, social integration into the regional community, and the creation of a meaningful living environment for residents and staff.
Conclusion: The BPM we developed shows how a meaningful living environment can be created through therapeutic care and integrative activities. The ToC sheds light onto the contextual factors and cultural values which should be considered in the development of NH interventions. Research on not only biomedical aspects, but also psychosocial dynamics and narrative co-constructions in nursing practice should inform NH innovations. The ToC also highlights the importance of developing adequate political frameworks and infrastructures for implementing such innovative practices on a larger scale.
It is seen that the Alevi-Sunni relations are mostly shaped by the stereotyped perceptions of the two groups about each other.
In particular, the fact that Alevism is a closed society due to the pressure they have experienced throughout history has prevented them from being perceived correctly.
As such, it is seen that there are many misconceptions about Alevis and their rituals that do not match the reality but are accepted as correct by the society.
Due to the lack of communication that could not be developed through this "unknown" in the historical process, Alevi-Sunni relations have always been open to manipulations. As a matter of fact, it is seen that Alevis' relations with Islam, the Djem ceremonies that form the basis of Alevism, and the content of Djem ceremonies have always remained a mystery to Sunnis.
Unfortunately, this misperception also reflected negatively on the communication between the two groups.
As it is known, if stereotypes arise when there is incorrect information about the target group, the best way to correct them is to create common contact environments that will bring individuals to the right information. Here in this article, the unknown Djem ritual and especially the Qur'anic verses that they refer to during the Djem ceremonies are discussed.
The quantification and identification of aerosols in industry plays a key role in process monitoring and control and lays the foundation for process automation aspired by the industry 4.0 initiative.
However, measuring particulate matter's mass and number concentrations in harsh environments poses great analytical constraints.
The presented approach comprises a comprehensive set of light-and imaging-based techniques, all contactless, in-line, and real-time. It includes, but is not limited to, stroboscopic imaging, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and laser-induced incandescence (LII). Stroboscopic imaging confirmed the particles sphericity and was used to measure the particle number density. A phase-selective LIBS setup with low fluence and 500 Hz repetition rate was used to classify each particle with a single-pulse and in real time. Simultaneously, the created plasma was captured by CCD imaging to determine the detection volume and hit rate of the LIBS setup.
Both data sets combined were converted to a particle number density, which was consistent with the particle number density of the stroboscopic measurements. Furthermore, using a photodiode and microphone in parallel to the LIBS setup allowed for the photoacoustic normalization of the spectral line intensity at the laser repetition rate of 500 Hz.
This was done as a partial photoacoustic normalization method with the cut-off based on the coefficient of variation (CV), reducing it by 25%. Aside from that photodiode and microphone were proven to be valuable event counting with the advantage of the less spatially constricted. A second laser setup was used for laser -induced incandescence (LII) making it possible to classify the particles based on their incandescence tendency. Given its larger probing volume, LII could be employed at very low particle number densities.
With respect to the current literature, this is the first approach of using LII as an in-line, real-time analytical technique for the compositional classification of metal-bearing aerosols.
We report on the triplet sensitization of the intramolecular Photo-Dehydro-Diels-Alder (PDDA) reaction of two diaryl suberates bearing methyl propiolate chromophors. Compared with the non-sensitized irradiation, considerably increased yields could be observed.
Moreover, it is possible to use the more efficient UVA lamps instead of UVB lamps.
Among three investigated sensitizers (xanthone, benzophenone, thioxanthone) xanthone gave the best results.
Consumer behaviour changes and strategic management decisions are driving adaptations in manufacturing routines. Based on the theory of situational strength, we investigated how contextual and person-related factors influence workers’ adaptation in a two-worker position routine. Contextual factors, like retrieval cues (Study 1), time pressure (Study 2), and convenience (Study 3), were varied. Person-related factors included retentivity, general and routine-specific self-efficacy, and perceived adaptation costs. Dependent variables included various error types and production time before and after adaptation. In each study, 148 participants were trained in a production routine at t1 and executed an adapted routine at t2, one week later. Repeated measures ANOVA for performance at t1 and t2, and MANOVA for performance at t2, revealed that time increased for all groups at t2. For participants in Studies 1 & 2, error rates remained consistent. Retentivity significantly impacted errors at both t1 and t2, emphasising that routine changes in a ‘running business’ take time, regardless of contextual factors. Workers with lower retentivity may require additional support.
Detecting anomalous subsequences in time series is an important task in time series analytics because it serves the identification of special events, such as production faults, delivery bottlenecks, system defects, or heart flicker.
Consequently, many algorithms have been developed for the automatic detection of such anomalous patterns. The enormous number of approaches (i.e., more than 158 as of today), the lack of properly labeled test data, and the complexity of time series anomaly benchmarking have, though, led to a situation where choosing the best detection technique for a given anomaly detection task is a difficult challenge.
In this demonstration, we present TIMEEVAL, an extensible, scalable and automatic benchmarking toolkit for time series anomaly detection algorithms. TIMEEVAL includes an extensive data generator and supports both interactive and batch evaluation scenarios. With our novel toolkit, we aim to ease the evaluation effort and help the community to provide more meaningful evaluations.
Entity resolution on-demand
(2022)
Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify and merge records that refer to the same real-world entity.
ER is typically employed as an expensive cleaning step on the entire data before consuming it. Yet, determining which entities are useful once cleaned depends solely on the user's application, which may need only a fraction of them.
For instance, when dealing with Web data, we would like to be able to filter the entities of interest gathered from multiple sources without cleaning the entire, continuously-growing data.
Similarly, when querying data lakes, we want to transform data on-demand and return the results in a timely manner-a fundamental requirement of ELT (Extract-Load-Transform) pipelines.
We propose BrewER, a framework to evaluate SQL SP queries on dirty data while progressively returning results as if they were issued on cleaned data. BrewER tries to focus the cleaning effort on one entity at a time, following an ORDER BY predicate. Thus, it inherently supports top-k and stop-and-resume execution.
For a wide range of applications, a significant amount of resources can be saved. We exhaustively evaluate and show the efficacy of BrewER on four real-world datasets.
Many proteins are anchored to the cell surface of eukaryotes using a unique family of glycolipids called glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchors.
These glycolipids also exist without a covalently bound protein, in particular on the cell surfaces of protozoan parasites where they are densely populated.
GPIs and GPI-anchored proteins participate in multiple cellular processes such as signal transduction, cell adhesion, protein trafficking and pathogenesis of Malaria, Toxoplasmosis, Trypanosomiasis and prion diseases, among others.
All GPIs share a common conserved glycan core modified in a cell-dependent manner with additional side glycans or phosphoethanolamine residues. Here, we use atomistic molecular dynamic simulations and perform a systematic study to evaluate the structural properties of GPIs with different side chains inserted in lipid bilayers.
Our results show a flop-down orientation of GPIs with respect to the membrane surface and the presentation of the side chain residues to the solvent.
This finding agrees well with experiments showing the role of the side residues as active epitopes for recognition of GPIs by macrophages and induction of GPI-glycan-specific immune responses.
Protein-GPI interactions were investigated by attaching parasitic GPIs to Green Fluorescent Protein. GPIs are observed to recline on the membrane surface and pull down the attached protein close to the membrane facilitating mutual contacts between protein, GPI and the lipid bilayer.
This model is efficient in evaluating the interaction of GPIs and GPI-anchored proteins with membranes and can be extended to study other parasitic GPIs and proteins and develop GPI-based immunoprophylaxis to treat infectious diseases.
The BAMline at the BESSY II synchrotron X-ray source has enabled research for more than 20 years in widely spread research fields such as materials science, biology, cultural heritage and medicine.
As a nondestructive characterization method, synchrotron X-ray imaging, especially tomography, plays a particularly important role in structural characterization.
A recent upgrade of key equipment of the BAMline widens its imaging capabilities: shorter scan acquisition times are now possible, in situ and op erando studies can now be routinely performed, and different energy spectra can easily be set up.
In fact, the upgraded double-multilayer monochromator brings full flexibility by yielding different energy spectra to optimize flux and energy resolution as desired.
The upgraded detector (based on an sCMOS camera) also allows exploiting the higher flux with reduced readout times.
Furthermore, an installed slip ring allows the sample stage to continuously rotate.
The latter feature enables tomographic observation of processes occurring in the time scale of a few seconds.
The debate whether single large or several small (SLOSS) patches benefit biodiversity has existed for decades, but recent literature provides increasing evidence for the importance of small habitats.
Possible beneficial mechanisms include reduced presence of preda-tors and competitors in small habitat areas or specific functions such as stepping stones for dispersal.
Given the increasing amount of studies highlighting individual behavioral differences that may influence these functions, we hypothesize that the advantage of small versus large habitat patches not only depends on patch functionality but also on the presence of animal personalities (i.e., risk-tolerant vs. risk-averse). Using an individual-based, spatially-explicit community model, we analyzed the diversity of mammal communities in landscapes consisting of a few large habitat islands interspersed with different amounts and sizes of small habitat patches.
Within these heterogeneous environments, individuals compete for resources and form home-ranges, with only risk-tolerant individuals using habitat edges. Results show that when risk-tolerant individuals exist, small patches increase species diversity. A strong peak occurs at approximately 20% habitat cover in small patches when those small habitats are only used for foraging but not for breeding and home-range core position. Additional usage as stepping stones for juvenile dispersal further increases species persistence. Over-all, our results reveal that a combination of a few large and several small habitat patches promotes biodiversity by enhancing land-scape heterogeneity.
Here, heterogeneity is created by pronounced differences in habitat functionality, increasing edge density, and variability in habitat use by different behavioral types. The finding that a combination of single large AND several small (SLASS) patches is needed for effective biodiversity preservation has implications for advancing landscape conservation.
Particularly in struc-turally poor agricultural areas, modern technology enables precise management with the opportunity to create small foraging habitats by excluding less profitable agricultural land from cultivation.
The Circular Economy (CE) - based on five principles (reduce, reuse, refurbish, repair, and recycle) - has received increased attention in both academia and practice in recent years. The transition to CE by public and private organizations can be seen as an entrepreneurial act encompassing their strategic policies, business models, structures, and processes. Little is known about the involvement of employees of organizations making this transition. Therefore, this study investigates the influence of organizations’ commitment to the five CE principles on their employees’ perceptions of the usefulness, ease of implementation, and acceptability of the principles. The method used is exploratory, a mixed-method approach combining PLS-SEM and fsQCA. This research contributes to the field by developing a unified theoretical perspective on the entrepreneurial context. It also highlights the impact of CE principles on organizations that are transitioning to more sustainable development.
Investigating of locomotor disturbances are relevant in human injury and performance. Therefore, lower extremity kinematics were analysed in response to decelerative perturbations during running using statistical parametric mapping (SPM). 13 asymptomatic individuals (8 females & 5 males, 28 +/- 3 years, 171 +/- 9 cm, 68 +/- 10 kg) completed an 8-minute running protocol with 30 one-sided perturbations (15 each side) to generate decelerative disturbances.
A 3D-motion capture system was employed to record kinematic data. Joint angles of the ankle, knee, and hip in addition to stride duration, stride length and step width were calculated for leading and trailing strides.
Results were analysed descriptively, followed by SPM of paired t-tests (P < 0.025). Reactively (after perturbation), perturbations caused decreased hip adduction and stride duration of the leading leg. The trailing leg reacted with ankle inversion, knee and hip flexion, hip abduction, as well as an increase in stride duration and step width (P < 0.025). In preparation for perturbation, the trailing leg reduced ankle dorsiflexion, knee flexion, hip flexion, and adduction. In summary, applied perturbations produced substantial reactive (feedback) and predictive (feedforward) responses of the lower limbs, most apparent in the trailing leg.
Back to bureaucracy?
(2024)
In this contribution, the emergence of the neo-Weberian state (NWS) is analyzed with regard to German public administration. Drawing on the concept of a governance space, which consists of a hierarchy, markets, and networks, we distinguish between four empirical manifestations of the NWS, namely, the NWS as (1) come back of the public/ re-municipalization; (2) re-hierarchization; (3) de-agencification; (4) de-escalation in performance management. These movements can, on the one hand, be interpreted as a (partial) reversal of New Public Management (NPM) approaches and a “swinging back of the pendulum” (see Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2019) toward public and classical Weberian principles (e.g., hierarchy, regulation, institutional re-aggregation). This reversal re-strengthened the hierarchy within the overall governance space to the detriment of, but without completely replacing, market mechanisms and networks. NPM’s failure to deliver what it promised and its inappropriateness as a response to more recent challenges connected to crises and wicked problems have engendered a partial return of the public and a move away from the economization logic of NPM. On the other hand, post-NPM reversals and managerial de-escalation gave rise to hybrid models that merge NPM and classic Weberian administration. While some well-functioning combinations of NPM and Weberianism exist, the hybridization of “old” and “neo” elements has also provoked ambivalent and negative assessments regarding the actual functioning of the NWS in Germany. Our analysis suggests that the NWS is only partially suitable as a model for reform and future administrative modernization, largely depending on the context surrounding reform and implementation practices.
Digital media are being used more and more frequently by children and for a wide variety of functions.
However, there are no studies to date that examine the effect of such use on peer interactions and the occurrence of prosocial behavior in peers.
For parents, it has been found that when using digital media only few parents respond responsively to their children's attempts at interaction and also very rarely, they communicate with them verbally and nonverbally.
In the present study, we investigated how playing a game in a digital versus analog form influences in-teractions (especially prosocial behavior) of peers.
We used an experimental situation, where 24 dyads of 4-10-year-old children were examined. Each of the dyads was randomly assigned to a condition where they played either a digital or analog game together. Various interaction parameters and prosocial behavior during and after the game were analyzed.
Results show that children in the analog condition communicated verbally with each other more often, responded more often to interaction attempts of their partners and showed less often negative forms of inter-action and more often positive forms of interaction than children in the digital condition.
However, the type of medium had no influence on prosocial behavior after the game situation.
These results suggest that the format of a game (digital vs. analog) has a decisive influence on peer interactions concerning their communication during but not their prosocial behavior after the game situation.
Knowledge and participation in exercise and physical activity among pregnant women in Ho, Ghana
(2022)
Background
Physical activity (PA) and exercise have been identified to improve the general fitness and health.
Although, the Pregnancy Physical Activity Questionnaire (PPAQ) has been validated for use in assessing PA in pregnant women. However, understanding the knowledge and participation levels of PA in pregnant women in the underdeveloped regions of Ghana is of clinical relevance to foster education and promotion of PA. In Ghana, pregnant women believe the "myth" (mostly in rural areas and underdeveloped regions) that exercising in the first trimester might lead to miscarriage.
Thus, the main objective of this study was to investigate the extent of knowledge and participation levels in PA among pregnant women in Ho, Ghana using a self-developed questionnaire which consisted of some questions adapted from the PPAQ. MethodsSeventy-seven (n = 77) pregnant women between the ages of 18-50 years were recruited from three hospitals across the Ho municipality of Ghana.
A self-developed questionnaire which consisted of some questions taken from the PPAQ was administered to participants under the researchers' supervision. Spearman's correlation analysis was used to find the association between the level of participation in PA, knowledge of PA and gestational age among pregnant women.
Results
From the total participants (n = 77) recruited, 57 (74%) of the participants scored high in PA knowledge.
Most of the participants 48 (62.3%) answered that PA promotes healthy pregnancy. Participants who reported barriers to PA during pregnancy were no exercise habits 51 (66.2%), having no time 17 (22.1%) and fear of miscarriage 9 (11.7%).
There was a significant (p < 0.05) association between the level of participation and gestational age. No significant (p > 0.05) association between the level of participation and knowledge of PA was observed.
Conclusion
There is a high level of knowledge of PA among pregnant women in Ho, Ghana. However, most pregnant women rather engage in PA as their gestational age increases. Thus, to foster sustainable exercise participation during pregnancy, all healthcare providers saddled with the responsibility of providing maternal healthcare must strengthen the education and promotion of exercise and PA among pregnant women in Ho, Ghana.
Background: The loss of a sibling can have a long-term impact on the mental and physical health of the surviving sibling throughout adolescence and later adulthood. Even though bereaved siblings can be identified as a high-risk group, evidence-based interventions for this bereavement group are still missing.
Aim: To evaluate the treatment effects of an internet-based writing intervention for bereaved siblings aged 16-65 years.
Design: A two-armed randomized controlled trial (DRKS00011514) compared the intervention to a waiting list control group. The 6-week intervention consisted of six structured writing assignments that were based on cognitive behavioral therapy, focusing on the specific situation of bereaved siblings.
Setting/participants: Eighty-six bereaved siblings (loss >1 month ago, no severe psychiatric symptoms) were randomly allocated to the intervention group (n = 47) or the waiting list control group (n = 39). Primary outcomes were symptoms of prolonged grief disorder and depression; secondary outcomes were posttraumatic stress symptoms and survivor guilt.
Results: Symptoms of depression and prolonged grief disorder improved significantly in the intention-to-treat analyses from pre-to post-measurement compared with the control group (g(Depression) = -0.62, g(Grief) = 0.33). In the intervention group, all primary and secondary outcomes decreased significantly from baseline to 12-month follow-up (gs = -0.38 to -1.04). A significant clinical change could be found for depression (34%) compared to the waitlist control group (10%).
Conclusions: Bereaved siblings profited from this brief internet-based writing intervention in the short- and long-term. However, future research, such as dismantling studies, may help to further optimize the benefits of an intervention aimed at bereaved siblings.
This study investigates alternatively certified (AC) teachers' motives for teaching, their well-being, and their intention to stay in the profession.
We conducted multivariate covariance analyses using a largescale dataset of 446 traditionally certified (TC) teachers and 143 AC teachers at secondary schools in Germany. Findings show that AC teachers reported more frequently than TC teachers that they chose teaching due to social influences and because of more time for their family. Furthermore, AC teachers report significantly higher enthusiasm for teaching.
No differences were found regarding emotional exhaustion or the intention to stay in the profession.
As school learning should enable people to self-determine their own lives, its long-lasting relevance for participation in further education is an essential outcome. Contemporary adult education research shows that beliefs and memories from one's school years have an impact on the motivation to pursue further education in working life.
However, almost no longitudinal research exists that investigates the long-term forces behind adults' motivation to educate themselves. Hence, the present study examined whether students' learning-related behaviour, cognitions and emotions that developed in their school years are related to the subjective value they place on further education, their expectations of success in solving further learning tasks, and thus the likelihood of participating in further education. Corresponding structural equation analyses on data from the German panel study LifE (n = 1,110) revealed that the learning behaviour, ability self-concept and test anxiety at the age of 12, along with their individual change between the ages of 12 and 16, are associated in different ways with the attainment value and subjective costs placed on further education and expectations of success at the age of 35.
In contrast, no influence of youth characteristics on the likelihood of participating in further education could be found. The findings indicate that especially the development of learning-related cognitions and emotions in secondary school is sustainably related to the individual's success expectancy and achievement value of further education. Long-term dependencies should be further investigated with regard to academic domains and socio-economic pathways.
Persistent memory's (PMem) byte-addressability and persistence at DRAM-like speed with SSD-like capacity have the potential to cause a major performance shift in database storage systems. With the availability of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, initial benchmarks evaluate the performance of real PMem hardware.
However, these results apply to only a single server and it is not yet clear how workloads compare across different PMem servers. In this paper, we propose PerMA-Bench, a con.gurable benchmark framework that allows users to evaluate the bandwidth, latency, and operations per second for customizable database-related PMem access.
Based on PerMA-Bench, we perform an extensive evaluation of PMem performance across four di.erent server configurations, containing both first- and second-generation Optane, with additional parameters such as DIMM power budget and number of DIMMs per server.
We validate our results with existing systems and show the impact of low-level design choices. We conduct a price-performance comparison that shows while there are large differences across Optane DIMMs, PMem is generally competitive with DRAM. We discuss our findings and identify eight general and implementation-specific aspects that influence PMem performance and should be considered in future work to improve PMem-aware designs.
Video-based reflection in teacher education: comparing virtual reality and real classroom videos
(2022)
While previous studies have examined the use of real-world classroom videos to support the development of student teachers' reflective skills, there has been little research to date on the use of virtual reality (VR) videos in teacher education to provide opportunities for authentic reflec-tion.
This mixed-methods study investigated changes in reflection-related self-efficacy and dif-ferences in written reflection processes using a quasi-experimental design with two types of reflection stimuli.
One group of 46 student teachers used a VR-based video to reflect on in-struction while another group of 23 student teachers used a real classroom video.
We found an increase in reflection-related self-efficacy over time among participants in the VR group only. We also found that VR videos triggered similar reflection processes to real classroom videos.
This study shows, for the first time, that video-based reflection on VR classroom videos produced comparable results to reflection on real classroom videos. This indicates that VR can be used successfully in teacher education and that it offers a useful learning tool for teacher education programs.
The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), academically structured as the independent Faculty of Digital Engineering at the University of Potsdam, unites computer science research and teaching with the advantages of a privately financed institute and a tuition-free study program. Founder and namesake of the institute is the SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, who also heads the Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts (EPIC) research center which focuses on the technical aspects of business software with a vision to provide the fastest way to get insights out of enterprise data. Founded in 2006, the EPIC combines three research groups comprising autonomous data management, enterprise software engineering, and data-driven decision support.
Purpose
This paper provides a systematization of the existing body of literature on both employee participation goals and the intervention formats in the context of organizational change. Furthermore, degrees of employee involvement that the intervention formats address are identified and related to the goals of employee participation. On this basis, determinants of employee involvement and participation in the context of digital transformation are unveiled.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a systematic literature review the authors structure and relate employee participation goals and formats. Through a workshop with expert practitioners, the authors transfer and enhance these theoretical findings in the context of digital transformation. Experts rated the three most important goals and identified accompanying success factors, barriers and effects.
Findings
The results show that it is not necessarily the degree of involvement but a context-specific selection of measures, the quality of their implementation as well as the actual uptake of suggestions and activities developed by employees that contribute to employees accepting and participating in goal-directed transformations. Moreover, employees must have sufficient information and time for their participation in transformation processes.
Originality/value
This paper is based on a transformative approach, combining literature analysis to identify formats and goals of employee participation with experiential knowledge of digital transformation practitioners. In addition to relating intervention formats to goals pursued in organizational change processes, empirical and experiential perspectives are used to identify three very relevant goals and respective determinants in digital transformation processes.
A new challenger seeks to enter the German party system: Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). With her new party, former Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht combines a left-authoritarian profile (economically left-leaning, but culturally conservative) with anti-US, pro-Russia and anti-elitist stances. This article provides the first large-n academic study of the voter potential of this new party by using a quasi-representative sample (n = 6,000) drawn from a Voting Advice Application-like dataset that comes from a website designed to explore the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht’s positions. The results show that congruence with foreign policy positions and anti-elitism are strong predictors of the propensity to vote for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. In contrast, social/welfare and immigration policies are less predictive for assessing the party’s potential. Among the different socio-demographic groups, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht has a strong potential among baby boomers, the less educated and East Germans. Regarding party voters, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht is favoured by supporters of some minor parties like dieBasis, Freie Wähler and Die PARTEI, but also non-voters. Among the established parties, the party’s potential is high among Die Linke voters and, to a lesser extent, voters of the Social democrats (SPD) and Alternative for Germany (AfD). A potential below the average is reported for the supporters of the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and most clearly for Green and Volt voters.
Jews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austria for centuries untold, yet often continue to be construed as the essential “other.” This essay explores a selection of sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent historical experiences amongst these two broad population groups, focusing specifically on demographic diversity, community-building, discrimination and persecution, and the post-war situation. The ultimate aim is to illuminate paradigmatically through the Austrian case study the complex multicultural mosaic of historical Central Europe, the understanding of which, so our contention, sheds a critical light on the often divisive present-day debates concerning immigration and diversity in Austria and Central Europe more broadly. It furthermore opens up a hitherto understudied field of historical research, namely the entangled history of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe.
The Jewish museums established in the fin-de-siècle Habsburg Empire postulated the unity of “the Jewish people,” with custodians constructing an “us” (Jews) in distinction to the “other” (non-Jews). In the difference-oriented frenzy of the time, Jewish identity was predominantly presented as Central European, enlightened, not overly religious, and middle-class. Then, when the Viennese Jewish Museum opened its doors in 1895, the painters Isidor Kaufmann and David Kohn created an installation called “Die Gute Stube” (The Parlor). This exhibit housed books, furniture, as well as decorative and ritual objects of the kind that were thought to be found in typical Eastern European Jewish households. However, as this article argues, this attempted visualization of the essence of Judaism and the range of Jewish life worlds promoted a paradigmatic stereotype with which Jewish museums would have to struggle for decades to come.
Even though Salonican Jews are not typically associated with the Habsburg Empire, some of them, nonetheless, lived there. This paper aims to examine the formation of these Salonican Jews’ (self-)identification by studying their social interactions with the local Viennese population such as the Viennese Sephardi or the Greek-Orthodox communities. The change of the milieu within which they found themselves subsequently impacted their self-perception. Thus, the issue of the surrounding environment and their relations with other groups became central to their self-understanding, as will be demonstrated. By examining different aspects, like migration patterns, financial decisions and family ties, one can understand how their intersection influenced Salonica Jews’ self-identification, which, at the same time, shaped and was shaped by the surrounding milieu. Within this framework, these people perceived themselves and were perceived as Salonican, Sephardi, Jewish, and as subjects of the Emperor.
“Domestic Foreigners”
(2024)
This paper examines the relationship between the Sephardic Jewish community of Vienna and the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the latter half of the 19th century. The community’s legal status was transformed following the emancipation of Austrian Jews, but very few first-hand accounts of these changes exist today. The primary sources analyzed in this paper are Judezmo-language newspapers published in Vienna at that time. The paper emphasizes the historical and political contexts surrounding these sources, particularly the community’s close ties to the Ottoman and Habsburg regimes.
Shared Spaces
(2024)
Galicia was home to the largest Jewish population of the Cisleithanian part of the Habsburg Empire. After the Josephinian “German-Jewish schools” had closed already in 1806, educational patterns differed from those in Moravia and Bohemia, where Jewish children received a secular education in a more consistent “Jewish” space. In Galicia in the constitutional era (post-1867), however, with mandatory education enforced, public schools became a shared space in which Jews and (Catholic) Christians functioned together. In Galicia, most Jewish children received public education but usually constituted a religious minority in the student body. The article analyzes how the school space, calendar, and routines were adjusted to accommodate the multi-religious character of the student body.
The article analyzes the interdependences between the history of the Habsburg Empire and the names of its Jewish inhabitants. Until today, these names tell stories about this close relationship and they are an everlasting symbol of this era. By focusing on names, this paper shows how state policies towards Jews shifted over time, and how the perspective on names and name regulations can be a tool to connect and investigate both Habsburg and Jewish studies.
This article aims to demonstrate the exceptional potential of Habsburg military records for the study of Jewish history during Europe’s Age of Revolution. We begin with the random discovery of six Jewish veterans of Freikorps Grün Loudon – a unit of mercenary freebooters – which fought for the Habsburgs during the first war against the French Republic (1792 – 97). A careful re-reading of the available archival evidence reveals that these men were the survivors of a much larger group numbering at least two dozen Jewish soldiers. While Jewish conscripts had been drafted into the Habsburg army since 1788, the fact that Jews could also serve – even volunteer – as professional soldiers in that period is completely new to us. When considered together, the personal circumstances and service experiences of the Jewish soldiers of Freikorps Grün Loudon enable us to make several observations about their motivation as well as their position vis-à-vis their non-Jewish comrades.
This article brings two seemingly disconnected historiographic models of periodization into conversation: Habsburg studies and Habsburg Jewish studies. It argues for an expansion of the temporal frameworks of both fields to highlight historical continuities connecting the Holy Roman and Habsburg Empire at least from a structural perspective. These historical continuums are a useful analytical lens when applied to marginalized groups, like early modern Jews, in tandem with a central group of contemporary powerholders, such as the Habsburg nobility. Using Bohemia as a case study, this essay juxtaposes questions of transregional transfer of cultural, economic, and social capital with the challenges of Jewish marginalization and discrimination to highlight the changing yet interconnected imperial landscapes.
In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open-door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull-effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.
This article analyses the institutional design variants of local crisis governance responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their entanglement with other locally impactful crises from a cross-country comparative perspective (France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the UK/England). The pandemic offers an excellent empirical lens for scrutinizing the phenomenon of polycrises governance because it occurred while European countries were struggling with the impacts of several prior, ongoing, or newly arrived crises. Our major focus is on institutional design variants of crisis governance (dependent variable) and the influence of different administrative cultures on it (independent variable). Furthermore, we analyze the entanglement and interaction of institutional responses to other (previous or parallel) crises (polycrisis dynamics). Our findings reveal a huge variance of institutional designs, largely evoked by country-specific administrative cultures and profiles. The degree of de-/centralization and the intensity of coordination or decoupling across levels of government differs significantly by country. Simultaneously, all countries were affected by interrelated and entangled crises, resulting in various patterns of polycrisis dynamics. While policy failures and “fatal remedies” from previous crises have partially impaired the resilience and crisis preparedness of local governments, we have also found some learning effects from previous crises.
The motion picture industry is subject to extensive business and management research conducted on a wide range of topics. Due to high research productivity, it is challenging to keep track of the abundance of publications. Against this background, we employ a bibliographic coupling analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of current research topics. The following themes were defined: Key factors for success, word of mouth and social media, organizational and pedagogical dimensions, advertising—product placement and online marketing, tourism, the influence of data, the influence of culture, revenue maximization and purchase decisions, and the perception and identification of audiences. Based on the cluster analysis, we suggest the following future research opportunities: Exploring technological innovations, especially the influence of social media and streaming platforms in the film industry; the in-depth analysis of the use of artificial intelligence in film production, both in terms of its creative potential and ethical and legal challenges; the exploration of the representation of wokeness and minorities in films and their cultural and economic significance; and, finally, a detailed examination of the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises on the film industry, especially in terms of changed consumption habits and structural adjustments.
We investigate the variation in oral and written language in terms of anaphoric distance (i.e., the textual distance between anaphors and their antecedents), expanding corpus-based research with experimental evidence.
Contrastive corpus studies demonstrate that oral genres include longer average anaphoric distance than written genres, if the distance is measured in terms of clauses (Fox, 1987; Aktas & Stede, 2020).
We designed an experiment in order to examine the contrasts in oral and written mediums, using the same genre.
We aim to gain more insight about the impact of the medium, in a situation where both mediums convey a similar level of spontaneity, informality and interactivity. We designed a story continuation study, where the participants are recruited via crowdsourcing.
To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind, where anaphoric distance is manipulated systematically in a language production experiment in order to examine medium distinctions.
We observed that participants use more pronouns in oral medium than in written medium if the anaphoric distance is long.
This result is in line with the implications of the earlier corpus-based research. In addition, our results indicate that anaphoric distance has a larger effect in referential choice for the written medium.
After the Second World War, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were singled out as evil geniuses who misled the masses and plunged them into an “unwanted war.”
In relation to their armed forces, this narrative argued that the generals under their command had been demoted to powerless tools in the hands of the dictators, having to follow orders and with no sway over decision-making.
It was further asserted that Germany and Italy had not been able to secure a victory due to the dictators’ meddling. Yet, as this chapter shows, there are important differences between the German and Italian cases.
The chapter compares both the command structures in which the dictators operated as well as their grand strategies and how they cooperated during the war.
Their personal relationship will be also analyzed, as it is impossible to look at the Axis without understanding the complex personal relationship at the very top.
The strategies of both Hitler and Mussolini will be looked at and how each leader behaved in terms of working with their closest ally, together with some examples of cooperation on the lower military rungs.
We present general existence and uniqueness results for marked models with pair interactions, exemplified through Gibbs point processes on path space.
More precisely, we study a class of infinite-dimensional diffusions under Gibbsian interactions, in the context of marked point configurations: the starting points belong to R-d, and the marks are the paths of Langevin diffusions.
We use the entropy method to prove existence of an infinite-volume Gibbs point process and use cluster expansion tools to provide an explicit activity domain in which uniqueness holds.
Migration and democracy
(2021)
In the last few years, we have been increasingly experiencing a discursive and practical use of the existing democratic structures as an instrument of anti-immigration anxiety and sentiment, from electoral support to right-wing populist parties to anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and/or racist mobilizations in and beyond the Western world. This article argues that the origins and political histories that the concepts of demos and democracy stand on provide a firm ground to resist the attempts at their current nativist/nationalist closure. Contesting the attempts to reduce the concepts of democracy and demos to strictly limited or ethnically defined populations, the article develops a political argument that relates democracy and migration, which have been represented as opposite poles within the current political map defined by the populist surge.
Several lines of research have demonstrated spatial-numerical associations in both adults and children, which are thought to be based on a spatial representation of numerical information in the form of a mental number line. The acquisition of increasingly precise mental number line representations is assumed to support arithmetic learning in children. It is further suggested that sensorimotor experiences shape the development of number concepts and arithmetic learning, and that mental arithmetic can be characterized as “motion along a path” and might constitute shifts in attention along the mental number line. The present study investigated whether movements in physical space influence mental arithmetic in primary school children, and whether the expected effect depends on concurrency of body movements and mental arithmetic. After turning their body towards the left or right, 48 children aged 8 to 10 years solved simple subtraction and addition problems. Meanwhile, they either walked or stood still and looked towards the respective direction. We report a congruency effect between body orientation and operation type, i.e., higher performance for the combinations leftward orientation and subtraction and rightward orientation and addition. We found no significant difference between walking and looking conditions. The present results suggest that mental arithmetic in children is influenced by preceding sensorimotor cues and not necessarily by concurrent body movements.
HARE
(2023)
Sensor-based human activity recognition is becoming ever more prevalent. The increasing importance of distinguishing human movements, particularly in healthcare, coincides with the advent of increasingly compact sensors. A complex sequence of individual steps currently characterizes the activity recognition pipeline. It involves separate data collection, preparation, and processing steps, resulting in a heterogeneous and fragmented process. To address these challenges, we present a comprehensive framework, HARE, which seamlessly integrates all necessary steps. HARE offers synchronized data collection and labeling, integrated pose estimation for data anonymization, a multimodal classification approach, and a novel method for determining optimal sensor placement to enhance classification results. Additionally, our framework incorporates real-time activity recognition with on-device model adaptation capabilities. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted extensive evaluations using diverse datasets, including our own collected dataset focusing on nursing activities. Our results show that HARE’s multimodal and on-device trained model outperforms conventional single-modal and offline variants. Furthermore, our vision-based approach for optimal sensor placement yields comparable results to the trained model. Our work advances the field of sensor-based human activity recognition by introducing a comprehensive framework that streamlines data collection and classification while offering a novel method for determining optimal sensor placement.
The plasma membrane of mammalian cells links transmembrane receptors, various structural components, and membrane-binding proteins to subcellular processes, allowing inter- and intracellular communication. Therefore, membrane-binding proteins, together with structural components such as actin filaments, modulate the cell membrane in their flexibility, stiffness, and curvature. Investigating membrane components and curvature in cells remains challenging due to the diffraction limit in light microscopy. Preparation of 5–15-nm-thin plasma membrane sheets and subsequent inspection by metal replica transmission electron microscopy (TEM) reveal detailed information about the cellular membrane topology, including the structure and curvature. However, electron microscopy cannot identify proteins associated with specific plasma membrane domains. Here, we describe a novel adaptation of correlative super-resolution light microscopy and platinum replica TEM (CLEM-PREM), allowing the analysis of plasma membrane sheets with respect to their structural details, curvature, and associated protein composition. We suggest a number of shortcuts and troubleshooting solutions to contemporary PREM protocols. Thus, implementation of super-resolution stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy offers significant reduction in sample preparation time and reduced technical challenges for imaging and analysis. Additionally, highly technical challenges associated with replica preparation and transfer on a TEM grid can be overcome by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging. The combination of STED microscopy and platinum replica SEM or TEM provides the highest spatial resolution of plasma membrane proteins and their underlying membrane and is, therefore, a suitable method to study cellular events like endocytosis, membrane trafficking, or membrane tension adaptations.
Introduction Climbing is an increasingly popular activity and imposes specific physiological demands on the human body, which results in unique injury presentations. Of particular concern are overuse injuries (non-traumatic injuries). These injuries tend to present in the upper body and might be preventable with adequate knowledge of risk factors which could inform about injury prevention strategies. Research in this area has recently emerged but has yet to be synthesized comprehensively. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the potential risk factors and injury prevention strategies for overuse injuries in adult climbers.
Methods This systematic review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. Databases were searched systematically, and articles were deemed eligible based upon specific criteria. Research included was original and peer-reviewed, involving climbers, and published in English, German or Czech. Outcomes included overuse injury, and at least one or more variable indicating potential risk factors or injury prevention strategies. The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed with the Downs and Black Quality Index. Data were extracted from included studies and reported descriptively for population, climbing sport type, study design, injury definition and incidence/prevalence, risk factors, and injury prevention strategies.
Results Out of 1,183 records, a total of 34 studies were included in the final analysis. Higher climbing intensity, bouldering, reduced grip/finger strength, use of a “crimp” grip, and previous injury were associated with an increased risk of overuse injury. Additionally, a strength training intervention prevented shoulder and elbow injuries. BMI/body weight, warm up/cool downs, stretching, taping and hydration were not associated with risk of overuse injury. The evidence for the risk factors of training volume, age/years of climbing experience, and sex was conflicting.
Discussion This review presents several risk factors which appear to increase the risk of overuse injury in climbers. Strength and conditioning, load management, and climbing technique could be targeted in injury prevention programs, to enhance the health and wellbeing of climbing athletes. Further research is required to investigate the conflicting findings reported across included studies, and to investigate the effectiveness of injury prevention programs.
Systematic Review Registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/, PROSPERO (CRD42023404031).
The deficiency of a (bio)chemical reaction network can be conceptually interpreted as a measure of its ability to support exotic dynamical behavior and/or multistationarity. The classical definition of deficiency relates to the capacity of a network to permit variations of the complex formation rate vector at steady state, irrespective of the network kinetics. However, the deficiency is by definition completely insensitive to the fine details of the directionality of reactions as well as bounds on reaction fluxes. While the classical definition of deficiency can be readily applied in the analysis of unconstrained, weakly reversible networks, it only provides an upper bound in the cases where relevant constraints on reaction fluxes are imposed. Here we propose the concept of effective deficiency, which provides a more accurate assessment of the network’s capacity to permit steady state variations at the complex level for constrained networks of any reversibility patterns. The effective deficiency relies on the concept of nonstoichiometric balanced complexes, which we have already shown to be present in real-world biochemical networks operating under flux constraints. Our results demonstrate that the effective deficiency of real-world biochemical networks is smaller than the classical deficiency, indicating the effects of reaction directionality and flux bounds on the variation of the complex formation rate vector at steady state.
Introduction Flux phenotypes from different organisms and growth conditions allow better understanding of differential metabolic networks functions. Fluxes of metabolic reactions represent the integrated outcome of transcription, translation, and post-translational modifications, and directly affect growth and fitness. However, fluxes of intracellular metabolic reactions cannot be directly measured, but are estimated via metabolic flux analysis (MFA) that integrates data on isotope labeling patterns of metabolites with metabolic models. While the application of metabolomics technologies in photosynthetic organisms have resulted in unprecedented data from 13CO2-labeling experiments, the bottleneck in flux estimation remains the application of isotopically nonstationary MFA (INST-MFA). INST-MFA entails fitting a (large) system of coupled ordinary differential equations, with metabolite pools and reaction fluxes as parameters. Here, we focus on the Calvin-Benson cycle (CBC) as a key pathway for carbon fixation in photosynthesizing organisms and ask if approaches other than classical INST-MFA can provide reliable estimation of fluxes for reactions comprising this pathway.
Methods First, we show that flux estimation with the labeling patterns of all CBC intermediates can be formulated as a single constrained regression problem, avoiding the need for repeated simulation of time-resolved labeling patterns.
Results We then compare the flux estimates of the simulation-free constrained regression approach with those obtained from the classical INST-MFA based on labeling patterns of metabolites from the microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Chlorella sorokiniana and Chlorella ohadii under different growth conditions.
Discussion Our findings indicate that, in data-rich scenarios, simulation-free regression-based approaches provide a suitable alternative for flux estimation from classical INST-MFA since we observe a high qualitative agreement (rs=0.89) to predictions obtained from INCA, a state-of-the-art tool for INST-MFA.
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is gaining recognition and importance as an organismic model for toxicity testing in line with the 3Rs principle (replace, reduce, refine). In this study, we explored the use of C. elegans to examine the toxicities of alkylating sulphur mustard analogues, specifically the monofunctional agent 2-chloroethyl-ethyl sulphide (CEES) and the bifunctional, crosslinking agent mechlorethamine (HN2). We exposed wild-type worms at different life cycle stages (from larvae L1 to adulthood day 10) to CEES or HN2 and scored their viability 24 h later. The susceptibility of C. elegans to CEES and HN2 paralleled that of human cells, with HN2 exhibiting higher toxicity than CEES, reflected in LC50 values in the high µM to low mM range. Importantly, the effects were dependent on the worms’ developmental stage as well as organismic age: the highest susceptibility was observed in L1, whereas the lowest was observed in L4 worms. In adult worms, susceptibility to alkylating agents increased with advanced age, especially to HN2. To examine reproductive effects, L4 worms were exposed to CEES and HN2, and both the offspring and the percentage of unhatched eggs were assessed. Moreover, germline apoptosis was assessed by using ced-1p::GFP (MD701) worms. In contrast to concentrations that elicited low toxicities to L4 worms, CEES and HN2 were highly toxic to germline cells, manifesting as increased germline apoptosis as well as reduced offspring number and percentage of eggs hatched. Again, HN2 exhibited stronger effects than CEES. Compound specificity was also evident in toxicities to dopaminergic neurons–HN2 exposure affected expression of dopamine transporter DAT-1 (strain BY200) at lower concentrations than CEES, suggesting a higher neurotoxic effect. Mechanistically, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) has been linked to mustard agent toxicities. Therefore, the NAD+-dependent system was investigated in the response to CEES and HN2 treatment. Overall NAD+ levels in worm extracts were revealed to be largely resistant to mustard exposure except for high concentrations, which lowered the NAD+ levels in L4 worms 24 h post-treatment. Interestingly, however, mutant worms lacking components of NAD+-dependent pathways involved in genome maintenance, namely pme-2, parg-2, and sirt-2.1 showed a higher and compound-specific susceptibility, indicating an active role of NAD+ in genotoxic stress response. In conclusion, the present results demonstrate that C. elegans represents an attractive model to study the toxicology of alkylating agents, which supports its use in mechanistic as well as intervention studies with major strength in the possibility to analyze toxicities at different life cycle stages.