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Poster presentation: Calcium plays a pivotal role in relaying electrical signals of the cell to subcellular compartments, such as the nucleus. Since this one ion type is used by the cell for many processes a neuron needs to establish finely tuned calcium pathways in order to be able to differentiate multiple tasks, [1-3].
While it is known that neurons can actively change their shape upon neuronal activity, [4-7], we here present novel findings of activity-regulated nuclear morphology, [8,9]. With the help of an experimental and computational modeling approach, we show that hippocampal neurons can change the previously spherical shape of their nuclei to complex and infolded morphologies. This morphology regulation is demonstrated to be regulated by NMDA-receptor gated calcium, while synaptic and extra-synaptic NMDA-receptors elicit opposing effects on nuclear morphology, [8].
The structural alterations of the cell nucleus have significant effects on nuclear calcium dynamics. Compartmentalization of the nucleus, due to membrane infoldings, changes calcium frequencies, amplitudes and spatial distributions, [8,10]. Since these parameters have been shown to control downstream events towards gene transcription, [11,12], the results elucidate the cellular control of nuclear function with the help of morphology modulation. With respect to processes downstream of calcium, we show that histone H3 phosphorylation is closely linked to nuclear morphology. Investigating the nuclear morphologies of hippocampal neurons, two major classes were identified [9,10]. One class contains non-infolded nuclei that have the function of calcium signal integrators, while the other class contains highly infolded nuclei, which function as frequency detectors of nuclear calcium, [10].
Extending this interdisciplinary approach of investigating structure/function relationships in neurons, the effects of cellular morphology – as well as the morphology of the endoplasmic reticulum and other organelles – on neuronal calcium signals is currently being investigated. This endeavor makes use of highly detailed, three-dimensional models of neuronal calcium dynamics, including the three-dimensional morphology of the cell and its organelles.
Diffusion of e-learning as an innovation and economic aspects of e-learning support structures
(2012)
Meanwhile, many universities and educational institutions have implemented an e-learning center or some similar, often smaller institutional units in order to support the usage of new media in teaching and learning processes [1]. This paper addresses questions around the installation of such e-learning support structures at different levels of an institution and also looks at the diffusion of e-learning as an innovation in educational institutions.
The paper presents a study which was based on the hypothesis that wikis that are initiated bottom up by students might be used more deliberately than wikis which are introduced top down by teachers. Therefore it examines the specific effects observed in nine different wiki projects at the university of Frankfurt ranging from student wiki projects up to wikis used in seminars and as information tool for institutions.
Since 2007 the concept of open online courses came up leading to many discussions of this new format in blog posts and articles especially in the US and Canada. 2011, the first German open online course was started addressing the Future of Learning.
The article discusses the concept of open online courses, the experiences with the first German course, and gives some perspectives on further developments which partly were implemented in a new course that was just started in 2012.
Open Online Courses als Kursformat? Konzept und Ergebnisse des Kurses "Zukunft des Lernens" 2011
(2012)
2011 starteten studiumdigitale, die zentrale eLearning-Einrichtung der Universität Frankfurt/M, und der Weiterbildungsblogger Jochen Robes den ersten deutschsprachigen Open Online Course unter dem Titel „Die Zukunft des Lernens“1. In 14 Wochen wurden in wöchentlichem Rhythmus 14 Themen behandelt, die sich rund um den Einsatz verschiedener Technologien in Bildungsprozessen und auch das Kursformat selbst drehten. Dieser Beitrag stellt die Bezüge des Open Online Courses zu seiner Herkunft und den ersten Kursen dieser Art in Kanada und USA her, bezieht sich auf die theoretischen und konzeptionellen Fundierungen dieses Ansatzes und stellt die Ergebnisse aus dem Kursverlauf und der abschließenden Befragung der Teilnehmenden vor.
Open Online Course als Kursformat? : Konzept und Ergebnisse des Kurses "Zukunft des Lernens" 2011
(2012)
Basierend auf dem Konzept des Connectivismus entwickelte sich in den letzten fünf bis sechs Jahren ein neues offenes Kursformat: die Open Online Courses, die als so genannte MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) teilweise bis über 100.000 Teilnehmende anzogen. In dem Beitrag wird mit Bezug auf die konzeptionellen Ursprünge im Connectivismus das Format der Open Online Courses erläutert und Erfahrungen aus dem ersten deutschsprachigen Kurs dieser Art beschrieben, dem Kurs „Zukunft des Lernens“, den im Sommer 2011 studiumdigitale, die zentrale E-Learning-Einrichtung der Universität Frankfurt, der Weiterbildungsblogger Jochen Robes in Kooperation mit der GMW und dem Zentrum für Lehrerbildung der Universität durchführten. Der Kurs zog ca. 900 Interessierte an, die sich in verschiedenen online Medien beteiligten. Der Beitrag beschreibt den Kursverlauf, gibt einen Überblick über technische Umsetzung und Betreuungsformen und stellt neben Betrachtungen zum Transfer die Ergebnisse aus der Teilnehmerbefragung vor.
Pseudo-Critical Temperature and Thermal Equation of State from Nf = 2 Twisted Mass Lattice QCD
(2012)
We report about the current status of our ongoing study of the chiral limit of two-flavor QCD at finite temperature with twisted mass quarks. We estimate the pseudo-critical temperature Tc for three values of the pion mass in the range of mPS ~ 300 and 500 MeV and discuss different chiral scenarios. Furthermore, we present first preliminary results for the trace anomaly, pressure and energy density. We have studied several discretizations of Euclidean time up to Nt = 12 in order to assess the continuum limit of the trace anomaly. From its interpolation we evaluate the pressure and energy density employing the integral method. Here, we have focussed on two pion masses with mPS ~ 400 and 700 MeV.
In his new book, R. Dworkin advocates the unity of values thesis. He wants to circumscribe morality as a proper epistemological domain which is methodologically different from scientific inquiry. The epistemological independence of morality is supposed to be a consequence of the irreducible fact/value dichotomy. This paper sustains that unity of values thesis is methodologically correct; all moral reasoning must be a constructive interpretation of its meaning. However, that author fails to recognize that not every axiological interpretation implies moral consequences. From H. Putnam’s pragmatic realism, this paper intends to demonstrate that much of scientific inquiry relies on values interpretation, and that this kind of reasoning is morally neutral. Finally, it should be clear that epistemological choices in legal positivism – e.g. the decision on which aspects of social interaction are theoretically relevant – should not disturb the soundness of its argument nor should it be read as if it had moral implications. This paper concludes that positivist theories cannot be ruled out. Since the choice between descriptive and interpretative models requires a circular justification, legal theory is itself an activity governed by epistemic values interpretation. Likewise natural sciences, it can only be understood from an internal perspective. Accordingly, inclusive positivism holds the advantage of being more consilient than interpretivism, which is arguably parochial.
It is a fact that mediation and other alternative dispute resolution means are becoming increasingly popular. Actually, governments are encouraging people to use them instead of going to Court, as they are quicker, cheaper and more informal than trials, and can be implemented using internet. The author focus on the analysis of the structure and purposes of mediation, in particular. The paper aims to discuss and understand what kind of justice, if any, is offered by alternative dispute resolution.
Race has been a term avoided in the Swedish debates, while at the same time, protections with respect to unlawful discrimination on the basis of race or ethnic origins have not been vigilantly upheld by the courts. This paper looks at the treatment of race by the Swedish legislature, as well as the treatment by the courts, specifically the Labour Court, with respect to claims of unlawful discrimination in employment on the basis of ethnic origins, against the background of Critical Race Theory. The disparities between the intent of the legislature and the outcome of the cases brought to the Swedish courts can be in least in part explained through the lens of Critical Race Theory, particularly with respect to the liberal approach taken by the courts when applying the law.
H. L. A. Hart thought that a theory of law can be purely descriptive and called his theory a “descriptive sociology”. One of his great contributions to modern legal theory is his emphasis on the internal aspect of social rules. According to him, a theory of law can be built on the basis of the description of the participants’ view without sharing with it. This descriptivism is totally rejected by Dworkin, who propagates a theory that denies a sharp separation between a legal theory and its implications for adjudication. For Dworkin, a legal theory is only possible as a theory with “the internal, participants’ point of view”. Dworkin’s position implies a radicalization of legal theory that will transform the statement of an external point of view to that of an internal one. For Dworkin, the descriptivism bases on the sociological concept of law, which is an “imprecise criterial concept” and is “not sufficiently precise to yield philosophically interesting essential features.”Hart’s position is vulnerable because it takes an impure form of descriptivism that still draws a categorical distinction between fact and norm. This theoretical impurity results from the ambiguity of interpreting the internal aspect of rules. A strategy to rescue the Hart’s project is to radicalize his descriptivism with Luhmann's systems theory. Adapting the systems theoretical distinction between internal and external observation of law with all its implications for the explanation of the legal system and legal communications, Hart’s descriptivism finally attains its pure form, which is not only a distinctive paradigm of legal theory, but also possesses the potentialities to clarify its relationship to the legal theory based on the internal aspect of law.
The concept of biopolitics has its origin on the Michel Foucault works developped since 1975 to 1979. In this period, the author introduced the foundations for a new approach about the modern government, based in both crescent enpowerment on individuals and the control of populations. The theme has attracted the attentions of some critical political studies, with many practical uses. However, I believe there is not enough consolidation about biopolitics as a concept and a comprehensive theory of the new political mechanisms. This uncertainness is more evident when the very role of Law is questioned in a biopolitical model, due to the archaic nature that Foucault gives to it. So the aim of the paper is to identify the theorical comprehension of biopolitics in a contemporary author as Giorgio Agamben to demonstrate his oppositions and proximities from the original idea of Michel Foucault. I propose that Agamben has the same difficulties of Foucault to deal with legal theory and Law inside biopolitics. Nevertheless, after a critical review on the works of this two authors, my conclusion is that a settlement of the concepts of Law and biopolitics depends of the surpassing of the Foucaldian version of Law as sovereignity, a clear delimitation of a common core between the authors and their differences and the research and affirmation of the concept of Law in Agamben, more well-refined than Foucault's one.
There is an increasing interest in incorporating significant citizen participation into the law-making process by developing the use of the internet in the public sphere. However, no well-accepted e-participation model has prevailed. This article points out that, to be successful, we need critical reflection of legal theory and we also need further institutional construction based on the theoretical reflection.
Contemporary dominant legal theories demonstrate too strong an internal legal point of view to empower the informal, social normative development on the internet. Regardless of whether we see the law as a body of rules or principles, the social aspect is always part of people’s background and attracts little attention. In this article, it is advocated that the procedural legal paradigm advanced by Jürgen Habermas represents an important breakthrough in this regard.
Further, Habermas’s co-originality thesis reveals a neglected internal relationship between public autonomy and private autonomy. I believe the co-originality theory provides the essential basis on which a connecting infrastructure between the legal and the social could be developed. In terms of the development of the internet to include the public sphere, co-originality can also help us direct the emphasis on the formation of public opinion away from the national legislative level towards the local level; that is, the network of governance.1
This article is divided into two sections. The focus of Part One is to reconstruct the co-originality thesis (section 2, 3). This paper uses the application of discourse in the adjudication theory of Habermas as an example. It argues that Habermas would be more coherent, in terms of his insistence on real communication in his discourse theory, if he allowed his judges to initiate improved interaction with the society. This change is essential if the internal connection between public autonomy and private autonomy in the sense of court adjudication is to be truly enabled.
In order to demonstrate such improved co-original relationships, the empowering character of the state-made law is instrumental in initiating the mobilization of legal intermediaries, both individual and institutional. A mutually enhanced relationship is thus formed; between the formal, official organization and its governance counterpart aided by its associated ‘local’ public sphere. Referring to Susan Sturm, the Harris v Forklift Systems Inc. (1930) decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the field of sexual harassment is used as an example.
Using only one institutional example to illustrate how the co-originality thesis can be improved is not sufficient to rebuild the thesis but this is as much as can be achieved in this article.
In Part Two, the paper examines, still at the institutional level, how Sturm develops an overlooked sense of impartiality, especially in the derivation of social norms; i.e. multi-partiality instead of neutral detachment (section 4). These two ideas should be combined as the criterion for impartiality to evaluate the legitimacy of the joint decision-making processes of both the formal official organization and ‘local’ public sphere.
Sturm’s emphasis on the deployment of intermediaries, both institutional and individual, can also enlighten the discourse theory. Intermediaries are essential for connecting the disassociated social networks, especially when a breakdown of communication occurs due to a lack of data, information, knowledge, or disparity of value orientation, all of which can affect social networks. If intermediaries are used, further communication will not be blocked as a result of the lack of critical data, information, knowledge or misunderstandings due to disparity of value orientation or other causes.
The institutional impact of the newly constructed co-originality thesis is also discussed in Part Two. Landwehr’s work on institutional design and assessment for deliberative interaction is first discussed. This article concludes with an indication of how the ‘local’ public sphere, through e-rulemaking or online dispute resolution, for example, can be constructed in light of the discussion of this article.
Occasionally, in pursuing their adjudicative duties over the course of a legal hearing, judges are called upon to acquire new concepts – that is, concepts which they did not possess at the commencement of the hearing. In performing their judicial role they are required to learn new things and, as a result, conceptualise the world in a way which differs from the way they conceived of things before the hearing commenced. Some theorists have argued that either as a general matter or as a matter specific to judicial practice and the legal context, judges are, with some degree of necessity, incapacitated from acquiring certain kinds of concepts. Such concepts include those possessed by the members of culturally different minority groups. Drawing on contemporary trends in analytic and naturalistic philosophy of mind, this paper explores the extent to which a judge might be incapacitated from acquiring new concepts over the course of a legal hearing and identifies those factors which condition the success or failure of that process.
The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 declares Brazil as a Democratic State of Law. This formally democratic legal status has been facing difficulties when it comes to its material implementation. Brazilian legal procedures are still greatly influenced by the catholic heritage from Portugal in the times of colonization, translated in the present times into a strong moral set of dogmas that still reflects upon the legal production and interpretation in the country. Recently in Brazil, a debate brought to the Supremo Tribunal Federal, the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court, has evidenced the struggle between Ethics and Morality in the country’s legal scenario. The focus of the discussion was the possibility of abortion of anencephalic fetuses (in Brazil, abortion in considered a crime against life). In order to properly ground its decision, the Court invited scientists, doctors, members of feminist movements and representatives of certain religions to a public dialogue, in which both scientific-technical and purely moral-religious arguments were presented. Although these procedures encouraged and promoted a democratic and pluralistic legal debate, it seems like the crucial point of the discussion were not taken into account: the scientific character of Law. This is the object of the present manuscript: in order to ensure an intersubjective construction and application of Law, this must be perceived as an Applied Social Science and judges, lawyers, legislators and all other legal actors must proceed in a scientific way. To illustrate the theme, the specific case of abortion of anencephalic fetuses will be mentioned through the text.
Agamben has claimed to work inside the tradition inaugurated by the archaeological method of Michel Foucault but not to fully coincide with it. “My method is archaeological and paradigmatic in a sense which is very close to that of Foucault, but not completely coincident with it. The question is, facing the dichotomies that structuralize our culture, to go beyond the exceptions that have been producing the former, however, not to find a chronologically originary state, but to be able to understand the situation in which we are. Archaeology is, in this sense, the only way to access present” (interview to Flavia Costa, trad. Susana Scramim, in Revista do Departamento de Psicologia – Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, v. 18 - n. 1, 131-136, Jan./Jun. 2006, 132, translated by the author). However, the aspects in which Agamben follows Foucault's method and the ones he does not were never very clear. This situation seems to change with the edition of Agamben's most extensive and explicit texts on method, Signatura Rerum. Sul Metodo (2008, italian edition). The goal of this article is to identify the points of intersection between their methods and some points in which they differ.
This paper aims to assess the arguments that claim representative democracy may be enhanced or replaced by an updated electronic version. Focusing on the dimension of elections and electioneering as the core mechanism of representative democracy I will discuss: (1) the proximity argument used to claim the necessity of filling the gap between decision-makers and stakeholders; (2) the transparency argument, which claims to remove obstacles to the publicity of power; (3) the bottom-up argument, which calls for a new form of legitimacy that goes beyond classical mediation of parties or unions; (4) the public sphere argument, referred to the problem of hierarchical relation between voters and their representatives; (5) the disintermediation argument, used to describe the (supposed) new form of democracy following the massive use of ICTs. The first way of conceptualizing e-democracy as different from mainstream 20th century representative democracy regimes is to imagine it as a new form direct democracy: this conception is often underlying contemporary studies of e-voting. To avoid some of the ingenuousness of this conception of e-democracy, we should take a step back and consider a broader range of issues than mere gerrymandering around the electoral moment. Therefore I shall problematize the abovementioned approach by analyzing a wider range of problems connected to election and electioneering in their relation with ICTs.
Communist regimes in general and especially the one in Albania destroyed almost every aspect of political, social, cultural and economic life, including the notion of pluralism and intellectual elite of the country. In Albania, the transition into democracy in 90’ was done through extrication which means that the authoritarian government was weakened, but not as thoroughly as in a transition by defeat. As a consequence, the former Communist elite was able to negotiate crucial features of the transition and was very quickly transformed into the new pluralist political class. This position enabled the communist elite to be rehabilitated and together with the new emerged communist elite to remain a strong influential actor in new emerged democracy and de facto to run in continuance the country. The purpose of the new emerged communist elite to maintain control was favored inter alia by the absence of a new strong intellectual elite and was done merely by sharing the power among its members divided into different political parties and also by using the ‘pluralist’ law as a tool for social control over new emerging intellectual elites. The use of law as a tool for social control by the political class has severely damaged people's understanding and expectations on the law, its relations with the state as well as international community. Indeed, such experience of the use of law by the political class for its own narrow interests, has made people lose confidence in law and state as well as has severely weakened the law enforcement in the country. To conclude, the overall purpose of this paper would be the analysis of law in general and its understandings and development in a post-communist society such as Albania from different points of view.
It is a long discussed issue whether light scalar mesons have sizeable four-quark components. We present an exploratory study of this question using Nf = 2+1+1 twisted mass lattice QCD. A mixed action approach ignoring disconnected contributions is used to calculate correlatormatrices consisting of mesonic molecule, diquark-antidiquark and two-meson interpolating operators with quantum numbers of the scalar mesons a0(980) (1(0++)) and k (1/2(0+)). The correlation matrices are analyzed by solving the generalized eigenvalue problem. The theoretically expected free two-particle scattering states are identified, while no additional low lying states are observed. We do not observe indications for bound four-quark states in the channels investigated.
Are Kantian philosophy and its principle of respect for persons inadequate to the protection of environmental values? This paper answers this question by elucidating how Kantian ethics can take environmental values seriously. In the period that starts with the Critique of Judgment in 1790 and ends with the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797, the subject would have been approached by Kant in a different manner; although the respect that we may owe to non-human nature is still grounded in our duties to mankind, the basis for such respect stems from nature’s aesthetic properties, and the duty to preserve nature lies in our duties to ourselves. Compared to the “market paradigm”, as it is called by Gillroy (the reference is to a conception of a public policy based on a criterion of economic efficiency or utility), Kantian philosophy can offer a better explanation of the relationship between environmental policy and the theory of justice. Kantian justice defines the “just state” as the one that protects the moral capacities of its “active” citizens, as presented in the first Part of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Kantian paradigm, the environmental risk becomes a “public” concern. That means it is not subsumed under an individual decision, based on a calculus.