In 1969/70, Andō Hideharu (1921–1998), a Japanese historian of ideas, was a visiting professor at the Max Weber-Institute in Munich, Germany, for a period of one year. He was a harsh critic of Marianne Weber’s 1926 biography of her husband. During his tenure, he travelled to a number of places associated with Max Weber, with the aim of reconstructing his personal history. Andō literally followed Weber’s path from the cradle to the grave, though not necessarily in a chronological order. In a travelogue published in 1972, Andō recounted his experiences in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and France, with a particular emphasis on interviews conducted with contemporaries of Max Weber who were still alive in 1969/70. Andō’s primary concern was in the personality of Max Weber, with a secondary focus on Weber’s work and the adaptation of Weber’s sociology for the study of Japanese modernity. The following article reconstructs Andō’s travel experiences in Europe by analysing his “Weber Travelogue”. It then discusses a bitter controversy that arose between Andō and certain colleagues in the context of Japanese Weber studies upon his return to Japan. Finally, the article assesses the merits and limitations of Andō’s “time travel” into Max Weber’s life through the lens of “Motivenforschung” (study of motives), a concept he drew from Weber’s methodological writings.
Ariane Moulinec, Selma de Donnová, Jindřiška Bojková
et al.
Stream restoration constitutes a tool to mitigate hydro-morphological degradation, which affects a substantial proportion of European streams and rivers. However, improvement of local habitat quality does not always result in the recovery of macroinvertebrate assemblages, mostly due to persisting catchment-scale stressors or colonization constraints. In this study, we aimed to explore the effect of pollution pressure on selected biotic indices in restored sites, and the role of hydro-morphological quality of upstream reference sites on macroinvertebrate colonization. We utilized a paired comparison design and included 24 streams restored before up to 32 years. Using linear regression models, we tested the effect of factors such as water chemistry, land use, hydro-morphological parameters, distance between restored and reference sites, and time since restoration on diversity in restored streams. Alpha diversity parameters at both restored and reference sites displayed comparable biotic trends along all tested predictors, with water chemistry being the strongest predictor. This was also the case for beta diversity parameters, but here, interestingly, streams with higher pollution pressure exhibited higher dissimilarity between restored and reference sites. This dissimilarity was governed by turnover, indicating that restoration resulted in greater assemblage change in polluted streams. This suggests that restoration may, to an extent, increase diversity even in disturbed agricultural landscapes. However, we did not confirm the role of hydro-morphological quality of upstream reference site on macroinvertebrate colonization. Large-scale factors such as water chemistry and land use play a pivotal role in structuring macroinvertebrate assemblages.
Epidemics and pandemics have been a constant feature of human life across all regions and historical periods. They have led to individual suffering, brought on far-reaching societal challenges and shaped demographic trends. Their effects persist far into the future and are not fully understood yet. One area that still merits further research concerns the economic costs attached to pandemics in the short, medium, and long term. The articles assembled in this thematic special issue include a wide range of case studies across different time periods, geographic contexts, and types of pathogens. Collectively, they contribute to our historical understanding of the socioeconomic backgrounds of epidemics and pandemics, societal responses to them, and their impact on key areas of social life. This special issue reflects the inherently interdisciplinary nature of economic and social history which serves as a bridge between historical scholarship and the social sciences, particularly economics. This introduction focuses on distilling key insights from the growing body of literature on the economic costs of epidemics and pandemics. Our aim is to identify the lessons that history has clearly taught us about economic costs so far, while also drawing attention to those areas of knowledge that remain only partially understood and deserve future research.
Economic history and conditions, Economics as a science
Wolfgang Felger, Martin Göbel, Dirk Reiners
et al.
We present a historical outline of the research and developments of Virtual Reality at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD) in Darmstadt, Germany, from 1990 through 2000.
The warmer temperatures of global climate change strengthen the water cycle, evaporation and precipitation increase. But the extremes of heavy rain, floods, dry periods and droughts will also increase. How does this fit together? Simple physical considerations show which factors mainly regulate the strength of the water cycle in the Earth system, and how this determines water availability on land. This can be used to interpret the observed changes in the water balance in Germany and explain the increasing dryness in Germany.
John Clark was inventor of the Eureka machine to generate hexameter Latin verse. He labored for 13 years from 1832 to implement the device that could compose at random over 26 million different lines of well-formed verse. This paper proposes that Clark should be regarded as an early cognitive scientist. Clark described his machine as an illustration of a theory of "kaleidoscopic evolution" whereby the Latin verse is "conceived in the mind of the machine" then mechanically produced and displayed. We describe the background to automated generation of verse, the design and mechanics of Eureka, its reception in London in 1845 and its place in the history of language generation by machine. The article interprets Clark's theory of kaleidoscopic evolution in terms of modern cognitive science. It suggests that Clark has not been given the recognition he deserves as a pioneer of computational creativity.
The way the topic of black-body radiation is presented in standard textbooks (i.e. from Rayleigh-Jeans to Max Planck) does not follow the actual historical timeline of the understanding of the black-body radiation problem. Authors believe that a presentation which follows an actual timeline of the ideas (although not a logical presentation of the field) would be of interest not only from the history of science perspective but also from a pedagogical perspective. Therefore, we attempt a concise history of this very interesting field of science.
This study examined the role of history education for nation building in Ethiopia, Germany Rwanda, South Africa, Switzerland, and USA using a comparative research method. Student textbooks and syllabi were the main data sources. Document review was the principal data-gathering tool and the data was analysed qualitatively. Findings revealed that there are some aim and learning objectives embedded in the textbooks and syllabi to cultivate unity and patriotism, and promote democratic values that facilitate nation building. Except in the context of Rwanda and USA, in all countries national history textbooks gave more emphasis to regional and global topics than national topics. In Rwanda, South Africa, and Ethiopia centrally prescribed one-size-fits-all contents focused on national narratives that appear to intentionally overlook ethnic-narratives. After the historic genocide in Rwanda and apartheid in South Africa, history textbooks focused on peace and reconciliation, and settlement of ethnic and race-based clashes. In the United States, Switzerland, and Germany, the instructional materials’ preparation process is decentralized to regional states or cantons. Except in South Africa, virtually in all countries, history is a compulsory subject. In Ethiopia, South Africa, and Switzerland history is taught as a separate subject, where as in the remaining countries it is taught as a combined social studies subject. Vis-à-vis the pedagogy, learner-centred methods and continuous assessment techniques appeared in the curricula often. The main lessons for Ethiopia include the need to incorporate more contents that help to ensure peace and national understanding, settle ethnic-based clashes, and facilitate national integration and the nation-building process.
One of the variants for systematizing the activities of the historian of mathematics is proposed, as well as a scheme for organizing research and search work in the preparation of scientific articles and reports on the history of science.
In the Open Data Portal Germany (OPAL) project, a pipeline of the following data refinement steps has been developed: requirements analysis, data acquisition, analysis, conversion, integration and selection. 800,000 datasets in DCAT format have been produced.
Amibeth Thompson, Mark Frenzel, Oliver Schweiger
et al.
In order to synthesize changes in pollinating insect communities across space and time, it is necessary to understand whether, and how, sampling methods influence assessments of community patterns. We compared how two common sampling methods—yellow combined flight traps and net sampling—influence our understanding of the species richness, abundance and composition of wild bees and hoverflies, and addressed whether these patterns resulted from potentially biased sampling of individuals or species with different types of functional traits. We sampled bee and hoverfly communities in six sites over three seasons in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. We captured more species and individuals of bees with traps and more species and individuals of hoverflies with net sampling. However, rarefied richness results were less dramatic between the sampling methods for bees and were not different between the sampling methods for hoverflies. Thus, differences in species richness across sampling methods were mostly due to differences in the number of individuals captured in the different methods. We captured more small-sized bees and hoverflies with traps. We tested if the different methods collected individuals and species with different functional traits, such as nesting preferences, sociality and flower specialization for bees and floral preference, migratory status and habitat preference for hoverflies. For most traits, we collected more individuals but not more species with a certain trait in the different methods. This was mainly due to a high abundance of one species being collected in the different methods. These results suggest that the best methodology depends on the aim of the survey, and that the methods cannot be easily combined into synthesis research. Our results have implications for the development of monitoring schemes for pollinators and for synthesis of trends that can identify threats to pollinators and inform research of pollinator conservation strategies.
Markus Pfenninger, Friederike Reuss, Angelika Kiebler
et al.
In the course of global climate change, Central Europe is experiencing more frequent and prolonged periods of drought. The drought years 2018 and 2019 affected European beeches (Fagus sylvatica L.) differently: even in the same stand, drought-damaged trees neighboured healthy trees, suggesting that the genotype rather than the environment was responsible for this conspicuous pattern. We used this natural experiment to study the genomic basis of drought resistance with Pool-GWAS. Contrasting the extreme phenotypes identified 106 significantly associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) throughout the genome. Most annotated genes with associated SNPs (>70%) were previously implicated in the drought reaction of plants. Non-synonymous substitutions led either to a functional amino acid exchange or premature termination. A non-parametric machine learning approach on 98 validation samples yielded 20 informative loci which allowed an 88% prediction probability of the drought phenotype. Drought resistance in European beech is a moderately polygenic trait that should respond well to natural selection, selective management, and breeding.
Thomas Ostermann, A-La Park, Sabine De Jaegere
et al.
Abstract Purpose Antibiotics are one possible treatment for patients with recurrent acute throat infections (ATI), but effectiveness can be modest. In view of worries over antibiotic resistance, treatment pathways that reduce recurrence of ATI are essential from a public health perspective. Integrative treatment strategies can be an option but there is still a high demand to provide evidence of their cost effectiveness. Methods We constructed a 4-state Markov model to compare the cost-effectiveness of SilAtro-5-90 as adjuvant homeopathic therapy to care as usual with care as usual alone in reducing the recurrence of ATI for children and adults with suspected moderate recurrent tonsillitis. The analysis was performed from a societal perspective in Germany over a 2-year period. Results are reported separately for children < 12 and for individuals aged 12 and over. The model draws on evidence from a multi-centre randomised clinical trial that found this strategy effective in reducing recurrence of ATI. Costs in 2019 € and outcomes after 1 year are discounted at a rate of 3% per annum. Results For adults and adolescents aged 12 years and over, incremental cost per ATI averted in the adjuvant therapy group was €156.64. If individuals enter the model on average with a history of 3.33 previous ATIs, adjuvant therapy has both lower costs and better outcomes than care as usual. For children (< 12 years) adjuvant therapy had both lower costs and ATI than care as usual. The economic case is stronger if adjuvant treatment reduces surgical referral. At a hypothetical cost per ATI averted threshold of €1000 probabilistic sensitivity analysis suggests Silatro-5-90 has a 65% (adults) and 71% (children) chance of being cost-effective. Conclusion Our results indicate the importance of considering homeopathy as adjuvant therapy in the treatment of ATIs in individuals with recurrent tonsillitis from a socio-economic perspective. Further evaluation should assess how differences in uptake and sustained use of homeopathic adjuvant therapy, as well as changing patterns of antibiotic prescribing, impact on cost effectiveness.
AbstractWhile far-reaching intellectual influences changed the face of sociology in the 1980s, the development of sociology in the 1990s was first and foremost shaped by a concrete social and political transformation, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soon after the German reunification, East German sociology almost entirely disappeared and West German sociology extended to the East. The triumph of capitalist society fostered a brief comeback of modernization theory. As the system change came along with severe social problems, theories and research projects focusing on social exclusion, precarious work, and xenophobia moved to the center stage of sociological thinking. The first decade of this century again brought about major changes for society and sociology. Market logic increasingly dominated social and education policy; economic thinking and its involvement in political affairs was on the rise and may have contributed to a marginalization of the influence of sociology on policy making. Characteristic is a further specialization and differentiation, visible through the multiplication of special sociologies. The landscape of sociological theory in Germany continued to change: Earlier, grand theories were dominant, whereas nowadays a trend toward sociological diagnoses of contemporary society can be observed. Overall, contemporary sociology in Germany can be characterized by the following features: (1) historically and philosophically informed sociological theory has always been and still is important, (2) German sociology lacks self-confidence compared to US-American sociology, (3) German sociology has a critical attitude and a strong tradition of public sociology, (4) self-critical debates and internal controversies have always existed and still persist in the field of German sociology. Most recently, this could be observed in the splitting off of the Academy of Sociology from the German Sociological Association and the accompanying debates.
Anika Schwind, Florian Wamser, Tobias Hoßfeld
et al.
Collecting and analyzing meaningful data in mobile networks is the key to assessing network performance. Crowdsourced Network Measurements (CNMs) provide insights beyond the network layer and offer performance and other measurements at the application and user-level towards Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper, the mobile Internet experience for Germany is evaluated with the help of crowdsourcing from the perspective of an end user. We statistically analyze a dataset with throughput measurements on the end device from Tutela Ltd., which covers more than 2.5 million throughput tests across Germany from January to July 2019. We give insights into this emerging methodology and highlight the benefits of this method. The paper contains statistics and conclusions for several large cities as well as regions in Germany compared to general statements for Germany, since individual measurements and averages often only imprecisely reflect the situation. The goal is to give a holistic view of the performance of the current mobile network in Germany. Reading this paper, it becomes evident that reliable statements about the quality of the mobile network for Germany depend on a large number of peculiarities in different regions with their own performance characteristics due to different network deployments and population numbers.
Opinion on the concept of state has a deep root in the history of western political thought. Although there have been brief and marginal studies in this area in ancient Greece, we notice more attention to the concept of state and its coordinates since the Renaissance. Germany, during eighteenth century, is one of the most important arenas on this concept. As one of its thinkers and contemporary of Hegel, Schopenhauer has also paid attention to the issue of state during his discussions. The problem of the present study is the nature of state in Schopenhauer's political thought. The hypothesis of the present paper is that Schopenhauer's theory of state as opposed to Hegelian thought, rejects the totalitarian and the Hegelian ideal state on one hand, and, based on the rule of the concept of evil and how he views metaphysics in its philosophical apparatus on the other hand, takes on a minimalist and protective nature.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Scott Bremer, Eleanor Johnson, Kjersti Fløttum
et al.
Climate change is dramatically shifting the way cities interpret and live with their local climate. This paper analyses how climate change is emerging as a matter of concern in the public spheres of Bergen, and interprets how this concern is affecting Bergen’s identity, with implications for the city’s climate risk governance. Historically, Bergen has a strong identity as Europe’s rainiest city, manifested in its cultural and social life. In the past 15 years, Bergen’s identity has been shifting from a ‘weather city’ to a ‘climate city’. This paper draws on ethnographic research, interviews and document analysis to map this shift as co-produced by certain social and natural events and processes; told as narratives of change. This identity shift is creating surprising hybrid representations of climate that are locally meaningful, shaped as much by Bergen’s cultural weatherworld as by incoming ideas of climate change. These representations influence Bergen’s attitudes towards climate risk governance, and may extend influence to global scales via climate city networks. This identity shift also moves the timeframe of risk governance. As a weather city, risks were implicit to the city’s heritage and peoples’ lived experience. But as a climate city, risks are predicted, to foresee and prevent impacts. Critically employing co-production as an analytical lens can help us understand the multiple facets to cities’ climate risk governance, including the role of culture and identity.
Birgit Lang, Julian Ahlborn, Munkhzuul Oyunbileg
et al.
Abstract Functional traits are proxies for plant physiology and performance, which do not only differ between species but also within species. In this work, we hypothesized that (a) with increasing precipitation, the percentage of focal species which significantly respond to changes in grazing intensity increases, while under dry conditions, climate‐induced stress is so high that plant species hardly respond to any changes in grazing intensity and that (b) the magnitude with which species change their trait values in response to grazing, reflected by coefficients of variation (CVs), increases with increasing precipitation. Chosen plant traits were canopy height, plant width, specific leaf area (SLA), chlorophyll fluorescence, performance index, stomatal pore area index (SPI), and individual aboveground biomass of 15 species along a precipitation gradient with different grazing intensities in Mongolian rangelands. We used linear models for each trait to assess whether the percentage of species that respond to grazing changes along the precipitation gradient. To test the second hypothesis, we assessed the magnitude of intraspecific trait variability (ITV) response to grazing, per species, trait, and precipitation level by calculating CVs across the different grazing intensities. ITV was most prominent for SLA and SPI under highest precipitation, confirming our first hypothesis. Accordingly, CVs of canopy height, SPI, and SLA increased with increasing precipitation, partly confirming our second hypothesis. CVs of the species over all traits increased with increasing precipitation only for three species. This study shows that it remains challenging to predict how plant performance will shift under changing environmental conditions based on their traits alone. In this context, the implications for the use of community‐weighted mean trait values are discussed, as not only species abundances change in response to changing environmental conditions, but also values of traits considerably change. Including this aspect in further studies will improve our understanding of processes acting within and among communities.