CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES IN POVERTY AND INEQUALITY:ONE DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST'S PERSPECTIVE

The last thirty years in the analysis of inequality and poverty, especially in developing countries, has seen two phases-a phase of conceptual advancement, followed by a phase of application and policy debate. Both phases were exciting and useful in their own way, but the applied phase has significantly exhausted the potential of the conceptual advances of two decades ago, and new advances have been few and far between. However, there is now a need, and an opening, for a new phase of conceptual advances, advances that will make use of shifting methodological terrain in mainstream economics, and that will answer emerging policy questions that would otherwise have no easy answers (or, perhaps, too easy answers).Food Security and Poverty,

Challenging Distributional Models with a Conceptual Network of Philosophical Terms

Computational linguistic research on language change through distributional semantic (DS) models has inspired researchers from fields such as philosophy and literary studies, who use these methods for the exploration and comparison of comparatively small datasets traditionally analyzed by close reading. Research on methods for small data is still in early stages and it is not clear which methods achieve the best results. We investigate the possibilities and limitations of using distributional semantic models for analyzing philosophical data by means of a realistic use-case. We provide a ground truth for evaluation created by philosophy experts and a blueprint for using DS models in a sound methodological setup. We compare three methods for creating specialized models from small datasets. Though the models do not perform well enough to directly support philosophers yet, we find that models designed for small data yield promising directions for future work

On Haslanger’s Focal Analysis of Race and Gender in <em>Resisting Reality</em> as an Interpretive Model

focal analysis of race and gender as social classes is proposed. A focal analy-sis is an account of: ‘a variety of phenomena in terms of their relations to one that is theo-rized, for the purposes at hand, as the focus or core phenomenon. For my purposes, the core phenomenon is the pattern of social relations that con-stitute men as dominant and women as subordinate, or whites as domi-nant and people of color as subordinate. An account of how norms, sym-bols, identities, and such as gendered or raced is then given by reference to the ‘core ’ sense. ’ (Haslanger 2012: 7; see also 228)1 One way to put the point cited above is that the core meaning or sense of ‘woman ’ – a term referring to gender, not to be confused with ‘female’, a term referring to sex – is adequately though partially captured (for a cer-tain purpose) as ‘those who are socially subordinate’. In other words, so-cial subordination is the common core (focus or core phenomenon) of both the concept of woman and that of person of color, though the cor

Inequality and the capability approach

Inequality has acquired a newfound prominence in academic and political debate. While scholars working with the capability approach have succeeded in influencing the nature of debate about the conceptualisation and measurement of poverty, which is increasingly understood in multidimensional terms, the recent literature on inequality focusses overwhelmingly on economic forms of inequality, and especially on inequalities in income and wealth. In this paper we outline how and why the capability approach might be employed to provide a richer understanding of inequality, and of ‘advantage’ in particular. We also discuss three issues that arise when seeking to apply the capability approach to examine inequality rather than the more traditional concern with poverty. Addressing these issues is central to unlocking the potential that the capability approach has to enrich the understanding of inequality

Corpus Analysis in Philosophy

The experimental philosophy movement advocates the use of empirical methods in philosophy. The methods most often discussed and in fact employed in experimental philosophy are appropriated from the experimental paradigm in psychology. But there is a variety of other (at least partly) empirical methods from various disciplines that are and others that could be used in philosophy. The paper explores the application of corpus analysis to philosophical issues. Although the method is well established in linguistics, there are only a few tentative attempts of philosophers to utilise it. Examples are introduced and the merit of corpus analysis is compared to that of using general internet search engines and questionnaires for similar purposes

Herstellung eines Phaffia rhodozyma : Stamms mit verstärkter Astaxanthin-Synthese über gezielte genetische Modifikation chemisch mutagenisierter Stämme

Ziel dieser Arbeit war es erstmals durch eine Kombination aus chemischer Mutagenese und gezielter genetischer Modifikation (hier: „metabolic engineering“) einen Phaffia-Stamm herzustellen, welcher über die Mutagenese hinaus über eine weiter verstärkte Astaxanthin-Synthese verfügt. Die von „DSM Nutritional Products“ bereitgestellten chemischen Mutanten wurden analysiert und über einen Selektionsprozess auf Pigmentstabilität und Wachstum hin optimiert, da die Stämme aus cryogenisierter Dauerkultur starke Pigmentinstabilitäten und ein verzögertes Wachstum aufwiesen. Über eine exploratorische Phase wurde die Carotinoidsynthese analysiert und festgestellt, dass in den Mutanten keine Einzelreaktionen betroffen sind, welche für die Heraufregulierung der Carotinoidsynthese in den Mutanten verantwortlich sind. Hierbei wurden Limitierungen identifiziert und diese durch Transformation von Expressionsplasmiden mit geeigneten Genen aufgehoben, um damit eine noch effizientere Metabolisierung von Astaxanthin-Vorstufen hin zu Astaxanthin zu erreichen. Eine Überexpression der Phytoensynthase/Lycopinzyklase crtYB resultierte in einem gesteigerten Carotinoidgehalt bei gleichbleibendem Astaxanthin- Anteil. Durch eine zweite Transformation mit einer Expressionskassette für die Astaxanthin-Synthase asy konnte der Carotinoidgehalt weiter gesteigert und zusätzlich eine Limitierung der Metabolisierung von Astaxanthin-Vorstufen behoben werden, sodass die Transformante nahezu alle Intermediate der Astaxanthinsynthese zu Astaxanthin metabolisieren konnte (Gassel et al. 2013). Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass auch in den Mutanten, aus Experimenten mit dem Wildtyp bekannte, Limitierungen identifiziert und ausgeglichen werden konnten