Why the refugee quota system is unfair on poorer eastern and southern EU states

EU states agreed on 23 September to implement a refugee quota system which will distribute 120,000 refugees across the EU, despite four member states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – voting against the proposal. Luc Bovens and Anna Bartsch write that regardless of the wider debate over whether a quota system is justified or not, it is vital that the ‘distribution key’ determining how many refugees are assigned to each state is fair. They argue that the distribution key proposed by the European Commission is ill-conceived and regressive, and that a fairer system with recalculated quotas may go some way toward convincing the dissenting states to support the system

Identification and functional characterization of cation/proton antiport systems in Corynebacterium glutamicum

Corynebacterium glutamicum is a Gram-positive soil bacterium of the actinomycetes suborder Corynebacterineae and was first described in 1958 as a glutamic acid secreting bacterium. C. glutamicum is one of the major industrial production organisms for amino acids and related compounds. In addition, C. glutamicum serves as a model organism for closely related, dangerous human pathogens like Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Corynebacterium diphtheriae. This work aimes to get a better insight into Na+- and K+-homeostasis in C. glutamicum whereas the main focus was placed on the export of the cations. Good candidates for this function are cation/proton antiporters which exchange internal Na+ and/or K+ with external protons. Four putative cation/proton antiporter candidates were found in the genome of C. glutamicum: Mrp1, Mrp2, ChaA and NhaP. Their function as Na+/H+- and/or K+/H+- antiporters was proven on a physiological and on a biochemical level. The growth phenotype of C.glutamicum antiporter deficient mutants in presence of high NaCl or KCl concentrations revealed that Mrp1 and Mrp2 are the cation/proton antiporters with highest relevance during salt stress. The sole absence of Mrp1 lead to a Na+ sensitive phenotype whereas the lack of Mrp2 caused K+ sensitivity. ChaA and NhaP were of minor physiological importance. Antiporter deficient mutants also showed increased internal sodium concentrations ([Na+]i). Interestingly, the increase of [Na+]i caused the reduction of the internal potassium concentration ([K+]i). It could be shown that this fact is not caused by an altered membrane potential so that the cells probably actively downregulate [K+]i. Complementation studies with a C. glutamicum antiporter quadruple mutant (AQM) revealed that Mrp1 and ChaA are involved in Na+ ion export over a wide pH range of pH 6.5 to pH 9.0. The expression of mrp2 and nhaP at pH 9.0 also improved growth of the mutant. In addition, Mrp1, ChaA and NhaP were able to reduce the internal Na+ concentration in the C. glutamicum AQM background. The acridine orange fluorescence assay was used for the biochemical characterization of the putative antiporters. The corresponding C. glutamicum genes were expressed in the antiporterdeficient Escherichia coli strain KNabc and everted membrane vesicles were used to determine cation/proton antiport activities. All four antiporters were able to mediate Na+/H+- and K+/H+- antiport whereas Mrp1 showed a preference for sodium and NhaP seemed to prefer potassium

Dose–response relationship between physical activity and mortality in people with non-communicable diseases: a study protocol for the systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies

Introduction This study protocol outlines our planned systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of postdiagnosis physical activity and mortality in people with non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Methods and analysis This study is based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis for Protocols. A systematic literature search will be conducted in various databases—namely, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science—by two researchers in order to identify prospective observational studies that investigate postdiagnosis physical activity or activity-related energy expenditure and mortality in individuals with NCDs. The target population is adults (≥18 years of age) with one of the following nine NCDs: low back pain, type 2 diabetes mellitus, osteoarthritis, depressive disorder, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, breast cancer, lung cancer, stroke or ischaemic heart disease. We will focus on all-cause mortality as the primary outcome and investigate indication-specific mortality as the secondary outcome. For each study identified as a result of the literature search, we will conduct graphical dose-response analyses of mortality as a function of activity-related energy consumption. If more than two studies are available for one disease, we will perform linear and non-linear dose-response meta-analyses for said disease using random-effects models. We will investigate the heterogeneity of the studies and publication bias. To assess the risk of bias and the quality of the included studies, we will use the Risk Of Bias In Non-randomised Studies - of Interventions tool, which is a Cochrane tool

Recent coastline evolution along the Yukon Coast, western Canadian Arctic

Soft sediment permafrost coasts are well known for their very dynamic nature. In some places their erosion can reach tens of meters, even though the erosion time is restricted to the short open water season of three to four months per year. Due to its high ground ice content, the Yukon coast in the western Canadian Arctic is particularly prone to erosion. Building on results from Irrgang et al., 2018, we continued analyzing shoreline movements along the Yukon Coast using Pleiades satellite imagery covering the whole Yukon Coast from 2018 and 2022, as well as very highly resolved data from UAV overflights covering long term monitoring sites in 2019 and 2022. Using the Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) Esri ArcMap extension tool, we quantified shoreline movements for the time periods 2011-2018, and 2018-2022 for the entire coastline and for 2015-2019 and 2019- 2022 for long term monitoring sites. We used the same transects and shoreline proxies as in Irrgang et al., 2018, to ensure comparability of our results and elongate our observation series. We will show how recent shoreline position changes differ from past ones and will provide possible reasoning for these detected changes. We are using our multi-time-step shoreline change rate dataset of the Yukon Coast for training and validation purposes within the Earth Observation for Permafrost Coasts (EO4PAC) project. The increasing usage of machine learning approaches for automated shoreline delineation and shoreline change rate retrieval opens up new pathways – especially if it comes to exploring large and remote areas. Such datasets which contain on site derived shoreline change rates and manually derived shorelines from (very) high resolution airborne and spaceborne data are crucial for training algorithms, validation of results and thus for the quality improvement of machine learning techniques

Legalbewährung nach Entlassung aus dem offenen Vollzug: Eine Vergleichsstudie

Bisher mangelt es an kontrollierten Untersuchungen zum Effekt des offenen Vollzugs auf die Legalbewährung, da vorherige Studien unterschiedliche Gruppen von Inhaftierten miteinander verglichen. Um diesem Selektionseffekt entgegenzuwirken, wurden in der vorliegenden Studie mittels Matching-Verfahren vergleichbare Gruppen von Gefangenen gebildet. Mit Hilfe von Bundeszentralregisterdaten konnten die Rückfallquote, -geschwindigkeit und -schwere untersucht sowie individuelle Risiko- und Schutzfaktoren der Gefangenen kontrolliert werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Unterbringung im offenen Vollzug über die Positivauswahl von Gefangenen hinaus einen eigenständigen Effekt hat und das Risiko einer erneuten Inhaftierung signifikant reduziert.Until now, there has been a lack of research on the effect of being incarcerated in an open prison on legal probation. Previous studies have mostly compared quite different groups of prisoners. In order to counteract this selection bias, this study forms comparable groups of prisoners from the open and closed prison systems using matching procedures. Data from the Federal Central Criminal Register were used to examine the rates, speed and severity of recidivism, while individual risk and protection factors were statistically checked. The results show that incarceration in an open prison has an independent effect on legal probation - beyond the effect of positive selection of prisoners - and significantly reduces reincarceration

Robust AMD Stage Grading with Exclusively OCTA Modality Leveraging 3D Volume.

Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a degenerative eye disease that causes central vision loss. Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) is an emerging imaging modality that aids in the diagnosis of AMD by displaying the pathogenic vessels in the subretinal space. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of OCTA from the view of deep classifiers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that solely uses OCTA for AMD stage grading. By developing a 2D classifier based on OCTA projections, we identify that segmentation errors in retinal layers significantly affect the accuracy of classification. To address this issue, we propose analyzing 3D OCTA volumes directly using a 2D convolutional neural network trained with additional projection supervision. Our experimental results show that we achieve over 80% accuracy on a four-stage grading task on both error-free and error-prone test sets, which is significantly higher than 60%, the accuracy of human experts. This demonstrates that OCTA provides sufficient information for AMD stage grading and the proposed 3D volume analyzer is more robust when dealing with OCTA data with segmentation errors

Modellierung der strukturellen Heterogenität in einem künstlichen Wassereinzugsgebiet und Ableitung von hydraulischen Eigenschaften mittels Pedotransferfunktionen.

Wir präsentieren ein prozessbasiertes Strukturgenerator-Modell mit dem Ziel, exemplarisch die Strukturen und heterogenen Sedimentverteilungen eines künstlichen Einzugsgebiets möglichst realistisch abzubilden. Dieses Strukturmodell dient als Basis für eine räumlich verteilte hydrologische Modellierung von Wassereinzugsgebieten

Polymer-Enforced Crystallization of a Eutectic Binary Hard Sphere Mixture

We prepared a buoyancy matched binary mixture of polydisperse polystyrene microgel spheres of size ratio 0.785 and at a volume fraction of 0.567 just below the kinetic glass transition. In line with theoretical expectations, a eutectic phase behavior was observed, but only a minor fraction of the samples crystallized at all. By adding a short non-adsorbing polymer we enforce inter-species fractionation into coexisting pure component crystals, which in turn also shows signs of intra-species fractionation. We show that in formerly inaccessible regions of the phase diagram binary hard sphere physics is made observable using attractive hard spheres. Ancillary files: Correction to Soft Matter 2012, 8, 627Comment: 4 pages, 2 Figures, Final accepted draft plus correctio

Learning from sustainability pioneers. The Korn-Scout project

Das Projekt Korn-Scout entwickelt betriebliche Lehr-Lern-Materialien für Auszubildende in Korn-handhabenden Berufen. Ziel ist die Vermittlung von Nachhaltigkeitskompetenzen insbesondere zur Kommunikation mit den Akteuren der Wertschöpfungskette, um Auszubildende zu Change Agents ihrer Branche zu machen. Entscheidende Impulse kommen von den Praxispartnern und Praxispartnerinnen im Projekt – erfolgreichen Nachhaltigkeitspionieren. Diese stellen in „korn – Die Zeitschrift für Azubis“ ihre Erfahrungen und ihre Beweggründe für nachhaltiges Handeln vor. (DIPF/Orig.)The Korn-Scout project develops company-based teaching-learning materials for trainees in grain-handling professions. The aim is to impart sustainability competencies, especially for communication with the actors in the value chain, to make trainees change agents in their sector. Decisive impulses come from the practice partners in the project—successful sustainability pioneers. In “korn – Die Zeitschrift für Azubis” (corn – Magazine for Apprentices) they present their experiences and their motives for sustainable action. (DIPF/Orig.