The Welfare Implications of the European Trucks Cartel

We present a pragmatic approach to calculating the total economic loss induced by a cartel, focusing on the European trucks cartel (1997-2011). Overall, we estimate a net welfare loss up to € 15.5 bn. and an overcharge to the amount of 7.6%. Our approach builds on the theory of monopoly pricing and uses the publicly available profit data of the infringing companies. It is comprehensible, transparent, and applicable to collusion on list prices, what makes it particularly relevant for both policymakers and practitioners

Taming the Journal Monster: Building Bibliographical Bridges

The idea of rounding up our special issue in this way came to us while harmonizing all the bibliographical entries into one pattern. We have tried as best as we could to double-check each single source. Sometimes, names that we have never heard before appeared over and over again, in multiple contributions. Somewhere on this planet, different scholars had come across the same readings. We simply wanted to underline this complex, interwoven net of border-crossing–border-creating literature. As editors from different fields, we have learned of many intriguing discourses that were unknown to us before. Quite often, shared literature lists make visible certain symptoms of academic echo chambers, copy-paste works, or self-referencing networks. Shared foundational texts serve as sense-making tool kits to the members of so-called ‘fields’, and give a hint at somehow negotiated vocabulary within them. Yet, what we have in front of us is an example of an interdisciplinary collaboration of writers. Since our special issue had an ‘open call’, many of our collaborators do not even know each other personally. Yet, in the end, it was possible to build bibliographical bridges between all of them—every single contribution has at least one theoretical link to another article. This way, it is possible to theoretically unite our work, and consider it as (part of) a whole. A Meta Bibliography of Some Sort—Bridging MaMo’s BibliographiesIn short, we consider as a bibliographical bridge the shared bibliographical reference to a particular work or to a particular person by at least two of our issue’s authors. If some of our authors refer to ‘writer A’, an imaginary bridge is being created between their contributions—oftentimes unconsciously. These bridges become even more intriguing when noticing that numerous authors independently investigated the identical ‘work B’, without even knowing that another contributor did so as well. Our overview is based on a close examination of all roughly 1000 bibliographical entries in this special issue. It may not be free from errors. For the detailed references, see each contributor’s bibliography individually.The idea of rounding up our special issue in this way came to us while harmonizing all the bibliographical entries into one pattern. We have tried as best as we could to double-check each single source. Sometimes, names that we have never heard before appeared over and over again, in multiple contributions. Somewhere on this planet, different scholars had come across the same readings. We simply wanted to underline this complex, interwoven net of border-crossing–border-creating literature. As editors from different fields, we have learned of many intriguing discourses that were unknown to us before. Quite often, shared literature lists make visible certain symptoms of academic echo chambers, copy-paste works, or self-referencing networks. Shared foundational texts serve as sense-making tool kits to the members of so-called ‘fields’, and give a hint at somehow negotiated vocabulary within them. Yet, what we have in front of us is an example of an interdisciplinary collaboration of writers. Since our special issue had an ‘open call’, many of our collaborators do not even know each other personally. Yet, in the end, it was possible to build bibliographical bridges between all of them—every single contribution has at least one theoretical link to another article. This way, it is possible to theoretically unite our work, and consider it as (part of) a whole. A Meta Bibliography of Some Sort—Bridging MaMo’s BibliographiesIn short, we consider as a bibliographical bridge the shared bibliographical reference to a particular work or to a particular person by at least two of our issue’s authors. If some of our authors refer to ‘writer A’, an imaginary bridge is being created between their contributions—oftentimes unconsciously. These bridges become even more intriguing when noticing that numerous authors independently investigated the identical ‘work B’, without even knowing that another contributor did so as well. Our overview is based on a close examination of all roughly 1000 bibliographical entries in this special issue. It may not be free from errors. For the detailed references, see each contributor’s bibliography individually.The idea of rounding up our special issue in this way came to us while harmonizing all the bibliographical entries into one pattern. We have tried as best as we could to double-check each single source. Sometimes, names that we have never heard before appeared over and over again, in multiple contributions. Somewhere on this planet, different scholars had come across the same readings. We simply wanted to underline this complex, interwoven net of border-crossing–border-creating literature. As editors from different fields, we have learned of many intriguing discourses that were unknown to us before. Quite often, shared literature lists make visible certain symptoms of academic echo chambers, copy-paste works, or self-referencing networks. Shared foundational texts serve as sense-making tool kits to the members of so-called ‘fields’, and give a hint at somehow negotiated vocabulary within them. Yet, what we have in front of us is an example of an interdisciplinary collaboration of writers. Since our special issue had an ‘open call’, many of our collaborators do not even know each other personally. Yet, in the end, it was possible to build bibliographical bridges between all of them—every single contribution has at least one theoretical link to another article. This way, it is possible to theoretically unite our work, and consider it as (part of) a whole. A Meta Bibliography of Some Sort—Bridging MaMo’s BibliographiesIn short, we consider as a bibliographical bridge the shared bibliographical reference to a particular work or to a particular person by at least two of our issue’s authors. If some of our authors refer to ‘writer A’, an imaginary bridge is being created between their contributions—oftentimes unconsciously. These bridges become even more intriguing when noticing that numerous authors independently investigated the identical ‘work B’, without even knowing that another contributor did so as well. Our overview is based on a close examination of all roughly 1000 bibliographical entries in this special issue. It may not be free from errors. For the detailed references, see each contributor’s bibliography individually

Protective activity of aromatic amines and imines against oxidative nerve cell death

Oxidative stress is a widespread phenomenon in the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Neuronal cell death due to oxidative stress may causally contribute to the pathogeneses of these diseases. Therefore, neuroprotective antioxidants are considered to be a promising approach to slow down disease progression. We have investigated different aromatic amine and imine compounds for neuroprotective antioxidant functions in cell culture, and found that these compounds possess excellent cytoprotective potential in diverse paradigms of oxidative neuronal cell death, including clonal cell lines, primary cerebellar neurons, and organotypic hippocampal slice cultures. Aromatic amines and imines are effective against oxidative glutamate toxicity, glutathione depletion, and hydrogen peroxide toxicity. Their mode of action as direct antioxidants; was experimentally confirmed by electron spin resonance spectroscopy, cell-free brain lipid peroxidation assays, and intracellular peroxide measurements. With half-maximal effective concentrations of 20-75 nm in different neuroprotection experiments, the aromatic imines phenothiazine, phenoxazine, and iminostilbene proved to be about two orders of magnitude more effective than common phenolic antioxidants. This remarkable efficacy could be directly correlated to calculated properties of the compounds by means of a novel, quantitative structure-activity relationship model. We conclude that bridged bisarylimines with a single free NH-bond, such as iminostilbene, are superior neuroprotective antioxidants, and may be promising lead structures for rational drug development

Meaning, context, and background

It is widely held that (truth-conditional) meaning is context-dependent. According to John Searle's radical version of contextualism, the very notion of meaning “is only applicable relative to a set of […] background assumptions” (Searle 1978, p. 207), or background know-how. In earlier work, I have developed a (moderately externalist) “neo-Husserlian” account of the context-dependence of meaning and intentional content, based on Husserl’s semantics of indexicals. Starting from this semantics, which strongly resembles today's mainstream semantics (section 2) I describe the (radical) contextualist challenge that mainstream semantics and pragmatics face in view of the (re-)discovery of what Searle calls the background of meaning (section 3). Following this, and drawing upon both my own neo-Husserlian account and ideas from Emma Borg, Gareth Evans and Timothy Williamson, I sketch a strategy for meeting this challenge (section 4) and draw a social-epistemological picture that allows us to characterize meaning and content in a way that takes account of contextualist insights yet makes it necessary to tone down Searle's “hypothesis of the Background” (section 5)

Self-identification, intersubjectivity, and the background of intentionality : a reply to Anita Pacholik-Żuromska

Two suggestions by Pacholik-Żuromska, concerning the background of “I”-references and the intersubjective dimension of intentionality, respectively, are taken up and related to Husserl's theory of intentionality. Moreover, a number of misunderstandings of my view are corrected, Searle's “regress argument” for the Background Hypothesis is criticized, and a distinction between two functions of the background of intentionality is drawn in order to clarify my view

A Generalized Grand-Reaction Method for Modelling the Exchange of Weak (Polyprotic) Acids between a Solution and a Weak Polyelectrolyte Phase

We introduce a Monte-Carlo method that allows for the simulation of a polymeric phase containing a weak polyelectrolyte, which is coupled to a reservoir at a fixed pH, salt concentration and total concentration of a weak polyprotic acid. The method generalizes the established Grand-Reaction Method by Landsgesell et al. [Macromolecules 53, 3007-3020 (2020)] and thus allows for the simulation of polyelectrolyte systems coupled to reservoirs with a more complex chemical composition. In order to set the required input parameters that correspond to a desired reservoir composition, we propose a generalization of the recently published chemical potential tuning algorithm of Miles et al. [Phys. Rev. E 105, 045311 (2022)]. To test the proposed tuning procedure, we perform extensive numerical tests for both ideal and interacting systems. Finally, as a showcase, we apply the method to a simple test system which consists of a weak polybase solution that is coupled to a reservoir containing a small diprotic acid. The complex interplay of the ionization various species, the electrostatic interactions and the partitioning of small ions leads to a non-monotonous, stepwise swelling behaviour of the weak polybase chains.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

The Nicastrin ectodomain adopts a highly thermostable structure

Nicastrin is a type I transmembrane glycoprotein, which is part of the high molecular weight gamma-secretase complex. gamma-Secretase is one of the key players associated with the generation of Alzheimer's disease pathology, since it liberates the neurotoxic amyloid beta-peptide. Four proteins Nicastrin, anterior pharynx-defective-1 (Aph-1), presenilin enhancer-2 (Pen-2) and Presenilin are essential to form the active gamma-secretase complex. Recently it has been shown, that Nicastrin has a key function in stabilizing the mature gamma-secretase complex and may also be involved in substrate recognition. So far no structural data for the Nicastrin ectodomain or any other gamma-secretase component are available. We therefore used Circular Dichroism (CD) spectroscopy to demonstrate that Nicastrin, similar to its homologues, the Streptomyces griseus aminopeptidase (SGAP) and the transferrin receptor (TfR), adopts a thermostable secondary structure. Furthermore, the Nicastrin ectodomain has an exceptionally high propensity to refold after thermal denaturation. These findings provide evidence to further support the hypothesis that Nicastrin may share evolutionary conserved properties with the aminopeptidase and the transferrin receptor family

Explaining Giant Apparent pKA\mathrm{p}K_\mathrm{A} Shifts in Weak Polyelectrolyte Brushes

Recent experiments on weak polyelectrolyte brushes found marked shifts in the effective p$K_\mathrm{A}$ that are linear in the logarithm of the salt concentration. Comparing explicit-particle simulations with mean-field calculations we show that for high grafting densities the salt concentration effect can be explained using the ideal Donnan theory, but for low grafting densities the full shift is due to a combination of the Donnan effect and the polyelectrolyte effect. The latter originates from electrostatic correlations which are neglected in the Donnan picture and which are only approximately included in the mean-field theory. Moreover, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the polyelectrolyte effect is almost invariant with respect to salt concentration but depends on the grafting density of the brush. This invariance is due to a complex cancellation of multiple effects. Based on our results, we show how the experimentally determined p$K_\mathrm{A}$ shifts may be used to infer the grafting density of brushes, a parameter that is difficult to measure directly.Comment: First revised version of the manuscript; 15 pages, 16 figure

The scientific basis for novel treatments of systemic sclerosis

In recent years, many potential antifibrotic treatment strategies have emerged from molecular studies of systemic sclerosis. Few biologicals have already entered clinical trials and these may hopefully prove to be effective in this progressive, profibrotic disease