Attitudes towards Development Policy in the Context of the War against Ukraine

Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. Global prices for energy and foodstuffs rose in part dramatically. Against this backdrop, the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) has explored three questions based on a representative survey conducted by the Development Engagement Lab (DEL) in October 2022: 1. How does public perception of the state of the German economy correlate with approval for DC? 2. What attitudes do people have towards various development policy measures in response to the war against Ukraine? 3. How does agreement to such measures differ according to individuals' political orientation and assessment of the general state of the economy, and their own, personal economic situation and income

Entwicklungspolitische Einstellungen im Kontext des Krieges gegen die Ukraine

Im Februar 2022 begann Russland seinen Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine. In der Folge sind die Weltmarktpreise für Energie und Lebensmittel teils drastisch gestiegen. Vor diesem Hintergrund hat das Deutsche Evaluierungsinstitut der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (DEval) auf der Basis einer repräsentativen Umfrage des Development Engagement Labs (DEL) aus dem Oktober 2022 drei Fragen untersucht: 1. Wie hängen die Wahrnehmung der wirtschaftlichen Lage Deutschlands und die Zustimmung zur Entwicklungszusammenarbeit zusammen? 2. Welche Einstellungen hat die Bevölkerung zu verschiedenen entwicklungspolitischen Maßnahmen in Reaktion auf den Krieg gegen die Ukraine? 3. Wie unterscheidet sich die Zustimmung zu den Maßnahmen in Abhängigkeit von politischer Orientierung, Einschätzung der allgemeinen und persönlichen wirtschaftlichen Lage und Einkommen

Automatic Testing of Operation Invariance

Abstract. We present an approach to automatically generating operation invariance tests for use with Haskell's random testing framework QuickCheck. The motivation stems from a paper by Holdermans [8] which showed how to address certain shortcomings of straightforward testing of implementations of an abstract datatype. While effective, his solution requires extra generation work from the test engineer. Also, it may not even be doable if the person responsible for testing has no knowledge about, and program-level access to, the internals of the concrete datatype implementation under test. We propose and realize a refinement to Holdermans' solution that improves on both aspects: Required operation invariance tests can be formulated even in ignorance of implementation internals, and can be automatically generated using Template Haskell

Digitisation of private collections

Results are presented of a study investigating solutions and procedures to incorporate private natural history collections into the international collections data infrastructure. Results are based on pilot projects carried out in three European countries aimed at approaches on how to best motivate and equip citizen collectors for digitisation:1) In Estonia, the approach was to outline tools for registering, digitising and publishing private collection data in the biodiversity data management system PlutoF.2) In Finland, the functionality of FinBIF, a portal offering a popular Notebook Service for citizens to store observations has been expanded to include collection specimens related to a field gathering event.3) In the Netherlands private collection owners were approached directly and asked to start digitising their collection using dedicated software, either by themselves or with the help of volunteers who were recruited specifically for this task.In addition to management tools, pilots also looked at motivation, persons undertaking the work, scope, planning, specific knowledge or skills required and the platform for online publication. Future ownership, legality of specimens residing in private collections and the use of unique identifiers are underexposed aspects effecting digitisation. Besides streamlining the overall process of digitising private collections and dealing with local, national or international challenges, developing a communication strategy is crucial in order to effectively distribute information and keep private collection owners aware of ongoing developments.Besides collection owners other stakeholders were identified and for each of them a roadmap is outlined aimed at further streamlining the data from private collections into the international infrastructure.In conclusion recommendations are presented based on challenges encountered during this task that are considered important to really make significant progress towards the overall accessibility of data stored in privately held natural history collections

Polyamines directly promote antizyme-mediated degradation of ornithine decarboxylase by the proteasome

Ornithine decarboxylase (ODC), a ubiquitin-independent substrate of the proteasome, is a homodimeric protein with a rate-limiting function in polyamine biosynthesis. Polyamines regulate ODC levels by a feedback mechanism mediated by ODC antizyme (OAZ). Higher cellular polyamine levels trigger the synthesis of OAZ and also inhibit its ubiquitin-dependent proteasomal degradation. OAZ binds ODC monomers and targets them to the proteasome. Here, we report that polyamines, aside from their role in the control of OAZ synthesis and stability, directly enhance OAZ-mediated ODC degradation by the proteasome. Using a stable mutant of OAZ, we show that polyamines promote ODC degradation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells even when OAZ levels are not changed. Furthermore, polyamines stimulated the in vitro degradation of ODC by the proteasome in a reconstituted system using purified components. In these assays, spermine shows a greater effect than spermidine. By contrast, polyamines do not have any stimulatory effect on the degradation of ubiquitin-dependent substrates