Media Philosophy— A Reasonable Programme?

It is beyond any doubt that media have an enormous impact on our media-culture societies. Media in?uence our perception and our knowledge, our memory as well as our emotions. They create public spheres and public opinions and give rise to media realities. Media shape our socialisation and our communality. They transform economy, politics, science, religion and law. “What we know about our society, even about our world we are living in, we know via the mass media.” (Luhmann 1996:9; my translation) Accordingly, “the media” have become a paramount subject of interdisciplinary discourses in the last decades all over the world. All these developments have become topics of scienti?c analyses as well as parts of media programmes. Since decades, various academic disciplines focused on an other-observation (“Fremdbeobachtung”) of the media from an external state, whereas the media increasingly tend to observe themselves as well as one another in order to transform this self-observation into parts of their respective programmes. The other-observation is carried out either by scholars of communication- and/or media theory or by philosophers; but whereas the former are organised in academic disciplines, no established discipline entitled “media philosophy” exists until today. Instead, the various approaches to philosophical analyses of media are heterogeneous and lack a solid theoretical basis as well as a disciplinary organisation. Some scholars even hold the view that media are not even within the province of philosophers. Some people deeply regret this deadlock regarding not only topics and discourses but also future jobs and positions for scholars of a discipline “media philosophy” to come. Others welcome this stalemate which gives room to creative solutions of thematic as well as of organisational matters. Let us have a short look at some of the foreseeable options. One of the actual media philosophical approaches concentrates its efforts on a reformulation of traditional philosophical topics in the framework of media ef?ciencies. The list of such topics is rather long and covers nearly all famous crucial subjects of philosophical discourses, reaching from reality, truth, culture, society, education or politics to time, space, emotion, subject or entertainment. This kind of rethinking or reformulating philosophical topics concentrates upon the question how—in the co-evolution of media systems and society—our daily experiences as well as our theoretical modellings of these topics have changed on the historical way from writing to the Internet

Pipe joints reinforced in place with fitted aluminum sleeves

Installation of an aluminum sleeve, using specially designed tools, reinforces solder- sealed ferrule joints in installed small-diameter aluminum tubing. Tubing joints reinforced by this method withstand considerable torsional tensional, and vibrational stresses at moderately elevated temperatures

Disorder-induced freezing of dynamical spin fluctuations in underdoped cuprates

We study the dynamical spin susceptibility of a correlated d-wave superconductor (dSC) in the presence of disorder, using an unrestricted Hartree-Fock approach. This model provides a concrete realization of the notion that disorder slows down spin fluctuations, which eventually "freeze out". The evolution of disorder-induced spectral weight transfer agrees qualitatively with experimental observations on underdoped cuprate superconductors. For sufficiently large disorder concentrations, static spin density wave (SDW) order is created when droplets of magnetism nucleated by impurities overlap. We also study the disordered stripe state coexisting with a dSC and compare its magnetic fluctuation spectrum to that of the disorder-generated SDW phase.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Multiple mRNA isoforms of the transcription activator protein CREB

We have characterized cDNA clones representing mouse CREB (cyclic AMP responsive element binding protein) mRNA isoforms. These include CREBA and CREBa, of which the rat and human homologues have been previously identified. Both encode proteins with CREbinding activity and identical transactivation potential. The additional CREB mRNA isoforms potentially encode CREB related proteins. From the structural organization of the mouse CREB gene we conclude that the multiple transcripts are generated by alternative splicing. Furthermore we show that specific CREB mRNA isoforms are expressed at a high level in the adult testis. Expression of these isoforms is induced after commencement of spermatogenesis. In situ hybridization suggests that this expression occurs predominantly in the primary spermatocytes. Comparison of the CREB gene with the recently isolated CREM (cAMP responsive element modulator) cDNAs illustrates that the two genes have arisen by gene duplication and have diverged to encode transcriptional activators and repressors of the cAMP signal transduction pathway