Corporate Tax Evasion and Extortionist Governments

We present a simple model of corporate tax evasion allowing for potentially bad governments that abuse their fiscal powers to extort monies from firms. Our model shows that the potential existence of extortionist governments provides incentives for corporate tax evasion and increases enforcement costs.tax evasion, extortion, corporate taxation

Soil water repellency: Comparison between individual particles and bulk properties.

Two different methods for probing soil particle surfaces were tested and applied to particles from natural soils to examine soil water repellency arising from organic coatings on their surfaces. The applicability of laser scanning confocal microscopy to the characterisation of organic soil particle surface coatings was examined. Individual particle fluorescence showed a correlation with organic matter present in the corresponding soil, although not all organic material in soil fluoresces. This indicates that fluorescence could be used to probe soil particle surfaces. Other parameters such as the extent of coverage with fluorescent material, number of fluorescent areas and their size gave no consistent results, but seemed to be strongly dependent on sample origin and possibly factors such as the surface roughness of the particles. Another new method for investigating soil particle surfaces involved measurement of the height of a water lamella pulled up by an individual particle. Good agreement was found between lamella height and the contact angle of bulk soil materials of various but known water repellencies. Soil samples generally contained particles with a wide distribution of individual water repellencies. However, particles from water repellent soils showed more variation in lamella height than those from wettable soils, indicating a non-uniform distribution of hydrophobic surfaces within soil. The influence of pH on soil water repellency was examined by changing soil pH using gases rather than liquid reagents. Addition of base led to a decrease in water repellency confirming observations that soils of high pH are seldom water repellent. Using these methods it was not possible to unravel all the characteristics and effects of organic particle coatings on soil water repellency. However, the results indicate that these coatings, and their chemistry, may not be the only factor involved. Physical properties, such as surface roughness, may interact with the chemistry

Media Diversity in Deutschland

An der Schnittstelle von Ethnologie und Journalismus untersucht die Arbeit die Entwicklungen und Potenziale von "Media Diversity" für die deutschen Medien. Unter dem Begriff Media Diversity entwickelt sich seit einigen Jahren ein relativ neuer und vielversprechender Ansatz, die etablierten Konventionen medialer Berichterstattung herauszufordern und um andere Perspektiven zu erweitern. Fürs Erste lässt sich Media Diversity als Konzept skizzieren, das beansprucht, die in einer Gesellschaft bestehende Vielfalt, Verschiedenheit oder Heterogenität in den Medien wertschätzend anzuerkennen, gleichberechtigt einzubinden und für den Abbau von struktureller Benachteiligung und Diskriminierung einzutreten. Vielfalt kann sich dabei auf so unterschiedliche Aspekte beziehen wie Alter, Geschlecht, sexuelle Orientierung, körperliche und mentale Verfasstheit, soziale Herkunft oder soziale Klasse, Beruf und Bildung, religiöse, kulturelle und ethnische Zugehörigkeit. Forderungen nach Media Diversity richten sich sowohl auf Medienproduktion und entsprechende Teilhabe als auch auf Medieninhalte. Die Arbeit untersucht das Feld des Journalismus hinsichtlich seiner Positionen, Politiken und Aktivitäten in Bezug auf Media Diversity. Einen ersten Zugang bieten Selbstverständnis, Rollenbild und Arbeitsroutinen des journalistischen Feldes. Dabei wird untersucht, inwiefern Media Diversity oder entsprechend verwandte Fragestellungen im journalistischen Selbstverständnis vorkommen und wie sie dort verhandelt werden. Die journalistischen Routinen, die innerhalb dieses Selbstverständnisses professionelles Arbeiten gewährleisten, rücken die Bedingungen in den Blick, die den notwendigen Rahmen bilden, in dem Media-Diversity-Ansätze gedacht werden müssen. In einem zweiten Zugang geht es, basierend auf einer Feldforschung in einer journalistischen Masterklasse, um die journalistische Ausbildung; um die Frage, auf welche Weise junge Journalist*innen in ihren Beruf sozialisiert werden, welche Rolle Media Diversity im Lehrplan einnimmt und welche verwandten Angebote bestehen. Einen dritten Zugang eröffnen die Politiken der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunksender in Bezug auf Migration und Integration. Forderungen nach Veränderungen beziehen sich dabei vor allem auf die drei Bereiche Programminhalte, Personalstruktur und Bewusstseinsbildung. Dieser Teilaspekt der Bewusstseinsbildung wird in einem vierten Zugang vertiefend untersucht. Anhand der eigenen Tätigkeit als Leiterin solcher bewusstseinsbildenden Workshops und Seminare werden diese bezüglich ihres Potenzials für die Umsetzung und Verstetigung von Media-Diversity-Konzepten befragt. Die Ergebnisse dieser Verortung von Media Diversity im journalistischen Feld werden schließlich einer kritischen Prüfung unterzogen. Während Diversity als politisches Projekt begriffen werden kann, das für den Abbau von Diskriminierung und Benachteiligung eintritt, kommt in der Übertragung auf die Medien der Aspekt der Repräsentation hinzu – und zwar sowohl im Sinne von Vertretung, wie es auch in Diversity angelegt ist, als auch im Sinne von Darstellung. Es stellt sich also die Frage, inwiefern sich Ansätze von Diversity in der medialen Repräsentation niederschlagen können, welche Bedingungen dafür nötig sind, bzw. dem entgegenstehen. Aus kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven wird aufgezeigt, in welches theoretische Spannungsfeld Media Diversity eingebettet ist und diskutiert, inwiefern Media Diversity als hegemoniale Praxis gesehen werden muss. Dazu werden die institutionellen Bedingungen des journalistischen Feldes und die in Diversity angelegte Differenzbildung kritisch beleucht. Abschließend diskutiert die Arbeit mit Bezug auf das Konzept des Friedensjournalismus und mit einer theoretischen Fundierung durch Postkoloniale Kritik und Kritische Weißseinsforschung, welche Möglichkeiten einer Neubesetzung von Media Diversity denkbar sind

Actor Approach to Researching Global Educational Policy

The article examines the actors in the global educational process on the example of the European Union, the UN, the World Bank and the OECD. We consider the tools of their influence on education, work efficiency, areas of responsibility. The article examines political forces (unions, associations) that have a real impact/influence on the processes in global educational policy, thus, are, above all, its active actors, capable, due to their political and/or economic importance, to the situation

Influence of High Energy Diet and Polygenic Predisposition for Obesity on Postpartum Health in Rat Dams

It is estimated that 30% of pregnant women worldwide are overweight or obese, leading to adverse health effects for both mother and child. Women with obesity during pregnancy are at higher risk for developing both metabolic and mental disorders, such as diabetes and depression. Numerous studies have used rodent models of maternal obesity to understand its consequences on the offspring, yet characterization of changes in the dams is rare, and most rodent models rely solely on a high fat diet to induce maternal obesity, without regarding genetic propensity for obesity. Here we present the influence of both peripartum high energy diet (HE) and obesity-proneness on maternal health using selectively bred diet-resistant (DR) and diet-induced obese (DIO) rat dams. Outbred Sprague-Dawley rats were challenged with HE diet prior to mating and bred according to their propensity to gain weight. The original outbred breeding dams (F0) were maintained on low-fat chow during pregnancy and lactation. By comparison, the F1 dams consuming HE diet during pregnancy and lactation displayed higher gestational body weight gain (P < 0.01), and HE diet caused increased meal size and reduced meal frequency (P < 0.001). Sensitivity to the hormone amylin was preserved during pregnancy, regardless of diet. After several rounds of selective breeding, DIO and DR dams from generation F3 were provided chow or HE during pregnancy and lactation and assessed for their postpartum physiology and behaviors. We observed strong diet and phenotype effects on gestational weight gain, with DIO-HE dams gaining 119% more weight than DR-chow (P < 0.001). A high-resolution analysis of maternal behaviors did not detect main effects of diet or phenotype, but a subset of DIO dams showed delayed nursing behavior (P < 0.05). In generation F6/F7 dams, effects on gestational weight gain persisted (P < 0.01), and we observed a main effect of phenotype during a sucrose preference test (P < 0.05), with DIO-chow dams showing lower sucrose preference than DR controls (P < 0.05). Both DIO and DR dams consuming HE diet had hepatic steatosis (P < 0.001) and exhibited reduced leptin sensitivity in the arcuate nucleus (P < 0.001). These data demonstrate that both diet and genetic obesity-proneness have consequences on maternal health

Spot: A Natural Language Interface for Geospatial Searches in OSM

Investigative journalists and fact-checkers have found OpenStreetMap (OSM) to be an invaluable resource for their work due to its extensive coverage and intricate details of various locations, which play a crucial role in investigating news scenes. Despite its value, OSM's complexity presents considerable accessibility and usability challenges, especially for those without a technical background. To address this, we introduce 'Spot', a user-friendly natural language interface for querying OSM data. Spot utilizes a semantic mapping from natural language to OSM tags, leveraging artificially generated sentence queries and a T5 transformer. This approach enables Spot to extract relevant information from user-input sentences and display candidate locations matching the descriptions on a map. To foster collaboration and future advancement, all code and generated data is available as an open-source repository.Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of the OSM Science 202

Identification and characterization of Iporin as a novel interaction partner for rab1

BACKGROUND: The small GTPase rab1a and its isoform rab1b are essential regulating components in the vesicle transport between the ER and the Golgi apparatus. Rab1 is thought to act as a molecular switch and can change between an active GTP-bound and an inactive GDP-bound conformation. To elucidate the function of rab1, several approaches have been established to isolate effector proteins, which interact with the activated conformation of rab1. To date p115, GM130, golgin-84 and MICAL have been identified as direct interacting partners. Together with rab1, these molecules are components of a protein complex, which mediates and regulates intracellular vesicle transport. RESULTS: Here, we report the characterization of Iporin, which is similar to KIAA0375 as a novel rab1-interacting protein. It was initially identified by yeast two-hybrid screening experiments with the active mutant of rab1b (rab1b Q67R) as bait. Iporin contains a SH3 domain and two polyproline stretches, which are known to play a role in protein/protein interactions. In addition, Iporin encloses a RUN domain, which seems to be a major part of the rab1binding domain (R1BD). Iporin is ubiquitously expressed and immunofluorescence staining displays a cytosolic punctual distribution. Interestingly, we also show that Iporin interacts with another rab1 interacting partner, the GM130 protein. CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrate that Iporin is a potential new interacting partner of rab1. Iporin is different from already identified rab1 interacting proteins concerning protein structure and cellular localization. We conclude that Iporin might function as a link between the targeting of ER derived vesicles, triggered by the rab1 GTPase and a signaling pathway regulated by molecules containing SH3 and/or poly-proline regions. The characterization of this novel intermolecular relation could help to elucidate how vesicles find their way from ER to the Golgi apparatus

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and cell sorting of living bacteria

Despite the development of several cultivation methods, the rate of discovery of microorganisms that are yet-to-be cultivated outpaces the rate of isolating and cultivating novel species in the laboratory. Furthermore, no current cultivation technique is capable of selectively isolating and cultivating specific bacterial taxa or phylogenetic groups independently of morphological or physiological properties. Here, we developed a new method to isolate living bacteria solely based on their 16S rRNA gene sequence. We showed that bacteria can survive a modified version of the standard fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) procedure, in which fixation is omitted and other factors, such as centrifugation and buffers, are optimized. We also demonstrated that labelled DNA probes can be introduced into living bacterial cells by means of chemical transformation and that specific hybridization occurs. This new method, which we call live-FISH, was then combined with fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to sort specific taxonomic groups of bacteria from a mock and natural bacterial communities and subsequently culture them. Live-FISH represents the first attempt to systematically optimize conditions known to affect cell viability during FISH and then to sort bacterial cells surviving the procedure. No sophisticated probe design is required, making live-FISH a straightforward method to be potentially used in combination with other single-cell techniques and for the isolation and cultivation of new microorganisms

Heidelberg-Studie 2000

Umfrage zum Leben und poltischen Problemen in Heidelberg. 1219 Telefoninterview