Radio and Audio Strategies for External Cultural Relations: conference report, Berlin, 24/25 October 2013

Radio and online audio-formats are valuable instruments for international cultural work, and for education and development programmes. However, political developments following the end of the Cold War and the rise of satellite TV and online media have brought with them far-reaching cuts in the radio programming of international broadcasters, and led to fundamental changes in the way radio and audio programmes are produced and distributed. Major western broadcasters, such as BBC World Service, BBG, RFI and DW, have limited their shortwave services to a small selection of countries, mainly in Africa and parts of Asia, where the infrastructure does not offer real alternatives for addressing the respective target groups. In these regions, radio still plays a vital role, not only for reasons related to infrastructure, but also because a great number of illiterate listeners can access information, knowledge and education best via audio. Traditional radio production and terrestrial transmission are also useful and efficient tools in media development work, as they can reach out into remote or rural areas and empower people to strengthen their community and cultural identity. But radio’s relevance goes beyond the local needs of regions that have not kept pace with the rate of recent technological change and media innovation. Radio has been at the core of international broadcasting right from the start, and now that it has become one element in a new mix of media, it turns out that there are some attractive core qualities of radio and audio that remain. These qualities are: 1. the direct and emotional impact of the human voice, 2. radio’s well-established culture of dialogue, 3. its potential to involve listeners as coproducers, 4. the flexibility, mobility and comparatively low production costs of audio, 5. its ability to subvert censorship

Attribution of Autonomy and its Role in Robotic Language Acquisition

© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Radio im interkulturellen Dialog

Internationale Rundfunkanstalten richten ihren Fokus vermehrt auf die Programmgestaltung im Internet, Kurzwellenprogramme hingegen werden reduziert. Trotz des Vormarschs des Internets ist die Kurzwelle ein Instrument, das es derzeit noch mehr als das Internet ermöglicht, Menschen in entlegenen Gebieten zu erreichen. Ist das Radio ein Relikt längst vergangener Zeiten oder spielt es doch noch eine Rolle für den Auslandsrundfunk? Steckt in Audioformaten das Potenzial zum globalen Dialog? Welchen Mehrwert haben Bildungsformate im Audioformat? Wie ermöglichen Audioformate alternativen Stimmen in restriktiven Regimen Gehör zu finden? Der Autor vertieft im vorliegenden Artikel die Frage nach der Rolle des Radios im interkulturellen Dialog in Zeiten von Web 2.0

Time-Dependent Changes In Viewing Behavior On Similarly Structured Web Pages

This article focuses on the impact of observation time and web page structure on viewing behavior. 63 subjects observed similarly structured pages of a popular commercial internet shop. Eye movements were recorded and analyzed regarding several saccade parameters, the individual fixation distribution by means of a progressive entropy approach, and the within- as well as between-subject congruency of fixation distributions. Our results show that viewing behavior significantly changed while subjects observed individual web pages. In contrast, we only found little evidence for a change in eye movements across web pages and hence for an attention-related schema building. In this context, we also provide an example of the impact of web page elements’ position on fixation probability

Mitotic degradation of cyclin A is mediated by multiple and novel destruction signals

AbstractExit from mitosis requires Cdk1 inactivation, with the most prominent mechanism of Cdk1 inactivation being proteolysis of mitotic cyclins [1]. In higher eukaryotes this involves sequential destruction of A- and B-type cyclins. CycA is destroyed first, and CycA/Cdk1 inactivation is required for the metaphase-to-anaphase transition [2]. The degradation of CycA is delayed in response to DNA damage but is not prevented when the spindle checkpoint is activated [3, 4]. Cyclin destruction is thought to be mediated by a conserved motif, the destruction box (D box). Like B-type cyclins, A-type cyclins contain putative destruction box sequences in their N termini [5]. However, no detailed in vivo analysis of the sequence requirements for CycA destruction has been described so far. Here we tested several mutations in the CycA coding region for destruction in Drosophila embryos. We show that D box sequences are not essential for mitotic destruction of CycA. Destruction is mediated by at least three different elements that act in an overlapping fashion to mediate its mitotic degradation

Data rescue of national and international meteorological observations at Deutscher Wetterdienst

Germany's national meteorological service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) houses in Offenbach and Hamburg huge archives of historical handwritten journals of weather observations. They comprise not only observations from Germany, but also of the oceans and land stations in many parts of the world. DWD works on the digitization and quality control of these archives. The current status is presented here

Data rescue of national and international meteorological observations at Deutscher Wetterdienst

KlimawandelHistorischen Klimadaten wird in der Diskussion um den Klimawandel eine immer größere Bedeutung zugemessen. Die weltweit in vielen Archiven auf Papier vorliegenden Daten sind in dieser Form für wissenschaftliche Auswertungen nicht nutzbar. Deshalb laufen verschiedene nationale und internationale Datenrettungsaktivitäten. Beim Deutschen Wetterdienst werden aktuell 4 Datenarchive digitalisiert. Dabei handelt es sich um 1) die nationalen Klimadaten, 2) weltweite Beobachtungen von Handelsschiffen, 3) Landstationen in vielen Teilen der Welt sowie 4) Signalstationen an den deutschen Küsten von Nord- und Ostsee. Während die nationalen Klimadaten im Zentralarchiv des DWD in Offenbach liegen sind die anderen drei Archive Erbe der Deutschen Seewarte Hamburg. In allen vier Archiven werden die Unterlagen gescannt und die Werte per Hand digitalisiert. Nach einer Qualitätskontrolle gehen die Daten in die Datenbanken des DWD ein und werden über das Climate Data Centre des DWD kostenlos zur Verfügung gestellt. Die Daten sind eine wichtige Grundlage für die Beurteilung des regionalen Klimawandels sowie Grundlage für die Erstellung regionaler und globaler Reanalysen der Atmosphäre. Im Beitrag wird der aktuelle Stand der Digitalisierung erläutert sowie die nationalen und internationalen Kooperationen des DWD auf dem Gebiet der Datenrettung vorgestellt