Legal aspects of gender balance on corporate boards in Germany

The German corporate governance code includes a recommendation as to diversity on corporate boards. Two draft bills on gender quotas are currently under way in legislative proceedings. However, the ruling coalition rejects those, advocating a “flexible quota”. The present study provides an overview on legislative proposals currently presented and on academic scholarship on the issue. Legal obstacles to the introduction of a “fix” quota under German law are discussed and the “soft” version of “flexible” quotas is advocated

Searches for Gauge Mediated SUSY Breaking at LEP

Searches for neutralinos and sleptons with arbitrary lifetimes, as predicted in the framework of the Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking (GMSB) model, have been performed by the four LEP collaborations. No evidence for these particles has been found in the data recorded at center-of-mass energies up to sqrt(s)=209GeV. Therefore constraints on the production cross-sections and particle masses as well as interpretations in the framework of the GMSB model are presented.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, To appear in the proceedings of the 37th Rencontres de Moriond, Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, Les Arcs, France, 9-16 March 200

Chant down tha System \u27till Babylon Falls: The Political Dimensions of Urban Grooves and Underground Hip Hop in Zimbabwe

This article, first published in the Journal of Pan African Studies (2013, Volume 6, Issue 3), is a shortened version of the author\u27s M.A. thesis in which she traces the trajectories and ideologies of two separate, but intertwined, youth movements in Harare, Zimbabwe: Urban Grooves and Underground Hip Hop

Two Arguments Against Some Critics of Religion Based on Feeling and Emotion Following William James

In this paper I will show that you can distinguish two main types of argumentation in respect to feeling and emotions in the philosophy of religion of William James, which point to two different kind of criticism of religion. Especially in his early works, James argues that you may lawfully adopt religious beliefs on the basis of passional grounds. This argumentation points to a type of criticism of religion, which denies that beliefs based on such emotional grounds may be justified. In his famous study The Varieties of Religious Experience, James defines religious experience as an experience of inner conversion, where the individual gets in touch with a higher self. The philosophical interpretation of religious experience points not at least to a type of criticism of religion in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach, which is known as the theory of projection

Foreword

The Afrikan Hiphop Caravan is an annual project run by various Hip Hop activist networks spread across the African continent and the diaspora. Despite the fact that Hip Hop has been used as a tool for mobilising toward social transformation and to contest authority, oppression and power, as, for instance, during the presidential elections in Senegal in the early 2000s, elements of the culture, particularly rap, have also been appropriated by the ruling elite (see, for instance, Kellerer this volume) and underwent commodification, or, in other words, were adopted into mainstream pop culture in many places. The key aim of the Hiphop Conference is to create a platform for Hip Hop scholars, cultural activists, artists and community organisers to critically analyse current debates surrounding African Hip Hop, to deepen the understanding of Africa\u27s urban youth cultures, and to share strategies and experiences in mobilising young people for social justice and transformation

A field full of researchers: fieldwork as a collective experience

A version of this paper was originally written for a plenary session about "The Futures of Ethnography" at the 1998 EASA conference in Frankfurt/Main. In the preparation of the paper, I sent out some questions to my former fellow researchers by e-mail. I thank Douglas Anthony, Jan-Patrick Heiß, Alaine Hutson, Matthias Krings, and Brian Larkin for their answers

AHCAL Energy Resolution

The CALICE collaboration has constructed highly granular hadronic and electromagnetic calorimeter prototypes to evaluate technologies for the use in detector systems at a future Linear Collider. The hadron calorimeter uses 7608 small scintillator cells individually read out with silicon photomultipliers. This high granularity opens up the possibility for precise three dimensional shower reconstruction and for software compensation techniques to improve the energy resolution of the detector. We discuss the calibration procedure for the analog hadronic calorimeter and present two software compensation methods based on reconstructed clusters, which were developed with simulations and are applied to hadronic test beam data.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, Linear Collider Workshop 2010 Conference Proceeding

Systolic ejection murmurs and the left ventricular outflow tract in boxer dogs

Turbulence of various genesis in the left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) causes systolic ejection murmurs. The prevalence of murmurs in adult boxer dogs is 50-80%, the majority of which are of low intensity. Some of the murmurs are caused by aortic stenosis (AS), while the origin of the others is unclear. The aim of this thesis was to study the physiology and clinical evaluation of systolic ejection murmurs and their relation to the development of the LVOT in boxers with and without AS. Growing and adult boxer dogs were examined by the standard methods cardiac auscultation, ECG, phonocardiography and echocardiography. Additionally, the complementary methods time-frequency and complexity analyses of heart murmurs and contrast echocardiography were evaluated. Studies on inter-observer variation in cardiac auscultation proved the importance of experience in detection and grading of low intensity ejection murmurs. Excitement of the dogs by exercise or noise stimulation (barking dog and squeaky toy) caused higher murmur grades, longer murmur duration and increased aortic flow velocities. No differences were found between diameters measured at different levels of the LVOT in growing boxers. Contrast echocardiography enhanced Doppler signals, but did not allow evaluation of myocardial blood flow. Using time-frequency analysis, duration of murmur frequency >200 Hz proved useful for differentiation between dogs with mild AS and dogs without. Combining assessment of murmur duration >200 Hz and complexity analysis using the correlation dimension (T2), a sensitivity of 94% and a specificity of 82% for differentiation between dogs with and without AS was achieved. The variability in presence and intensity of low intensity murmurs during growth was high. None of the young dogs developed AS, whereas 3 out of 16 individuals developed mild-moderate aortic insufficiency. Aortic or pulmonic flow velocities did not differ significantly between growing dogs with or without low intensity murmurs. In conclusion, the variability in presence and intensity of low intensity ejection murmurs in boxers is high during growth with no obvious progression. Both in young and adult boxers the murmur grade increased during excitement, which may be due to rapid flow in a comparatively small LVOT that has been suggested for the boxer breed. Experience is important in cardiac auscultation of low intensity murmurs. Therefore, assessment of murmur duration > 200 Hz combined with T2 analysis may be a useful complementary method for diagnosis of cardiovascular function in dogs