Umweltauswirkungen von Arzneimitteln - Bestandsaufnhame und Reformbedarf

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Explaining the Constitutional Integration and Resurgence of Traditional Political Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Social scientists have recently observed a “resurgence” of traditional political institutions on the constitutional level in Sub-Sahara Africa. Yet, the scope and causes of the resurgence remain unclear. We base our analysis on original data on the degree of constitutional integration of traditional institutions and on their constitutional resurgence since 1990 in 45 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. We test six theoretical explanations for constitutionalization: former colonial rule, democratization, state capacity, economic development, foreign aid and settlement patterns. First, we verify the broad resurgence of traditional political institutions on a constitutional level. Second, our analysis suggests that, particularly in former British colonies, traditional leaders were able to translate the arrangements of British colonial rule as well as the advantages of a country’s deconcentrated settlement pattern into greater constitutional status. Third, settlement patterns proved important for traditional leaders to gain or increase constitutional status – leading to a constitutional resurgence of traditional institutions

Reformansätze für eine praktikable, aber lenkungstaugliche Niederschlagswasserabgabe

In der gegenwärtigen Ausgestaltung hat die Abgabe auf Niederschlagswasser, die neben der Abgabe auf Schmutzwasser sowie für Kleineinleitungen im Abwasserabgabengesetz geregelt ist, durch lenkungsferne Bemessungsgrundlagen und weitreichende landesrechtliche Ausnahmeregelungen kaum nennenswerte Anreizwirkungen zur Reduktion von Gewässerbelastungen. Aufgrund der gewässergütepolitischen Relevanz von Niederschlagswassereinleitungen und der europäischen Grundentscheidung zu Kostendeckung bei Wasserdienstleistungen gilt es daher, im Rahmen einer angestrebten Reform der Abwasserabgabe auch dieses Teilinstrument lenkungswirksam zu effektivieren. Hierzu stehen dem Gesetzgeber einerseits eine Umstellung der Bemessungsgrundlage auf den Flächenmaßstab sowie anderseits die bundeseinheitliche Neuregelung der Befreiungstatbestände als wirkungsvolle Stellschrauben zur Verfügung. Sofern davon Gebrauch gemacht wird, kann eine weiterhin praktikable Niederschlagswasserabgabe Anreize für einen effektiven Gewässerschutz setzen

Iconicity in child reports. Does gesture-speech integration of preschoolersreally differ from adults?

Abramov O, Kopp S, Kern F, Rohlfing K, Mertens U, Németh A. Iconicity in child reports. Does gesture-speech integration of preschoolersreally differ from adults? Presented at the The 12thInternational Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature, Lund, Sweden

Towards a Computational Model of Child Gesture-Speech Production. How information is spread across modalities in pre-school children

Abramov O, Kopp S, Németh A, Kern F, Mertens U, Rohlfing K. Towards a Computational Model of Child Gesture-Speech Production. How information is spread across modalities in pre-school children. In: Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft e.V., ed. KogWis2018: Computational Approaches to Cognitive Science. 2018.Previous work by [1] studied gesture-speech interaction in adults. [1] focussed on temporal and semantic coordination of gesture and speech and found that while adult speech is mostly coordinated (or redundant) with gestures, semantic coordination increases the temporal synchrony. These observations do not necessarily hold for children (in particular with respect to iconic gestures, see [2]), where the speech and gesture systems are still under development. We studied the semantic and temporal coordination of speech and gesture in 4-year old children using a corpus of 40 children producing action descriptions in task oriented dialogues. In particular, we examined what kinds of information are transmitted verbally vs. non-verbally and how they are related. To account for this, we extended the semantic features (SFs) developed in [3] for object descriptions in order to include the semantics of actions. We coded the SFs on the children’s speech and gestures separately using video data. In our presentation, we will focus on the quantitative distribution of SFs across gesture and speech. Our results indicate that speech and gestures of 4-year olds are less integrated than those of the adults, although there is a large variability among the children. We will discuss the results with respect to the cognitive processes (e.g., visual memory, language) underlying children’s abilities at this stage of development. Our work paves the way for the cognitive architecture of speech-gesture interaction in preschoolers which to our knowledge is missing so far

Biomarkers in Liquid Biopsies for Prediction of Early Liver Metastases in Pancreatic Cancer

Individualized diagnostics approaches in modern cancer therapy require predictive and prognostic biomarkers that are easily accessible and stratify patients for optimal and individualized treatment. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is still a life-threatening disease mainly because of its late diagnosis in advanced stages or rapid progress even in patients with curative resection of the primary tumor. Moreover, patients with liver metastases exhibit an even worse prognosis. Hence, this retrospective multi-center study aims to identify biomarkers in perioperative serum of PDAC patients predicting early liver metastasis. A highly sensitive biomarker analysis was performed using two different methodological approaches. Olink® analysis, which was also used to validate LEGENDplexTM results, identified significant differences in proteins involved in chemotaxis and migration of immune cells as well as cell growth in serum of patients with early versus late onset of liver metastasis. Further studies with larger cohorts are required to validate these findings for clinical translation