Intelligent Data Networking for the Earth System Science Community

Earth system science (ESS) research is generally very data intense. To enable detailed discovery and transparent access of the data stored in heterogeneous and organisationally separated data centres common data and metadata community interfaces are needed. This paper describes the development of a coherent data discovery and data access infrastructure for the ESS community in Germany. To comprehensively and consistently describe the characteristics of geographic data, required for their discovery (discovery metadata) and for their usage (use metadata) the ISO standard 19115 is adopted. Webservice technology is used to hide the details of heterogeneous data access mechanisms and preprocessing implementations. The commitment to international standards and the modular character of the approach facilitates the expandability of the infrastructure as well as the interoperability with international partners and other communities

Statistics of Heat Transfer in Mesoscopic Circuits

A method to calculate the statistics of energy exchange between quantum systems is presented. The generating function of this statistics is expressed through a Keldysh path integral. The method is first applied to the problem of heat dissipation from a biased mesoscopic conductor into the adjacent reservoirs. We then consider energy dissipation in an electrical circuit around a mesoscopic conductor. We derive the conditions under which measurements of the fluctuations of heat dissipation can be used to investigate higher order cumulants of the charge counting statistics of a mesoscopic conductor.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

The influence of expertise on brain activation of the action observation network during anticipation of tennis and volleyball serves

In many daily activities, and especially in sport, it is necessary to predict the effects of others' actions in order to initiate appropriate responses. Recently, researchers have suggested that the action-observation network (AON) including the cerebellum plays an essential role during such anticipation, particularly in sport expert performers. In the present study, we examined the influence of task-specific expertise on the AON by investigating differences between two expert groups trained in different sports while anticipating action effects. Altogether, 15 tennis and 16 volleyball experts anticipated the direction of observed tennis and volleyball serves while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The expert group in each sport acted as novice controls in the other sport with which they had only little experience. When contrasting anticipation in both expertise conditions with the corresponding untrained sport, a stronger activation of AON areas (SPL, SMA), and particularly of cerebellar structures, was observed. Furthermore, the neural activation within the cerebellum and the SPL was linearly correlated with participant's anticipation performance, irrespective of the specific expertise. For the SPL, this relationship also holds when an expert performs a domain-specific anticipation task. Notably, the stronger activation of the cerebellum as well as of the SMA and the SPL in the expertise conditions suggests that experts rely on their more fine-tuned perceptual-motor representations that have improved during years of training when anticipating the effects of others' actions in their preferred sport. The association of activation within the SPL and the cerebellum with the task achievement suggests that these areas are the predominant brain sites involved in fast motor predictions. The SPL reflects the processing of domain-specific contextual information and the cerebellum the usage of a predictive internal model to solve the anticipation task. © 2014 Balser, Lorey, Pilgramm, Naumann, Kindermann, Stark, Zentgraf, Williams and Munzert

The spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid

In contrast to the well known Fermi liquid theory of three dimensions, interacting one-dimensional and quasi one-dimensional systems of fermions are described at low energy by an effective theory known as Luttinger liquid theory. This theory is expressed in terms of collective many-body excitations that show exotic behavior such as spin-charge separation. Luttinger liquid theory is commonly applied on the premise that "low energy" describes both the spin and charge sectors. However, when the interactions in the system are very strong, as they typically are at low particle densities, the ratio of spin to charge energy may become exponentially small. It is then possible at very low temperatures for the energy to be low compared to the characteristic charge energy, but still high compared to the characteristic spin energy. This energy window of near ground-state charge degrees of freedom, but highly thermally excited spin degrees of freedom is called a spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid. The spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid exhibits a higher degree universality than the Luttinger liquid and its properties are qualitatively distinct. In this colloquium I detail some of the recent theoretical developments in the field and describe experimental indications of such a regime in gated semiconductor quantum wires.Comment: 21 pages, 18 figures. Updated references, corrected typo in Eq.(20) in journal versio

Erleben und Verhalten unter Stress in Abhängigkeit von der kardialen Sensibilität

Stresssituationen lösen kardiovaskuläre Reaktionen aus. Generell sind Individuen in der Lage diese kardiovaskulären Prozesse wahrzunehmen, was man als kardiale Sensibilität bezeichnet. Allerdings existieren deutliche interindividuelle Unterschiede in dem Ausmaß der kardialen Sensibilität. Theorien zu Emotionen, kognitiver Leistung und Coping (Stressbewältigung) sowie empirische Befunde legen nahe, dass interindividuelle Unterschiede in der kardialen Sensibilität die kognitiv-behaviourale Stressreaktion und die Aufmerksamkeitsallokation gegenüber Stressoren beeinflussen könnte. Daher war es Ziel der aktuellen Studien den Einfluss der kardialen Sensibilität auf das emotionale Stresserleben, die kognitive Leistung und das Coping zu untersuchen. Die Probanden wurde mit Hilfe eines Tests zur Erfassung der kardialen Sensibilität in Probanden mit hoher versus niedriger kardialer Sensibilität eingeteilt. Anschließend wurde Stress in Studie 1 und 2 durch mentale Stressoren induziert und das emotionale Erleben mittels Fragebögen erhoben. Zudem wurde in Studie 2 die kognitive Leistung durch Anzahl der falschen Reaktionen, der richtigen Reaktionen, der Auslassungen sowie dem Median der Reaktionszeit in einem computerbasierten Test erhoben. In Studie 3 wurde die Aufmerksamkeitsallokation gegenüber Stressoren in einem computerbasierten Paradigma erhoben. Es wurde die initiale Aufmerksamkeitsallokation und die Aufmerksamkeitsallokation im Verlauf erhoben. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass kardiale Sensibilität das emotionale Stresserleben intensivierte. Zudem zeigten sich positive Zusammenhänge zwischen kardialer Sensibilität und der Fehleranzahl sowie zwischen kardialer Sensibilität und schnelleren Reaktionen. Des weiteren ging hohe kardiale Sensibilität initial mit einer Aufmerksamkeitszuwendung zu Stressoren einher, jedoch mit einer Aufmerksamkeitsabwendung von Stressoren im Verlauf. Niedrige kardiale Sensibilität hatte hingegen keinen Effekt auf die Aufmerksamkeitsallokation gegenüber Stressoren. Insgesamt zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass hohe kardiale Sensibilität das Stresserleben intensiviert, die kognitive Leistung beeinträchtigt und mit einem vigilant-vermeidenden Coping unter Stress einhergeht. Damit modifizieren die Ergebnisse bisherige Stresstheorien, indem sie die Bedeutung der kardialen Sensibilität für die emotional-behaviourale Stressreaktion und für Copingprozesse aufzeigen. Darüber hinaus fügen die aktuellen Ergebnisse dem multidimensionalen Konstrukt „Stress“ eine weitere Dimension, die Interozeption, also die Wahrnehmung somatoviszeraler Prozesse, hinzu