Dialogue-oriented product design: inventive - cooperative - sustainable

Seit einigen Jahren befinden wir uns in einem wirtschaftlichen Wandlungsprozess, der nicht nur die Unternehmen, sondern auch die Kunden betrifft. Zahlreiche Veränderungen drängen die Betriebe dazu, ihre bisherigen Strategien zu überdenken und neue Pfade zu beschreiten, damit die Neuorientierung unterstützt und die Überlebensfähigkeit des Unternehmens gesichert werden kann. So hat auf der Nachfrageseite die zunehmend individuelle Ausrichtung der Kunden dazu geführt, dass Massenartikel mehr und mehr ins Hintertreffen gelangen. Die Konsumenten treten als individuelle Käufer auf, die ihre persönlichen Vorstellungen verwirklicht haben wollen. Folglich haben klassische Einheitsprodukte zunehmend kaum mehr eine Chance langfristig am Markt zu bestehen. Es scheint wichtig dass sie sich durch neuartige Ideen auf die Wünsche der Kunden anpassen. Es findet ein zunehmender Wettbewerb um die Sicherung noch nicht erschlossener Marktanteile statt. Überdies kommt es zu einem harten Verdrängungswettbewerb um bestehende Märkte. Dies könnte durch einen zunehmenden Wunsch an Individualisierung wie auch durch ständige Neuerungen in den Bereichen des Privatkonsums und des Investitionsgüterbereichs begründet sein. Letztlich trägt die Globalisierung mit dazu bei, dass sich Unternehmen durch neue Formen der Innovation stets weiterentwickeln müssen.For several years, we are in a period of transition, which does not only the company, but also the customers concerns. Numerous variations urge Companies to rethink their existing strategies and to explore new paths so the orientation and supports the viability of the company can be saved. Thus, on the demand side, the increasing alignment of individual customers led to mass products get more and more behind. consumers appear as individual buyers who want to have implemented their own ideas. Consequently, classical unity products have increasingly little chance long term to survive in the market. It seems important that they be produced by new ideas to the wishes Adjust the customers. There is an increasing competition for the control yet unexplored market shares held. Moreover, there is a cutthroat competition to existing markets. This could be due to an increasing desire for individualization be justified as well as with innovations in the areas of private consumption and investment goods industry. Ultimately, economic globalization on with this that companies always need to develop new forms of innovation

‘Money spoils the medicine’

In this article, I use classical anthropological and sociological theory on exchange to explain the robustness of the cultural economy of healing in Northern Ghana. While many scholars have argued that health care in Africa should be understood through the lens of neoliberal marketization, ethnographic research among Mamprusi healers shows that practices of traditional healing are firmly embedded in a cultural system of exchange. Although confronted with an expanding monetary economy, the healers adhere to the local credo that ‘money spoils the medicine’. This alludes to an approach to healing characterized by a kind of reciprocity that reflects (post-)Maussian principles of gift exchange. Drawing on these principles, I propose to complement our understanding of exchange with the concept of ‘moral monies’. As peculiar monetary (counter)gifts, these serve as instruments to reconcile contemporary monetary needs with the sociocultural, moral, and historical institutions in which traditional health care is rooted

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationPancreatic cancer remains one of the poorest prognoses in medicine, with limited treatment options and 5-year patient survival of only ~7%. Activating mutations in the Kras proto-oncogene (KrasG12D) are nearly ubiquitous in human pancreatic cancer and are sufficient to initiate precancerous pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PanINs) when expressed in adult acinar cells of mice. KrasG12D-driven PanINs normally take months to form, which lead to the hypothesis that acinar differentiation determinants may have an inhibitory effect on PanIN formation and subsequent cancer initiation. While targeted drugs that promote cell differentiation are curative in blood cancers like acute promyelocytic leukemia, there is currently minimal evidence suggesting that cell differentiation could play a role in limiting or stopping solid tumor growth. This dissertation aims to test whether loss of acinar differentiation, mediated through the transcription factor Ptf1a, is necessary and/or sufficient to initiate the early stages of pancreatic cancer. Using mouse genetics, we demonstrate that loss of Ptf1a alone is sufficient to promote acinar-to-ductal reprogramming and a cancer-like gene expression profile that is conducive to inflammation and Kras-dependency. As a result, Ptf1a-deficient acinar cells are rapidly transformed into PanINs in the presence of oncogenic KrasG12D. Consistent with PanINs acting as precursor lesions to invasive pancreatic cancer, we demonstrate that loss of Ptf1a allows for rapid progression to carcinoma in situ and mortality from invasive pancreatic cancer in an established mouse model of disease. These data confirm that loss of acinar cell identity hastens tumor development independently of canonical tumor suppressor loss. In contrast, a novel mouse line that sustains Ptf1a expression during pancreatic cancer initiation eliminates formation of KrasG12D-driven precancerous PanINs. Perhaps most strikingly, reintroduction of Ptf1a into established precancerous PanINs reverts them to primitive acinar cells. Our findings therefore suggest that loss of acinar cell differentiation is required for pancreatic cancer origination and progression. This dissertation is among the first studies demonstrating that a cell differentiation program can prevent and reverse premalignant solid tumor cells in vivo and thus introduces a novel paradigm for solid tumor prevention and treatment

Autoequivalences of Blow-Ups of Minimal Surfaces

Let X be the blow-up of the projective plane in a finite set of points in very general position. We show that X has only standard autoequivalences, no nontrivial Fourier-Mukai partners, and admits no spherical objects. Further, we show that the same result holds if X is a blow-up of finitely many points in a minimal surface of nonnegative Kodaira dimension which contains no (-2)-curves. Independently, we characterize spherical objects on blow-ups of minimal surfaces of positive Kodaira dimension.Comment: 9 page

On proper splinters in positive characteristic

While the splinter property is a local property for Noetherian schemes in characteristic zero, Bhatt observed that it imposes strong conditions on the global geometry of proper schemes in positive characteristic. We show that if a proper scheme over a field of positive characteristic is a splinter, then its Nori fundamental group is trivial and its Kodaira dimension is negative. In another direction, Bhatt also showed that any splinter in positive characteristic is a derived splinter. We ask whether the splinter property is a derived-invariant for smooth projective varieties in positive characteristic and give a positive answer for varieties with big anticanonical divisor. For that purpose, we introduce the notion of O-equivalence and show that the derived splinter property for pseudo-rational excellent schemes of finite type and separated over a fixed Noetherian base is preserved under O-equivalence. Finally, we show that global F-regularity is a derived-invariant for smooth projective varieties in positive characteristic.Comment: 33 page

Default Risk and Debt Recovery Strategies of Microfinance Institutions: A Comparative Study of MFIS in Ghana

The objective of this research is to identify and compare the strategies used by SIL and PCSL[1] to minimise the risk of loan default and to recover debt. It also evaluates the effectiveness of the debt recovery strategies. The data was collected through questionnaire administered to the management and staff of both institutions in addition to information obtained from their financial statements. The percentage of non-performing loans to the total loan portfolio of both institutions from 2008-2010 was compared to the industry figures. The findings were that PCSL’s non-performing loans ratio was below the industry average. There was no difference between the industry’s average and SIL’s non-performing loans ratio. The research concluded that the debt recovery strategies of PCSL are comparatively better than strategies adopted by SIL. Key words: Non-performing loans, Debt recovery, MFIs, Ghana. [1] The decision of the researchers based on the understanding with the MFIs involved in the study is to use their abbreviated names in publications.  However, their full names will be made available upon request to the authors through their email addresses

Der Einsatz von Videografie zur Stärkung der Beobachtungskompetenz angehender Lehrkräfte im Berufsfeld Gesundheit. Ergebnisse eines Pilotprojektes

Es liegt eine korrigierte Version vom 03.04.2020 vor, s. Link unter "URL