Making “healthy” families: the biomedicalization of kin marriage in contemporary Turkey

This thesis focuses on the impact of reproductive genetic health services on the making of “healthy” families in Turkey by exploring how kin marriage is being conceptualized, managed, and negotiated as a genetic risk factor and reproductive health concern within intersecting biomedical and genetic spaces in contemporary Turkey. It asks how notions of “healthy” reproduction and “healthy” family making inform the health policies, discourses and practices surrounding the biomedical management of kin marriage, and how couples practicing kin marriage respond to and negotiate concepts of “risky reproduction” and “genetic risk” in their experiences with genetic services. Although kin marriages as close as first cousin marriage are legally accepted and comparatively frequent in Turkey, these marriage patterns have long occupied a contested position within Turkey’s society. Modernist nationalist discourse depicted kin marriages as a remnant of the Ottoman past signifying the lingering presence of internal “non-modernity”, “traditionalism” and “Oriental” otherness. These existing legacies of otherization and stigmatization of kin marriage have gained a new biomedical quality with the emerging re-conceptualization of kin marriage as a reproductive health problem following the spread and routinization of reproductive genetic health services in Turkey from the 1980s onwards. This “biomedicalization” (Clarke et al. 2003) of kin marriage has shifted the question of how future citizens should be brought up in a socially and politically desirable familial environment to the question of how these future citizens should be conceived and born in the first place. Based on a critical reading of relevant government issued texts on reproductive health, family making and kin marriage, 19 qualitative interviews with medico-genetic professionals as well as 18 qualitative interviews with lay participants practicing kin marriage, and observations during a two-and-a-half months stay at a public genetics clinic in Istanbul, this thesis explores the (bio)political implications of this biomedicalization process

Investigating pre-service biology teachers’ diagnostic competences with a video-based assessment tool

In order to be able to recognize and cope with critical situations of teaching and learning, teachers need diagnostic competences, which should already be fostered in teacher education at university. Diagnostic competences can be defined as teachers’ dispositions enabling them to apply their knowledge in diagnostic activities according to professional standards to collect and interpret data accurately in order to make appropriate decisions. In this definition, three components of diagnostic competences become apparent: the professional knowledge base, diagnostic activities, and diagnostic accuracy. The professional knowledge base consists of the facets pedagogical-psychological knowledge (PK), content knowledge (CK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Pre-service teachers have to be able to apply knowledge in diagnostic contexts that are real or close to everyday life by using diagnostic activities. Diagnostic activities describe those activities that teachers execute to generate and evaluate data in order to produce a diagnosis. Additionally, their diagnosis has to meet qualitative demands in terms of diagnostic accuracy, which describes the adequacy of a person’s diagnosis in terms of objective criteria. It has not yet been systematically investigated how the components of diagnostic competences are interrelated. Furthermore, there is a growing debate about how to foster knowledge development in higher education. The investigation of different instructional approaches of knowledge presentation (e.g., by a lecturer, via texts, via video-based tools) can be connected to this debate. With regard to the demand to investigate professional knowledge as well as diagnostic activities using real-life diagnostic contexts, video-based tools are considered promising. Video-based tools can provide an authentic representation of the subject-specific professional everyday life of teachers and their tasks. That makes it possible to measure and promote specific components of diagnostic competences in a situated way. For biology teacher education, there is a lack of tools in which subject-specific relevant situations from the biology classroom are the subject of diagnosis. To close this gap, the video-based assessment tool DiKoBi Assess was developed in the project COSIMA (Facilitating diagnostic competences in simulation-based learning environments in higher education), which focused on the facilitation of professional knowledge and diagnostic competences of biology teachers and was funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation, NE-1196/8-1). In DiKoBi Assess (German acronym for diagnostic competences of biology teachers in biology classrooms), biology-specific challenges of different classroom situations have to be diagnosed with regard to dimensions of subject-specific instructional quality (i.e., level of students’ cognitive activities and creation of situational interest, dealing with (specific) student ideas and errors, use of technical language, use of experiments, use of models, and conceptual instruction). Overall, the present dissertation had three aims: (1) to validate the video-based tool DiKoBi Assess with respect to the integrated biology-specific challenges, the tasks used, and the construct of diagnostic activities (i.e., the activities generating evidence, evaluating evidence, and drawing conclusions) used for analysis. The validation process is completed by comparing the construct of diagnostic activities with the construct of professional vision (regarding the included aspects description, explanation, and prediction) established in video-based teacher research. Further aims were (2) the investigation of the relationships between the three components that constitute diagnostic competences, and (3) the analysis of the effects of different types of instructional support on professional knowledge as one component of diagnostic competences. The three aims were addressed in the first funding phase of the COSIMA project. Following a preliminary study with five in-service biology teachers, in which the validity of the video-based tool was tested, two main studies with pre-service biology teachers took place. Data was collected in both Study 1 (N = 90 pre-service teachers) and Study 2 (N = 103 pre-service teachers) in a pre-post design. In both studies, professional knowledge was assessed with paper-pencil tests, diagnostic activities and diagnostic accuracy were assessed with the video-based tool DiKoBi Assess. The validation of DiKoBi Assess showed that the embedded biology-specific classroom situations were perceived as authentic, that biology-specific challenges in the respective classroom situations were diagnosable by in-service biology teachers, and that the integrated tasks triggered specifically the three targeted diagnostic activities generating evidence, evaluating evidence, and drawing conclusions. Thus, with DiKoBi Assess, specific diagnostic activities can be triggered and measured. Moreover, as a result of comparing the constructs diagnostic activities and professional vision, it was possible to identify and describe categories relevant for diagnosing the biology-specific classroom situations presented in DiKoBi Assess. The identified categories could then be used for analysis in the subsequent main studies. The evaluation of the two main studies showed that especially PCK was important for the application of the diagnostic activities and for diagnostic accuracy. In addition, a relationship between PK and diagnostic activities was found. Both main studies also indicated an impact of the work with DiKoBi Assess on the development of PCK. Furthermore, the use of the video-based tool in combination with instructional support provided by a lecturer can be considered effective. While for the development of CK, a non-integrated instruction might be beneficial, PCK benefited slightly more from the integrated instruction of the knowledge facets. However, the results suggest that diagnosing instructional quality is more effective for knowledge development than instructional approaches such as text interventions, but that in terms of PCK development, for example, greater linking of knowledge facets may also be advisable when instructing curricular content. Overall, it can be concluded that DiKoBi Assess is a valid measurement instrument for studies on diagnostic competences of pre-service biology teachers. Furthermore, the results of this dissertation suggest that working with DiKoBi Assess and diagnosing instructional quality can promote subject-specific knowledge (PCK), which in turn is a critical component of biology teachers’ diagnostic competences and therefore requires explicit support. Existing instructional methods of teacher education, in which knowledge acquisition is promoted via texts or lectures, should therefore be enriched with practice-oriented examples. This can be done via video-based tools that could be conducive to the development and stronger interlocking of the more practice-oriented knowledge facets PCK and PK. In addition, such tools can also be beneficial to address the knowledge facets in an interrelated way and to enhance linking between the knowledge facets. However, explicit specialized seminars addressing subject content still seem useful for developing a sound CK base

NILM techniques for intelligent home energy management and ambient assisted living: a review

The ongoing deployment of smart meters and different commercial devices has made electricity disaggregation feasible in buildings and households, based on a single measure of the current and, sometimes, of the voltage. Energy disaggregation is intended to separate the total power consumption into specific appliance loads, which can be achieved by applying Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) techniques with a minimum invasion of privacy. NILM techniques are becoming more and more widespread in recent years, as a consequence of the interest companies and consumers have in efficient energy consumption and management. This work presents a detailed review of NILM methods, focusing particularly on recent proposals and their applications, particularly in the areas of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), where the ability to determine the on/off status of certain devices can provide key information for making further decisions. As well as complementing previous reviews on the NILM field and providing a discussion of the applications of NILM in HEMS and AAL, this paper provides guidelines for future research in these topics.Agência financiadora: Programa Operacional Portugal 2020 and Programa Operacional Regional do Algarve 01/SAICT/2018/39578 Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through IDMEC, under LAETA: SFRH/BSAB/142998/2018 SFRH/BSAB/142997/2018 UID/EMS/50022/2019 Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain: SBPLY/17/180501/000392 Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (SOC-PLC project): TEC2015-64835-C3-2-R MINECO/FEDERinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

O PIBID e a diversidade de crenças, raças e etnias na escola, uma análise discursiva

Anais do II Seminário Seminário Estadual PIBID do Paraná: tecendo saberes / organizado por Dulcyene Maria Ribeiro e Catarina Costa Fernandes — Foz do Iguaçu: Unioeste; Unila, 2014A escola pública como uma instituição de ensino recebe uma grande quantidade de público com diferentes realidades e com diferentes valores, considerando essa realidade é necessário promover uma igualdade de valores dentro da sala de aula. Então o PIBID pode ser uma arma da igualdade e os bolsistas acadêmicos do projeto, podem fugir da mesmice da maioria das aulas de geografia na escola pública e promover uma discussão para garantir a igualdade. Esta discussão deve ser contínua e muito bem embasada. É preciso trabalhar com continuamente, instrumentalizado com múltiplas ferramentas e esgotar todas as vias que abordem os temas ligados a diversidade de crenças, a igualdade lutar e por fim a qualquer tipo de violência por crença, raça, opção, etc. Diante desses fatos o objetivo deste trabalho e promover uma discussão que venha tornas as diferenças comuns a nossos olho

Special values of zeta functions and areas of triangles

In this snapshot we give a glimpse of the interplay of special values of zeta functions and volumes of triangles. Special values of zeta functions and their generalizations arise in the computation of volumes of moduli spaces (for example of Abelian varieties) and their universal spaces

The adrenal gland of the African buffalo, Syncerus caffer: A light and electron microscopic study

Although the histology of the adrenal gland of many mammals, particularly domestic animals, is known, the histology of that of the African buffalo, Syncerus caffer, has not been described previously. Tissue from seven male and female adult buffalo was processed for light and electron microscopy. The gland is surrounded by a connective tissue capsule which contains smooth muscle fibres. The cortex of the gland is divided into three distinct zones with the cells of the outer zone being arranged in arcades rather than in glomeruli. The cells of this zona arcuata and of the outer region of the fasciculata have features typical of steroid-producing cells. The inner part of the fasciculata is a broad, less vacuolated and more intensely stained region than the outer region. Cells of the zona reticularis are arranged in freely anastomosing cords and are less vacuolated than the arcuata and the outer part of the fasciculata. The medulla is characterized by two distinct regions: an outer region of cells with granules of varying electron density which do not stain specifically with the Masson-Fontana technique and an inner zone of cells containing intensely electron dense granules which are chromaffin positive. These cells are adrenaline- and noradrenaline-secreting cells, respectively. The structure of the gland is thus typical of that of other mammals

Wave packet evolution in non-Hermitian quantum systems

The quantum evolution of the Wigner function for Gaussian wave packets generated by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian is investigated. In the semiclassical limit $\hbar\to 0$ this yields the non-Hermitian analog of the Ehrenfest theorem for the dynamics of observable expectation values. The lack of Hermiticity reveals the importance of the complex structure on the classical phase space: The resulting equations of motion are coupled to an equation of motion for the phase space metric---a phenomenon having no analog in Hermitian theories.Comment: Example added, references updated, 4 pages, 2 figure