Mathematik, Philosophie und Theologie als dieselben Wissenschaften der einen unendlichen Nichtfassbarkeit

Diese Arbeit ist der Versuch, ausgewählte Aspekte und Komponenten des „Unend-lichkeitsproblems“ zu beleuchten. Dabei soll eine Brücke geschlagen werden zwi-schen der Mathematik, der Philosophie und der Theologie und zwar in der Art und Weise, dass jeweils eine dieser Wissenschaften an jener Stelle unterstützend ein-greift und die Arbeit weiterführt, wo die eigenen fachspezifischen Methoden eines anderen Wissensgebietes nicht mehr greifen und mit ihnen das Problem weder lo-gisch integriert noch gelöst werden kann. In der Mathematik gibt es verschiedenste Ideen zu einer Theorie des Unendlichen. Der erste Teil der Arbeitet beschäftigt sich daher mit der „Lehre des Unendlichen“ in der Arithmetik, bei Georg Cantor und bei Kurt Gödel. Cantors „Schöpfung“ ist die Mengenlehre innerhalb derer er seine „Lehre des Unendlichen“ entwirft. Ein weiterer Grund für die Auseinandersetzung mit ihm ist das „abgründige Gebiet der Selbstbezüglichkeit“. Gödel hingegen steht vor dem Problem der Widerspruchsfreiheit von Systemen. Er veranschaulicht in seinem Unvollständigkeitsbeweis, dass es wahre existierende arithmetische Sätze gibt, die nicht beweisbar sind. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit wird versucht, die Mathematik aus der „Sackgasse“ zu be-freien und sie in eine neue Richtung zu lenken. Dies soll durch die Philosophie des Alain Badiou und seinem Begriff des „Ereignisses“ vollzogen werden. Hierbei wandelt er die mathematische Fragestellung in eine philosophische um. Badiou stellt eine These bezüglich der Identität von Mathematik und Ontologie auf, obwohl er sich bewusst ist, dass diese weder von den Mathematikern noch von den Philosophen gutgeheißen wird. Im dritten Teil wird in einem kurzen Abschnitt versucht eine Parallele zwischen Kurt Gödel und Alain Badiou zu finden und zwar in der Weise als man sich in der Mathematik das Ereignis als etwas vorstellen kann, das kein Weitergehen erlaubt. Gödel hat hierbei zwar nicht das Ereignis, wohl aber den Ereignisort „gefunden“. Daran anschließend steht die Auferstehung Christi im Zentrum des Interesses. Für Paulus ist das Ereignis schlechthin die Auferstehung Christi, die gleichzeitig ein Bruch in der Kontinuität der Geschichte ist. Dieses Ereignis kann niemals bewiesen, sondern „nur“ bezeugt werden

Deriving a holistic cognitive fit model for an optimal visualization of data for management decisions

Research shows that managerial decision making is directly correlated to both, the swift availability, and subsequently the ease of interpretation of the relevant information. Visualizations are already widely used to transform raw data into a more understandable format and to compress the constantly growing amount of information produced. However, research in this area is highly fragmented and results are contradicting. This paper proposes a preliminary model based on an extensive literature review including top current research on cognition theory. Furthermore an early stage validation of this model by experimental research using structural equation modeling is presented. The authors are able to identify task complexity as one of the most important predicting variables for information perception of visual data, however, other influences are significant as well (data density, domain expertise, working memory capacity and subjective visual complexity

Alkoholabhängigkeit im Alter

Ziel der Untersuchung: Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Studie wurde ein Vergleich des Therapieerfolges zwischen älteren und jüngeren Alkoholabhängigen in einem altersgemischten Rehabilitationsprogramm untersucht. Explizites Ziel war es, herauszufinden, ob sich die therapieerfolgsrelevanten Faktoren – gesundheitsbezogene Lebensqualität, personelle Ressourcen und Stressbewältigung – in den jeweiligen Altersgruppen im Zuge des Therapieverlaufs unterschiedlich verändern, um so Aufschluss über die Notwendigkeit speziell gerontologischer Entzugsprogramme zu erhalten. In diesem Sinne soll die Frage beantwortet werden, ob ein Therapieerfolg älterer Teilnehmer auch in altersunabhängigen Interventionen in vergleichbarem Ausmaß wie bei jüngeren erreicht werden kann. Methode: Die Untersuchung konzentrierte sich, in Anlehnung an die aktuelle Forschungsliteratur ausschließlich auf Männer. Insgesamt nahmen 63 Patienten an der gesamten Untersuchung teil, wovon 27 (50 bis 70 Jahre) der Versuchsgruppe und 36 (21 bis 49 Jahre) der Kontrollgruppe angehörten. Um den Therapieerfolg ermitteln zu können, wurden die Patientendaten zu den therapieerfolgsrelevanten Faktoren am Beginn der Therapie, unmittelbar nach dem körperliche Entzug, sowie gegen Ende der Therapie, innerhalb der sechsten Behandlungswoche, erhoben. Zum ersten Erhebungstermin wurde neben einem soziodemografischen Fragebogen sowie dem WST, SF-36, FERUS, BDI und CBI-G auch ein Fragebogen zur Erfassung persönlich wichtiger Problembereiche bei der Abhängigkeitsentstehung und –aufrechterhaltung vorgegeben. Im Zuge der zweiten Erhebung kamen neben den bereits zum ersten Testzeitpunkt vorgelegten Erhebungsverfahren zusätzlich zwei selbst formulierte Fragebögen zur Berücksichtigung verschiedener Problembereiche in der Therapie sowie zur Teilnahme an therapeutischen Angeboten des API zur Anwendung. Ergebnisse: Da sowohl die gesundheitsbezogene Lebensqualität, die personellen Ressourcen als auch die wesentlichsten Stressbewältigungsstrategien im Rahmen der sechswöchigen Rehabilitationstherapie am API in beiden Gruppen verbessert werden konnten, ist von einem allgemeinen Therapieerfolg beider Gruppen auszugehen. Die Steigerung der therapieerfolgsrelevanten Faktoren verlief bis auf einige Tendenzen, die größtenteils zugunsten der VG ausfielen, in beiden Gruppen ähnlich, was darauf schließen lässt, dass im Zuge der Therapie auf beide Gruppen gleichermaßen eingegangen wurde und so ein vergleichbarer Therapieerfolg anzunehmen ist. Konklusion: Die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Studie zeigen zunächst eindeutig die qualifizierte Arbeit, die am API geleistet wird auf, durch welche es nicht nur möglich war auf individuelle Entstehungs- als auch Aufrechterhaltungsfaktoren ausreichend einzugehen, sondern darüber hinaus durch kompetente therapeutische Angebote, sowohl die Lebensqualität, die personellen Ressourcen als auch die Stressbewältigungsfähigkeiten der Patienten zu steigern. Da weder zum ersten noch zum zweiten Erhebungszeitpunkt gravierende Unterschiede zwischen jüngeren und älteren Alkoholabhängigen festgestellt werden konnten, stellt sich nunmehr die Frage, ob Altersunterschiede in therapeutischen Interventionen wirklich einen derart gravierenden Einfluss besitzen wie oftmals in der Literatur behauptet wird. Zusammenfassend ist im Allgemeinen aber anhand der gewonnenen Ergebnisse nicht davon auszugehen, dass eine Notwendigkeit für spezielle gerontologische Rehabilitationsprogramme besteht - viel wichtiger erscheint in diesem Zusammenhang eine kompetente, empathische und vor allem individuelle Betreuung, im Zuge derer, falls nötig auch auf mögliche altersspezifische Determinanten eingegangen wird, wie dies in speziell altersbezogenen Interventionen der Fall ist.Objective of the study: Within the scope of the present research study a comparison of the therapeutic success between younger and older alcohol addicts in a rehabilitation program (varied aged subject group) was carried out. The objective was to detect whether relevant factors concerning therapeutic success – health-related quality of life, personal resources and coping strategies – would change differently in the respective age groups as part of the therapy-progress. The result of this comparison should indicate whether older participants in interventions achieve the same therapeutic success as younger participants independent of age, or whether particular gerontological detox programs are necessary. Approach: Referring to the current research literature, the study is focused on men only. In total, 63 patients participated in the investigation, of which 27 (aged 50 to 70) were part of the test group and 36 (aged 21 to 49) of the control group. To investigate the therapeutic success, patient data concerning relevant factors for therapeutic success were compiled at the beginning of the therapy – immediately after the detoxification – as well as towards the end of the therapy, within the sixth week after the first medical treatment. The first elicitation was composed of a sociodemographic questionnaire, WST, SF-36, FERUS, BDI und CBI-G and a questionnaire related to important personal problem areas in terms of the emergence and the maintenance of addiction. As part of the second elicitation, two self-created questionnaires, one taking account of different problem areas during the therapy and the other examining the participation in the therapeutic offers of the API, were administered. Results: In the course of the six weeks’ rehabilitation therapy at the API, the health-related quality of life, personal resources and the main coping strategies improved in both groups. Thus, a general therapeutic success, encompassing both groups, must be assumed. The improvement of relevant factors related to the therapeutic success proceeded similarly in both groups except some tendencies which mainly benefited the test group. Hence, both groups were treated equally, and this turn resulted in a comparable therapy success. Conclusion: The results of the presented study initially illustrate the high-skilled work accomplished at the API. This level of skills enabled an elaboration of individual factors related to the emergence and the maintenance of addiction. Through qualified therapeutic offers both health-related quality of life, personal resources and coping strategies of the patients could all be improved. As no considerable differences between younger and older alcohol addicts could be ascertained, neither at the time of the first nor second, does the question arise whether age disparity in therapeutic interventions has a verifiably strong impact, as is often claimed in the literature. Finally, by reference to the obtained results, it has to be concluded that there is currently no need for particular gerontological detox programs. In this context, qualified, empathetic and especially individualized care appears much more important. If necessary, an age-specific determination can be elaborated as part of this particular therapy, as it is the case in age-related interventions

Elevated ratio of MMP2/MMP9 activity is associated with poor response to chemotherapy in osteosarcoma

Background: Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are crucially involved in the regulation of multiple stages of cancer progression. Elevated MMP levels have been associated with the development of metastases and poor prognosis in several types of cancer. However, the role of MMPs in osteosarcoma and their prognostic value is still unclear. Available data are conflicting, most likely due to different technical approaches. We hypothesized that in contrast to total mRNA or protein levels frequently analyzed in previous studies the enzymatic activities of MMPs and their inhibitors the tissue inhibitors of matrix metalloproteinases (TIMPs) are closer related to their biological functions. We therefore aimed to evaluate the reliability of different zymography techniques for the quantification of MMP and TIMP activities in osteosarcoma biopsies in order to investigate their distribution, possible regulation and prognostic value. Methods: All analyses were done using cryo-conserved osteosarcoma pretreatment biopsies (n = 18). Gene and protein expression of MMPs and TIMPs were analyzed by RT-qPCR and western blot analysis, respectively. Overall MMP activity was analyzed by in situ zymography, individual MMP activities were analyzed by gelatin zymography. Reverse zymography was used to detect and quantify TIMP activities. Results: Strong overall MMP activities could be detected in osteosarcoma pretreatment biopsies with MMP2 and MMP9 as predominant active MMPs. In contrast to total RNA or protein expression MMP2 and MMP9 activities showed significant quantitative differences between good and poor responders. While MMP9 activity was high in the good responder group and significantly decreased in the poor responder group, MMP2 activity showed a reverse distribution. Likewise, significant differences were detected concerning the activity of TIMPs resulting in a negative correlation of TIMP1 activity with MMP2 activity (p = 0.044) and negative correlations of TIMP2 and TIMP3 with MMP9 activity (p = 0.007 and p = 0.006). Conclusion: In contrast to mRNA or protein levels MMP and TIMP activities showed significant differences between the analyzed good and poor responder groups. A shift from MMP9 to predominant MMP2 activity is associated with poor response to chemotherapy suggesting that the ratio of MMP2/MMP9 activity might be a valuable and easily accessible marker to predict the response to chemotherapy in osteosarcoma

Contrastive Tuning: A Little Help to Make Masked Autoencoders Forget

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) methods, like Masked Autoencoders (MAE), efficiently learn a rich representation of the input. However, for adapting to downstream tasks, they require a sufficient amount of labeled data since their rich features code not only objects but also less relevant image background. In contrast, Instance Discrimination (ID) methods focus on objects. In this work, we study how to combine the efficiency and scalability of MIM with the ability of ID to perform downstream classification in the absence of large amounts of labeled data. To this end, we introduce Masked Autoencoder Contrastive Tuning (MAE-CT), a sequential approach that utilizes the implicit clustering of the Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning (NNCLR) objective to induce abstraction in the topmost layers of a pre-trained MAE. MAE-CT tunes the rich features such that they form semantic clusters of objects without using any labels. Notably, MAE-CT does not rely on hand-crafted augmentations and frequently achieves its best performances while using only minimal augmentations (crop & flip). Further, MAE-CT is compute efficient as it requires at most 10% overhead compared to MAE re-training. Applied to large and huge Vision Transformer (ViT) models, MAE-CT excels over previous self-supervised methods trained on ImageNet in linear probing, k-NN and low-shot classification accuracy as well as in unsupervised clustering accuracy. With ViT-H/16 MAE-CT achieves a new state-of-the-art in linear probing of 82.2%

Help-seeking attitudes and behaviours for mental health problems in adolescents before and during the first COVID-19 school closures in Germany.

AIM Comparing measures of psychological wellbeing and help-seeking in youths before and within the first school closures due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic enables a better understanding of the effects the pandemic has for those seeking professional help for mental health problems. METHODS Data were obtained from the Germany-based ProHEAD school study. Pre-lockdown and lockdown samples (n = 648) were compared regarding pupils' psychological wellbeing, help-seeking attitudes and help-seeking behaviour. RESULTS Participants from the lockdown sample showed greater positive attitudes towards seeking professional help, whereas psychological wellbeing and help-seeking behaviour remained stable. CONCLUSIONS Possible explanations may include an increased public discourse on mental health or self-selection bias for participation during lockdown

Intentions and barriers to help-seeking in adolescents and young adults differing in depression severity: cross-sectional results from a school-based mental health project.

BACKGROUND Mental health problems, such as depression, have a high prevalence in young people. However, the majority of youths suffering from depression do not seek professional help. This study aimed to compare help-seeking behavior, intentions and perceived barriers between youthswith different levels of depressive symptoms. METHODS This cross-sectional study is part of a large-scale, multi-center project. Participants were n = 9509 youths who were recruited in German schools and completed a baseline screening questionnaire. Based on their depressive symptoms, youths were allocated to the following three subgroups: (a) without depressive symptoms, (b) with subclinical symptoms, (c) with clinical symptoms (measured by PHQ-A). Quantitative analyses compared previous help-seeking behavior, help-seeking intentions and perceived barriers (Barriers questionnaire) between these subgroups. An additional exploratory qualitative content analysis examined text answers on other perceived barriers to help-seeking. RESULTS Participants were mostly female (n = 5575, 58.6%) and 12 to 24 years old (M = 15.09, SD 2.37). Participants with different levels of depressive symptoms differed significantly in help-seeking behavior, intentions and perceived barriers. Specifically, participants with clinical depressive symptoms reported more previous help-seeking, but lower intentions to seek help compared to participants without symptoms (all p < 0.05). Participants with subclinical depressive symptoms reported a similar frequency of previous help-seeking, but higher intentions to seek help compared to participants without symptoms (all p < 0.05). Perception of barriers was different across subgroups: participants with clinical and subclinical depressive symptoms perceived the majority of barriers such as stigma, difficulties in accessibility, and family-related barriers as more relevant than participants without depressive symptoms. Across all subgroups, participants frequently mentioned intrapersonal reasons, a high need for autonomy, and a lack of mental health literacy as barriers to help-seeking. CONCLUSIONS Youths with higher levels of depressive symptoms are more reluctant to seek professional help and perceive higher barriers. This underlines the need for effective and low-threshold interventions to tackle barriers, increase help-seeking, and lower depressive symptoms in adolescents and young adults differing in depression severity. TRIAL REGISTRATION DRKS00014685

Conjugation of Native-Like HIV-1 Envelope Trimers onto Liposomes Using EDC/Sulfo-NHS Chemistry: Requirements and Limitations

The display of native-like human immunodeficiency virus type 1 envelope (HIV-1 Env) trimers on liposomes has gained wide attention over the last few years. Currently, available methods have enabled the preparation of Env-liposome conjugates of unprecedented quality. However, these protocols require the Env trimer to be tagged and/or to carry a specific functional group. For this reason, we have investigated N-(3-Dimethylaminopropyl)-N′-ethylcarbodiimide/N-Hydroxysulfosuccinimide (EDC/Sulfo-NHS) chemistry for its potential to covalently conjugate tag-free, non-functionalized native-like Env trimers onto the surface of carboxyl-functionalized liposomes. The preservation of the liposome’s physical integrity and the immunogen’s conformation required a fine-tuned two-step approach based on the controlled use of β-mercaptoethanol. The display of Env trimers was strictly limited to activated liposomes of positive charge, i.e., liposomes with a positive zeta potential that carry amine-reactive Sulfo-NHS esters on their surface. In agreement with that, conjugation was found to be highly ionic strength- and pH-dependent. Overall, we have identified electrostatic pre-concentration (i.e., close proximity between negatively charged Env trimers and positively charged liposomes established through electrostatic attraction) to be crucial for conjugation reactions to proceed. The present study highlights the requirements and limitations of potentially scalable EDC/Sulfo-NHS-based approaches and represents a solid basis for further research into the controlled conjugation of tag-free, non-functionalized native-like Env trimers on the surface of liposomes, and other nanoparticles

Production of He-4 and (4) in Pb-Pb collisions at root(NN)-N-S=2.76 TeV at the LHC

Results on the production of He-4 and (4) nuclei in Pb-Pb collisions at root(NN)-N-S = 2.76 TeV in the rapidity range vertical bar y vertical bar <1, using the ALICE detector, are presented in this paper. The rapidity densities corresponding to 0-10% central events are found to be dN/dy4(He) = (0.8 +/- 0.4 (stat) +/- 0.3 (syst)) x 10(-6) and dN/dy4 = (1.1 +/- 0.4 (stat) +/- 0.2 (syst)) x 10(-6), respectively. This is in agreement with the statistical thermal model expectation assuming the same chemical freeze-out temperature (T-chem = 156 MeV) as for light hadrons. The measured ratio of (4)/He-4 is 1.4 +/- 0.8 (stat) +/- 0.5 (syst). (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe