Belief and practice in the unified Germanies

'Gegen Ende des Mittelalters wurde die Christenheit in Westeuropa mit der protestantischen Reformation konfrontiert. Heute müssen sich die Christen - wiederum in Deutschland - mit einem weiteren kristenträchtigen Phänomen zunehmend vertraut machen: Der prinzipiellen Ablehnung des traditionellen christlichen Glaubens. In diesem Beitrag werden zunächst die in Westdeutschland längerfristig feststellbare Vereinigung von konfessioneller Mitgliedschaft und der Rückgang des Kirchenbesuchs für verschiedene Kohorten beschrieben. Der Zeitraum für diese Untersuchung ist 1953 bis 1992. Der zweite Abschnitt konzentriert sich auf einen Ost-West-Vergleich für die ersten Jahre nach der deutschen Vereinigung. Die Autoren zeigen, daß der Sozialismus in der DDR zu einem außerordentlich starken Rückgang von kirchlicher Partizipation und religiösen Einstellungen geführt hat. Vergleichbar hohe Schwächungen traditioneller Religiösität konnten bisher in keinem anderen Land mit Erhebungsdaten belegt werden. Im dritten Abschnitt werden die Untersuchungen auf alternative Glaubensformen ausgedehnt. Glücksbringer, Wunderheiler, Wahrsager und Horoskope werden immer noch von einem großen Bevölkerungsteil akzeptiert, ohne daß ein grundlegender Ost-West-Unterschied zu beobachten ist. Dies gilt sogar für Befragte in der jüngsten Kohorte. Weitere Analysen befassen sich mit den potentiellen Beziehungen zwischen Glauben an Gott, kirchlicher Partizipation und alternativen Glaubensformen.' (Autorenreferat)'At the end of the Middle Ages, western christianity was confronted with the Protestant Reformation. Today, and again in Germany, modern western christianity may be preparing to confront another major crisis - the rejection of traditional christian belief. The first part of the article focuses on church membership and church attendance in the western parts of Germany. It describes how far 'unchurching' has progressed among the various cohorts. Observation start in 1953 and end in 1992. The second section contains an East-West comparison of recent religious participation and attitudes in the new and old federal states. The authors show that the socialist influences experienced in the former GDR led to an extraordinarily high degree of explicitly unchurched people in Eastern Germany. This result is unparalleled in the other formerly socialist countries for which we have survey data. Finally, alternative forms of belief are investigated. These are beliefs in good luck charms, faith hearlers, fortune tellers, and horoscopes. Such alternative forms of belief apparently still persist in Germany today, irresspective of the East-West differentiation. They can even be found in the youngest cohorts. Further investigations focus on some of the potential relations between christian and alternative beliefs.' (author's abstract)

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

NCRN Meeting Spring 2015: Survey Informatics: The Future of Survey Methodology and Survey Statistics Training in the Academy?

Presentation at the NCRN Meeting Spring 2015NSF Award 1237602 and NSF Award 150724

Životní šance mužů a žen v období transformace :Srovnání České a Slovenské republiky

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