How Much State and How Much Market? Comparing Social Housing in Berlin and Vienna

This article examines the effect of two different social housing systems on housing-market characteristics and affordability using a case study of Berlin and Vienna. Despite comparable framework conditions, both cities pursued very different social housing policies. While both cities are currently challenged by growing populations and rising house prices, we show that Vienna is more successful in providing affordable housing as it has created effective institutions to attract and retain private actors in this sector. In Berlin, in contrast, the current crisis reveals the lack of institutional capacity to actively pursue housing policy. We argue that different housing market outcomes can be attributed to fundamental differences in the organisation of social housing provision reflecting divergent state-market relations. While in Berlin social housing has been seen as a provisional measure to correct temporary market imbalances, Vienna’s continuous state participation in the housing market has created a framework of balanced rights and responsibilities for social and private actors to achieve social policy goals. Differences in funding arrangements and institutional embeddedness influence not only housing outcomes but also feedback on the state’s capacity to intervene successfully in housing markets

Transliteration und retrieval : zur Problematik des Auffindens hebräischsprachiger Medien in Online-Katalogen

Anlass für die Konversion hebräischschriftlicher Zeugnisse in ein anderes Schriftsystem ist im Falle von Bibliotheken der bibliographische Nachweis von Materialien in einem zentralen Katalog, der in einer dominanten Schrift geführt wird. Für Bibliotheken im europäischen und anglo-amerikanischen Sprachraum ist das die lateinische. Weltweit gelten und galten im Bibliotheksbereich unterschiedliche Standards für die Umschrift des Hebräischen. Die Verschiedenartigkeit der Transliterationssysteme und mangelnde Information der Nutzer durch die Bibliotheken über den jeweils verwendeten Standard führen zu großer Unsicherheit bei der Formulierung der Suchanfrage im Rahmen einer OPAC-Recherche. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden vor diesem Hintergrund Internetauftritte und Online-Kataloge mehrerer europäischer und amerikanischer Bibliotheken betrachtet, die bedeutende Hebraica-Bestände halten. Die Untersuchung konzentriert sich einerseits auf die Frage nach der Vermittlung des für ein zuverlässiges Retrieval notwendigen Wissens. Weiterhin werden einheitliche Suchanfragen an die verschiedenen Online-Kataloge gerichtet und die Rechercheergebnisse analysiert. Ein Exkurs beschreibt die Konsequenzen der Bearbeitung hebräischsprachiger Medien für den Geschäftsgang in Bibliotheken. Diese Veröffentlichung ist die überarbeitete Fassung einer Masterarbeit im postgradualen Fernstudiengang Master of Arts (Library and Information Science) an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Bibliographical reference in a main catalogue conducted in a dominant script is the reason for transliterating materials written in Hebrew into another script. For libraries in the European and Anglo-American sphere this is the Latin one. Worldwide there are and there always have been different standards in use for the conversion of Hebrew into Latin. The various kinds of transliteration systems and deficient information about applied standards provided by libraries lead to great confusion in formulating a query for an OPAC search. This is the context for the publication at hand which takes a close look at the websites of several European and American libraries that hold important collections of Hebraica. This research focusses on the question whether libraries supply their users with sufficient information that are necessary for reliable retrieval. Furthermore the online-catalogues under consideration are confronted with uniform queries and the recall is analyzed. Another part deals with consequences that Hebrew materials have on the workflow within libraries. This publication is a revised version of a Master Thesis in the Postgraduate Studies of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-University in Berlin

Lessons from Germany: Tenant power in the rental market

The second of our series of reports comparing the English and German housing markets explores the lessons that policymakers in England can learn from Germany – where renting, the dominant tenure, appears to offer both stability and security to its 40-million-plus tenants. The private rented sector (PRS) in England is growing rapidly, in part in response to the increasing unaffordability of home ownership and the declining supply of social housing. There is mounting concern that across a range of indicators it is a poor substitute for both of these main alternatives. Tenants enjoy limited rights, their tenancies are short, and rents – while in the short-term more affordable than buying – are rising faster than incomes, preventing tenants from saving for mortgage deposits or even meeting the everyday costs of living. The PRS does not need to be a poor relation to home ownership or social renting, however, and we can turn our attention to other countries in which the challenges presented by the PRS are managed with more success. This paper, the second of our series comparing the English and German housing markets, explores the lessons policymakers can learn from Germany – a country in which renting is the dominant tenure and which appears able to offer both stability and security to its 40-million-plus tenants. England can learn from Germany in areas of tenancy security, controls on cost, and tenant representation. We recommend greater balance between the rights of a tenant and the rights of a landlord in England through longer tenancies, help with the costs associated with renting (such as deposits and letting fees), and stronger, more formalised representation

German model homes? A comparison of the UK and German housing markets

Can Britain learn from Germany to tackling the housing crisis? A new paper from IPPR finds Germany has higher rates of housebuilding, a much less volatile housing market, and a larger private rented sector than the UK. IPPR looks at why this has happened. Germany has higher rates of housebuilding, a much less volatile housing market, and a larger private rented sector than the UK. This paper, the first of three, explores the reasons for these differences, looking at both supply- and demand-side dimensions. On the supply side: Germany has a more diverse mix of housebuilders, both small and large, who build a wide variety of homes; a broader mix of investors, including build-to-rent; and a planning system that facilitates the release of land and the translation of permissions into completions. On the demand side: Germany has a more conservative mortgage market with greater restrictions on loan-to-value ratios; a tax system that favours long-term property ownership while discouraging speculation; and a combination of longer tenancies and more rent control, which together make private renting an attractive alternative to home ownership. Despite the many strong features of Germany’s housing market and wider policy framework, there remain areas in which policymakers in the UK can learn from Germany’s missteps. While Germany has managed to deliver more affordable homes in the last three decades, its model for delivering them, through the equivalent 20–30-year covenants, has led to a sharp drop in the availability of affordable rented homes. In addition, the private rented sector in Germany can be difficult to access, with lengthy property-search and application procedures, making entry difficult for prospective tenants and impacting on labour market flexibility. While the UK rental market may be too flexible, to the disadvantage of tenants, a full shift towards a German model could be problematic

Path Dependency and the Politics of Socialized Health Care

Rich democracies exhibit vast cross-national and historical variation in the socialization of health care. Yet, cross-national analyses remain relatively rare in the health policy literature, and health care remains relatively neglected in the welfare state literature. We analyze pooled time series models of the public share of total health spending for eighteen rich democracies from 1960 to 2010. Building on path dependency theory, we present a strategy for modeling the relationship between the initial 1960 public share and the current public share. We also examine two contrasting accounts for how the 1960 public share interacts with conventional welfare state predictors: the self-reinforcing hypothesis expecting positive feedbacks and the counteracting hypothesis expecting negative feedbacks. We demonstrate that most of the variation from 1960 to 2010 in the public share can be explained by a country's initial value in 1960. This 1960 value has a large significant effect in models of 1961-2010, and including the 1960 value alters the coefficients of conventional welfare state predictors. To investigate the mechanism whereby prior social policy influences public opinion about current social policy, we use the 2006 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). This analysis confirms that the 1960 values predict individual preferences for government spending on health. Returning to the pooled time series, we demonstrate that the 1960 values interact significantly with several conventional welfare state predictors. Some interactions support the self-reinforcing hypothesis, while others support the counteracting hypothesis. Ultimately, this study illustrates how historical legacies of social policy exert substantial influence on the subsequent politics of social policy

Unraveling a tumor type-specific regulatory core underlying E2F1-mediated epithelial-mesenchymal transition to predict receptor protein signatures

Cancer is a disease of subverted regulatory pathways. In this paper, we reconstruct the regulatory network around E2F, a family of transcription factors whose deregulation has been associated to cancer progression, chemoresistance, invasiveness, and metastasis. We integrate gene expression profiles of cancer cell lines from two E2F1-driven highly aggressive bladder and breast tumors, and use network analysis methods to identify the tumor type-specific core of the network. By combining logic-based network modeling, in vitro experimentation, and gene expression profiles from patient cohorts displaying tumor aggressiveness, we identify and experimentally validate distinctive, tumor type-specific signatures of receptor proteins associated to epithelial-mesenchymal transition in bladder and breast cancer. Our integrative network-based methodology, exemplified in the case of E2F1-induced aggressive tumors, has the potential to support the design of cohort- as well as tumor type-specific treatments and ultimately, to fight metastasis and therapy resistance

In vitro bioactivity of various pure flavonoids in ruminal fermentation, with special reference to methane formation

Polyphenols, like flavonoids, have been investigated when present in intact plants or in extracts as methane mitigating dietary supplements in ruminants. The aim of the present study was to examine pure compounds in a short-term in vitro experiment using the Hohenheim Gas Test method. We focused on the group of the flavonoids and tested which of them had the potential to mitigate methane without negatively affecting ruminal fermentation. Eight flavonoids were tested: epicatechin, luteolin-7-glucoside, quercetin, and isoquercetin in Experiment 1; catechin, gallocatechin, epigallocatechin, and epigallocatechin gallate in Experiment 2. Tannic acid, no flavonoid but a phenolic acid with known methane mitigating properties, served as positive control, and the unsupplemented basal diet as negative control. In both experiments, each of these compounds (including tannic acid) was tested at dosages of 0.5, 5.0, and 50.0 mg/g basal diet dry matter (DM) in four runs each. Gallocatechin, tannic acid, and epigallocatechin gallate (50 mg/g DM) lowered fermentation gas formation and in vitro organic matter digestibility relative to the negative control (Experiment 2). Apart from tannic acid, epicatechin, quercetin, isoquercetin, and luteolin-7-glucoside (5 and 50 mg/g DM) reduced the amount of CH4 produced in relation to total gas produced (Experiment 1). The incubation fluid ammonia concentration was decreased with luteolin-7-glucoside and tannic acid (50 mg/g DM). From the flavonoids tested especially luteolin-7-glucoside seems to have a similar potential as tannic acid to mitigate methane and ammonia formation during ruminal fermentation in vitro, both favourable in environmental respect. These results need to be confirmed in live animals

Attitudinal and socio-structural determinants of cervical cancer screening and HPV vaccination uptake: a quantitative multivariate analysis

Aim: The introduction of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine enables for the first time in the history of cancer prevention the possibility of combating the major cause of a cancer even before its onset. The secondary prevention measure of cervical cancer screening has thus been complemented by a primary prevention measure. The aim of this study is to analyse the determinants of uptake of preventive measures against cervical cancer as a basis for comparing the determinants of screening attendance with those of HPV vaccination attendance. Subject and methods: A population-based representative survey comprising 760 randomly selected women aged 14 to 65 was performed in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Prevention behaviour, attitudes towards cervical cancer screening and HPV vaccination, and knowledge about cervical cancer and HPV were investigated by means of a structured questionnaire. Descriptive analyses and multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify the determinants of screening and HPV vaccine uptake. Results: Attendance both at screening and at HPV vaccination was best predicted by attitudinal factors. Positive connotations of cancer prevention measures and utility expectations, fear of cancer and high subjective risk perception were conducive to attendance at screening and HPV vaccination. Screening attendance was less regular among women of lower socioeconomic status. In contrast, HPV vaccination uptake was higher for young women with lower educational attainment and lower social class. Knowledge did not impact prevention behaviour significantly. There is no trade-off between screening and vaccination attendance; the vast majority of respondents was aware of the necessity of regular screening attendance even when vaccinated against HPV. Conclusions: Uptake rates for existing primary and secondary prevention measures against cervical cancer can be enhanced by fostering perceptions of utility and positive connotations of regular screening and becoming vaccinated against HPV. Elderly women in particular should be encouraged to attend screening by means of a recall system. Given the low overall level of knowledge about cervical cancer and its risk factors, there is a need for education about the necessity and utility of prevention to reach women of all social classes