The legitimizing role of the leader Konrad Adenauer, 1949-1976

In dem Beitrag geht es um das wechselnde Führungsimage Adenauers angesichts von Meinungsumfragen des Instituts für Demoskopie zwischen 1949 und 1976. Die Führungsrolle Adenauers wird in Beziehung gesetzt zur Legitimität der BRD in den Augen der breiten Öffentlichkeit unter vorläufiger Außerachtlassung anderer Aspekte der Legitimität. Es werden drei Kurven der öffentlichen Meinung dargestellt: (1) die Anerkennung von Adenauers genereller Politik; (2) die Stimmen für seine Partei; (3) sein Image als historische Figur, das erst nach seiner Amtsniederlegung und seinem Tod richtig gewachsen ist. Die nachträgliche öffentliche Einschätzung seiner Führungsposition in den Jahren 1968 und 1975 bringen seine Führerrolle klar in Zusammenhang mit der Legitimität der inneren Ordnung und der äußeren Gestalt des Systems. Die Beweisstücke werden schließlich verschiedenen Hypothesen von Legitimitätsrollen von Führern gegenübergestellt: Legitimität wird geschaffen wenn (1) die meisten Leute denken, sie hätten es nie besser gehabt, (2) gemäßigte Parteien sich in ständigen Wettbewerb begeben und sich ein stabiles Parteiensystem entwickelt und (3) wenn ein Führer es fertig bringt, über einige Jahre lang 'am Ruder' zu bleiben, und ihm gleichzeitig nachgesagt wird, bedeutende nationale Probleme in Angriff genommen und gelöst zu haben. (KWübers.)'This is an examination of the changing leadership image of Adenauer in the light of Institut für Demoskopie polls between 1949 und 1976. It seeks to relate the leadership role to the legitimacy of the Federal Republic in the eyes of the mass public, leaving aside other aspects of legitimacy for the time being. Three public opinion curves are plotted: Adenauer's general policy approval, the vote for his party, and his image as an historical figure which grew especially after he left office and after his demise. The posthumous public assessments of his leadership in 1968 and 1975 clearly relate his leadership to the legitimacy of the internal order and external stature of the system. These bits and pieces of evidence, finally, are contrasted with various hypotheses of legitimacy roles of leaders. Legitimacy is created when a) most people feel they never had it better; b) moderate parties engage in recurrent competition and a stable party system emerges; or c) when a leader manages to stay at the helm for a long series of years and, at the same time, is perceived to have tackled and solved major national problems.' (author's abstract

Oligo kernels for datamining on biological sequences: a case study on prokaryotic translation initiation sites

BACKGROUND: Kernel-based learning algorithms are among the most advanced machine learning methods and have been successfully applied to a variety of sequence classification tasks within the field of bioinformatics. Conventional kernels utilized so far do not provide an easy interpretation of the learnt representations in terms of positional and compositional variability of the underlying biological signals. RESULTS: We propose a kernel-based approach to datamining on biological sequences. With our method it is possible to model and analyze positional variability of oligomers of any length in a natural way. On one hand this is achieved by mapping the sequences to an intuitive but high-dimensional feature space, well-suited for interpretation of the learnt models. On the other hand, by means of the kernel trick we can provide a general learning algorithm for that high-dimensional representation because all required statistics can be computed without performing an explicit feature space mapping of the sequences. By introducing a kernel parameter that controls the degree of position-dependency, our feature space representation can be tailored to the characteristics of the biological problem at hand. A regularized learning scheme enables application even to biological problems for which only small sets of example sequences are available. Our approach includes a visualization method for transparent representation of characteristic sequence features. Thereby importance of features can be measured in terms of discriminative strength with respect to classification of the underlying sequences. To demonstrate and validate our concept on a biochemically well-defined case, we analyze E. coli translation initiation sites in order to show that we can find biologically relevant signals. For that case, our results clearly show that the Shine-Dalgarno sequence is the most important signal upstream a start codon. The variability in position and composition we found for that signal is in accordance with previous biological knowledge. We also find evidence for signals downstream of the start codon, previously introduced as transcriptional enhancers. These signals are mainly characterized by occurrences of adenine in a region of about 4 nucleotides next to the start codon. CONCLUSIONS: We showed that the oligo kernel can provide a valuable tool for the analysis of relevant signals in biological sequences. In the case of translation initiation sites we could clearly deduce the most discriminative motifs and their positional variation from example sequences. Attractive features of our approach are its flexibility with respect to oligomer length and position conservation. By means of these two parameters oligo kernels can easily be adapted to different biological problems

Zur quantitativen Analyse von Lebensläufen "Alter Kämpfer"

Der Autor untersucht die Lebensläufe von alten NSDAP-Mitgliedern unter einer doppelten Fragestellung. Zum einen sollen die Motive für den Parteieintritt und die Erwartungen an die Partei betrachtet werden. Zum anderen geht es dem Autor um die Einbeziehung quantitativer Methoden in die herkömmliche Geschichtswissenschaft, der von seiten der Historiker immer noch mit Vorbehalt begegnet wird. Als Basis seiner Untersuchung dient ihm die Abel-Sammlung, eine Sammlung von 581 Lebensläufen "Alter Kämpfer" von dem Soziologen Theodore Abel. Die Ursachen für den NSDAP-Beitritt will der Autor nicht auf Faktoren wie z.B. Beruf oder soziale Herkunft reduzieren. Die 79 Variablen der Abel-Sammlung bieten für ihn die Möglichkeit, ein realistisches Bild der individuellen Motivation zu geben. Der Autor stellt darüberhinaus noch die Beschränkungen der Abel-Sammlung und die Probleme ihrer Auswertung dar. (BG

Score-based prediction of genomic islands in prokaryotic genomes using hidden Markov models

BACKGROUND: Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is considered a strong evolutionary force shaping the content of microbial genomes in a substantial manner. It is the difference in speed enabling the rapid adaptation to changing environmental demands that distinguishes HGT from gene genesis, duplications or mutations. For a precise characterization, algorithms are needed that identify transfer events with high reliability. Frequently, the transferred pieces of DNA have a considerable length, comprise several genes and are called genomic islands (GIs) or more specifically pathogenicity or symbiotic islands. RESULTS: We have implemented the program SIGI-HMM that predicts GIs and the putative donor of each individual alien gene. It is based on the analysis of codon usage (CU) of each individual gene of a genome under study. CU of each gene is compared against a carefully selected set of CU tables representing microbial donors or highly expressed genes. Multiple tests are used to identify putatively alien genes, to predict putative donors and to mask putatively highly expressed genes. Thus, we determine the states and emission probabilities of an inhomogeneous hidden Markov model working on gene level. For the transition probabilities, we draw upon classical test theory with the intention of integrating a sensitivity controller in a consistent manner. SIGI-HMM was written in JAVA and is publicly available. It accepts as input any file created according to the EMBL-format. It generates output in the common GFF format readable for genome browsers. Benchmark tests showed that the output of SIGI-HMM is in agreement with known findings. Its predictions were both consistent with annotated GIs and with predictions generated by different methods. CONCLUSION: SIGI-HMM is a sensitive tool for the identification of GIs in microbial genomes. It allows to interactively analyze genomes in detail and to generate or to test hypotheses about the origin of acquired genes

P-value based visualization of codon usage data

Two important and not yet solved problems in bacterial genome research are the identification of horizontally transferred genes and the prediction of gene expression levels. Both problems can be addressed by multivariate analysis of codon usage data. In particular dimensionality reduction methods for visualization of multivariate data have shown to be effective tools for codon usage analysis. We here propose a multidimensional scaling approach using a novel similarity measure for codon usage tables. Our probabilistic similarity measure is based on P-values derived from the well-known chi-square test for comparison of two distributions. Experimental results on four microbial genomes indicate that the new method is well-suited for the analysis of horizontal gene transfer and translational selection. As compared with the widely-used correspondence analysis, our method did not suffer from outlier sensitivity and showed a better clustering of putative alien genes in most cases

Socioemotional wealth in family firms: a longitudinal content analysis of corporate disclosures

This is the Accepted Manuscript of the article published in Journal of Family Business Strategy, 2019, 10(2), pp. 119-132, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfbs.2018.11.002. Please cite the published version. This Accepted Manuscript is deposited under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.Family business literature has noted the nature and presence of socioemotional wealth (SEW) in family firms. One method of observing SEW is by a five-dimension approach, collectively termed FIBER. While the dimensions are well defined, they have been critiqued, as have the theoretical foundations of SEW. Regardless, given the concept of SEW is about a decade old and the FIBER dimensions less so, it is reasonable to argue more research is needed. One potentially useful research approach is an historical one, which we will here term SEW history – the use of historical research to support (or question) the development of SEW as a concept. We undertake a content analysis of corporate disclosures through the Chairman’s Statement of two Irish family breweries over a period of about two decades. To conduct the analysis, we develop a coding scheme based on the FIBER dimensions and offer some research propositions around these dimensions of SEW being stable (or not) over time. Our findings reveal that the Chairman’s Statement does include FIBER dimensions in both breweries and they do change over time. Subsequent statistical analysis reveals significant differences in the FIBER dimensions between the two breweries and context is revealed as a key issue in the assessment of SEW, something prior research has noted. The study also raises some questions on the nature of some FIBER dimensions, in particular the “I” dimension. This is the Accepted Manuscript of the article published in Journal of Family Business Strategy, 2019, 10(2), pp. 119-132, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfbs.2018.11.002. Please cite the published version. This Accepted Manuscript is deposited under a CC-BY-NC-ND license

Political Continuity and Change

xviii,606hal.;21c