A Liminal Orientalism: Turkish Studies by Franz Babinger

Franz Babinger (1891-1967), a German scholar publishing on Ottoman history, worked outside the mainstream of Oriental philology of his time. While he shared many of the nationalist, patriarchal and gendered views of his generation (he was, however, not anti-Semitic), his interest in the “realities” of history bridled the scope of Orientalist assumptions and the reliance on canonical texts singled out as key to understanding “Islam” or the “Middle East”. Extensive travels and an eye for material conditions made him understand the Ottoman Empire as a Mediterranean phenomenon. Rather than intellectual or political differences his brusque and irascible character (along with his idiosyncratic use of German that makes his works difficult to understand for second-language readers) prevented his research from resonating with contemporary historians. His correspondence shows how Babinger established and then destroyed a working relationship with Halil İnalcık that might have won him a Turkish audience

Urban ethics: Towards a research agenda on cities, ethics and normativity

To live in a city is to be confronted with difference, contingency and conflict, and with questions about how one should live one's life in the urban context. What is a ‘good’ life in the city? How does my ‘good’ life affect others and vice versa? Is the ‘good’ also that which is ‘right’ and ‘proper’? Or, perhaps, who should be made to live in accordance with specific values, how and why? Urban dwellers do not encounter such questions in a realm of pure freedom. In contemporary cities, as elsewhere, the question how one should live often seems determined by norms and practicalities, by culture and authority, by one's access to resources, regulated by regimes and legal prescriptions, negotiated by power struggles that are both macro- and micro-political. Under such conditions questions of good life attain a cultural or political edge; they have an economic dimension, and they often concern legal matters. However, the question how one should live in the city will never be completely answered through culture, religion, politics, economics, or law alone. Negotiation through ethics and therefore a vocabulary of ethics become pivotal, we argue, when the logics of socio-economic relations, law or political conflict do not prevail. To speak of urban ethics is to point toward a dimension of normativity in cities that is constituted relationally and differentially. Urban ethics also denotes particular means with which people and institutions negotiate urban life. If urban researchers want to come to terms with the complexities of normativity in urban life, they need to address the fundamental aspects of urban ethics more explicitly. In doing so, we also must take into account discourses on ethical urban life in recent conjunctures. Whereas the ethical dimension of the urban has been addressed through different vocabularies and practices that can be understood as forms of urban ethics in an analytical sense, we contend that over the last two decades, questions about urban life have increasingly been raised explicitly as ethical questions. These patterns of ethicization are part of a wider, in some ways problematic ethical turn that has been diagnosed in social science and humanities disciplines. In these recent conjunctures, to pose a question about urban life as a question of ethics is to envision debates about choices that individuals should make freely, on their own accord, because they are motivated by a desire to do what seems good and right – and, to some extent, urban. In this imaginary, ‘good’ urban subjects are universalist, post-cultural ethicists. Urban research must address more directly how this rise of ethics talk leads to depoliticization and what that means in different settings. Ethical framings and concerns have been on the rise in diverse urban social fields (Amin, 2006; Mostafavi, 2013), for example, in architecture and urban planning. One signpost was the Venice architectural biennial in the year 2000 titled “Less Aesthetics, More Ethics”. This explicit demand for ethics – used here as a shorthand for good and responsible rather than merely profitable designs – represents an important aspect of practical urbanism, architecture, design and participatory art in city spaces (Bishop, 2012; Collier and Lakoff, 2005, Thompson, 2012, 2015). Discussions about living ethically in the city are also apparent in the area of ecological sustainability. Explicitly ethical initiatives target regular city dwellers and experts alike, focusing on the ways we are supposed to act with regard to the waste we produce, the energy we consume, or the traffic we cause. Ethical appeals for changing the lifestyles of urbanites – voluntarily, through bans and incentives, and through benignly authoritarian nudging (John, Smith, & Stoker, 2009) – have gained in importance in the context of global climate change, which is often presented as a consequence of accumulated individual consumption. In many academic disciplines researchers search for an environmentally ethical urbanism, while such programs’ urban-ethical frameworks have rarely been investigated. In such settings, urban-ethical discourses and strategies are relatively easy to delineate. In everyday life, however, urban ethics have a much broader meaning that goes beyond these discursive forms with their rationalist, voluntaristic and individualist tendencies. We argue that the rationalist ethics discourse and the governmentality with which it is associated often obscure actual ethical antagonisms, complexity and subaltern critique. In this article, we develop a research agenda on urban ethics to better understand the role of ethics in the conduct of everyday life in cities. Drawing on examples from our own research, we highlight how the ethical dimension of urban life can be analyzed without losing sight of materialist aspects. In order to carve out our argument, we first outline the main features of our research agenda, which we apply to a case study. We then scrutinize the urban studies literature and show how the relationship of urban life and ethics has been discussed so far: We include work on the anthropology of ethics, on morality in cities, and on social and environmental (in)justice and ethics, and we point out what is different from our approach. In the last sections, we review two ways of looking at urban ethics that we consider particularly promising – and challenging – for analysis because they highlight different aspects of ethical normativity: a focus on moral economies, which primarily refer to historical sedimentations of rights and responsibilities in moments of crisis, and a focus on social creativity, which stresses imagination and the future tense. Our conclusion describes the research agenda that is emerging from our interdisciplinary research

Phase transitions and volunteering in spatial public goods games

Cooperative behavior among unrelated individuals in human and animal societies represents a most intriguing puzzle to scientists in various disciplines. Here we present a simple yet effective mechanism promoting cooperation under full anonymity by allowing for voluntary participation in public goods games. This natural extension leads to rock--scissors--paper type cyclic dominance of the three strategies cooperate, defect and loner i.e. those unwilling to participate in the public enterprise. In spatial settings with players arranged on a regular lattice this results in interesting dynamical properties and intriguing spatio-temporal patterns. In particular, variations of the value of the public good leads to transitions between one-, two- and three-strategy states which are either in the class of directed percolation or show interesting analogies to Ising-type models. Although volunteering is incapable of stabilizing cooperation, it efficiently prevents successful spreading of selfish behavior and enables cooperators to persist at substantial levels.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Impact of the Specific Mutation in KRAS Codon 12 Mutated Tumors on Treatment Efficacy in Patients with Metastatic Colorectal Cancer Receiving Cetuximab-Based First-Line Therapy: A Pooled Analysis of Three Trials

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of specific mutations in codon 12 of the Kirsten-ras (KRAS) gene on treatment efficacy in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). Patients: Overall, 119 patients bearing a KRAS mutation in codon 12 were evaluated. All patients received cetuximab-based first-line chemotherapy within the Central European Cooperative Oncology Group (CECOG), AIO KRK-0104 or AIO KRK-0306 trials. Results: Patients with KRAS codon 12 mutant mCRC showed a broad range of outcome when treated with cetuximab-based first-line regimens. Patients with tumors bearing a KRAS p.G12D mutation showed a strong trend to a more favorable outcome compared to other mutations (overall survival 23.3 vs. 14-18 months; hazard ratio 0.66, range 0.43-1.03). An interaction model illustrated that KRAS p.G12C was associated with unfavorable outcome when treated with oxaliplatin plus cetuximab. Conclusion: The present analysis suggests that KRAS codon 12 mutation may not represent a homogeneous entity in mCRC when treated with cetuximab-based first-line therapy. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

Highly sensitive feature detection for high resolution LC/MS

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC/MS) is an important analytical technology for e.g. metabolomics experiments. Determining the boundaries, centres and intensities of the two-dimensional signals in the LC/MS raw data is called feature detection. For the subsequent analysis of complex samples such as plant extracts, which may contain hundreds of compounds, corresponding to thousands of features – a reliable feature detection is mandatory.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a new feature detection algorithm <it>centWave </it>for high-resolution LC/MS data sets, which collects regions of interest (partial mass traces) in the raw-data, and applies continuous wavelet transformation and optionally Gauss-fitting in the chromatographic domain. We evaluated our feature detection algorithm on dilution series and mixtures of seed and leaf extracts, and estimated recall, precision and F-score of seed and leaf specific features in two experiments of different complexity.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The new feature detection algorithm meets the requirements of current metabolomics experiments. <it>centWave </it>can detect close-by and partially overlapping features and has the highest overall recall and precision values compared to the other algorithms, <it>matchedFilter </it>(the original algorithm of <it>XCMS</it>) and the centroidPicker from <it>MZmine</it>. The <it>centWave </it>algorithm was integrated into the Bioconductor R-package <it>XCMS </it>and is available from <url>http://www.bioconductor.org/</url></p

Communications in cellular automata

The goal of this paper is to show why the framework of communication complexity seems suitable for the study of cellular automata. Researchers have tackled different algorithmic problems ranging from the complexity of predicting to the decidability of different dynamical properties of cellular automata. But the difference here is that we look for communication protocols arising in the dynamics itself. Our work is guided by the following idea: if we are able to give a protocol describing a cellular automaton, then we can understand its behavior

Gender Separation Increases Somatic Growth in Females but Does Not Affect Lifespan in Nothobranchius furzeri

According to life history theory, physiological and ecological traits and parameters influence an individual's life history and thus, ultimately, its lifespan. Mating and reproduction are costly activities, and in a variety of model organisms, a negative correlation of longevity and reproductive effort has been demonstrated. We are employing the annual killifish Nothobranchius furzeri as a vertebrate model for ageing. N. furzeri is the vertebrate displaying the shortest known lifespan in captivity with particular strains living only three to four months under optimal laboratory conditions. The animals show explosive growth, early sexual maturation and age-dependent physiological and behavioural decline. Here, we have used N. furzeri to investigate a potential reproduction-longevity trade-off in both sexes by means of gender separation. Though female reproductive effort and offspring investment were significantly reduced after separation, as investigated by analysis of clutch size, eggs in the ovaries and ovary mass, the energetic surplus was not reallocated towards somatic maintenance. In fact, a significant extension of lifespan could not be observed in either sex. This is despite the fact that separated females, but not males, grew significantly larger and heavier than the respective controls. Therefore, it remains elusive whether lifespan of an annual species evolved in periodically vanishing habitats can be prolonged on the cost of reproduction at all

Identification of Ischemic Regions in a Rat Model of Stroke

Investigations following stroke first of all require information about the spatio-temporal dimension of the ischemic core as well as of perilesional and remote affected tissue. Here we systematically evaluated regions differently impaired by focal ischemia.Wistar rats underwent a transient 30 or 120 min suture-occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCAO) followed by various reperfusion times (2 h, 1 d, 7 d, 30 d) or a permanent MCAO (1 d survival). Brains were characterized by TTC, thionine, and immunohistochemistry using MAP2, HSP72, and HSP27. TTC staining reliably identifies the infarct core at 1 d of reperfusion after 30 min MCAO and at all investigated times following 120 min and permanent MCAO. Nissl histology denotes the infarct core from 2 h up to 30 d after transient as well as permanent MCAO. Absent and attenuated MAP2 staining clearly identifies the infarct core and perilesional affected regions at all investigated times, respectively. HSP72 denotes perilesional areas in a limited post-ischemic time (1 d). HSP27 detects perilesional and remote impaired tissue from post-ischemic day 1 on. Furthermore a simultaneous expression of HSP72 and HSP27 in perilesional neurons was revealed.TTC and Nissl staining can be applied to designate the infarct core. MAP2, HSP72, and HSP27 are excellent markers not only to identify perilesional and remote areas but also to discriminate affected neuronal and glial populations. Moreover markers vary in their confinement to different reperfusion times. The extent and consistency of infarcts increase with prolonged occlusion of the MCA. Therefore interindividual infarct dimension should be precisely assessed by the combined use of different markers as described in this study