Effects of copper on the early development of Xenopus laevis: the case of CuSO4 and Bordeaux mixture solutions

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Broadband Alfvénic excitation correlated to turbulence level in the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator plasmas

During the first operational phase (OP1) of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator, poloidal magnetic field fluctuations, $\dot{B}_{\theta}$, were measured in several different plasma scenarios with a system of Mirnov coils. In the spectrograms, multiple frequency bands close together in frequency are observed below f = 600 kHz. Furthermore, a dominant feature is the appearance of a frequency band with the highest spectral amplitude centred between $f = 180-220$ kHz. The fluctuations are observed from the beginning of most W7-X plasmas of OP1, which were often operated solely with electron cyclotron resonance heating. The fluctuations show characteristics known from Alfvén waves and possibly Alfvén eigenmodes (AEs). However, the fast particle drive from heating sources, which is generally a driver necessary for the appearance of AEs in magnetic confinement plasmas, is absent in most of the analysed experiments. A characterization of the Alfvénic fluctuations measured during OP1 plasmas is possible using a newly developed tracking algorithm. In this paper, we extensively survey the different spectral properties of the fluctuations in correlation with plasma parameters and discuss possible driving mechanisms. The correlation studies of the dynamics of the possible ellipticity induced AEs indicate that Alfvén activity in the frequency interval between $f = 100-450$ kHz could be excited due to an interaction with turbulence, or profile effects also affecting the turbulence amplitude

Die Zufriedenheit von Stuttgarter Studierenden mit ihrer Lebens- und Wohnsituation: erste deskriptive Ergebnisse einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Studie zu allgemeinen und bereichsspezifischen Zufriedenheiten der Studienrenden des Campus Vaihingen und des Campus Hohenheim

"In diesem Bericht werden erste Ergebnisse einer im Sommersemester 1999 durchgeführten Befragung unter rund 1000 Studierenden am Campus Vaihingen und Hohenheim vorgestellt. Im Zentrum des Interesses der Umfrage standen neben der allgemeinen Lebenszufriedenheit und den Zufriedenheiten der Studierenden in verschiedenen Lebensbereichen die Bewertung und Wahrnehmung der Wohnsituation und des jeweiligen Campus durch die Studierenden. Das Design der Studie wurde so gewählt, dass zum einem ein Vergleich der Situation der Studierenden am Campus Hohenheim und am Campus Vaihingen möglich ist. Zusätzlich ermöglicht das Studiendesign auch Vergleiche zwischen Studierenden, die am Campus wohnen und studieren, mit solchen, die 'nur' am Campus studieren. Die Ergebnisse belegen recht hohe Grade von Zufriedenheiten, die jedoch z.T. sehr deutlich nach verschiedenen sozialen Kontexten variieren. Als auffälligste Ergebnisse sind zu nennen, dass die Studierenden in Vaihingen mit ihrer Campussituation geringer zufrieden sind als die Studierenden in Hohenheim. Zudem zeigen die Analysen zu verschiedenen Bereichszufriedenheiten (u.a. Lebensstandard, Wohnsituation und Studium) und zur allgemeinen Lebenszufriedenheit, dass die Studierenden, die am Campus Vaihingen wohnen und studieren, im Vergleich zu allen anderen Studierenden stets geringere Zufriedenheiten äußern." (Autorenreferat)"This report presents first results of a survey among 1000 college students at the Vaihingen and the Hohenheim campus. The study concentrates an patterns of students' general and specific life satisfaction. It explores students' perception and evaluation of different areas of living at each campus. Due to its research design comparisons can be made between the situation at the Vaihingen and the Hohenheim campus and between students residing at the campus and students residing at other places outside the college area. The results show rather high degrees of satisfaction with variations according to different social contexts of living. The most striking results document higher degrees of satisfaction at the Hohenheim campus than at the Vaihingen campus. Students doing both residing and studying at the Vaihingen campus show the lowest degrees of satisfaction in comparison to all other groups of students concerning general life satisfaction and satisfaction with different area-specific topics (i.e. general standard of living, specific situations of housing and specific situations of studying and academic activities)." (author's abstract

The narrative self, distributed memory, and evocative objects

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our (unfolding) life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology of artifacts in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally-laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct

Is Profound Boredom Boredom?

Martin Heidegger is often credited as having offered one of the most thorough phenomenological investigations of the nature of boredom. In his 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between three different types of boredom and to explicate their respective characters. Within the context of his discussion of one of these types of boredom, profound boredom [tiefe Langweile], Heidegger opposes much of the philosophical and literary tradition on boredom insofar as he articulates how the experience of boredom can be existentially beneficial to us. In this chapter, we undertake a study of the nature of profound boredom with the aim of investigating its place within contemporary psychological and philosophical research on boredom. Although boredom used to be a neglected emotional experience, it is no more. Boredom’s causal antecedents, effects, experiential profile, and neurophysiological correlates have become topics of active study; as a consequence, a proliferation of claims and findings about boredom has ensued. Such a situation provides an opportunity to scrutinize Heidegger’s claims and to try to understand them both on their own terms and in light of our contemporary understanding of boredom

Comparison of drug prescribing before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-national European study

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on health care, with disruption to routine clinical care. Our aim was to describe changes in prescription drugs dispensing in the primary and outpatient sectors during the first year of the pandemic across Europe. Methods: We used routine administrative data on dispensed medicines in eight European countries (five whole countries, three represented by one region each) from January 2017 to March 2021 to compare the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic with the preceding 3 years. Results: In the 10 therapeutic subgroups with the highest dispensed volumes across all countries/regions the relative changes between the COVID-19 period and the year before were mostly of a magnitude similar to changes between previous periods. However, for drugs for obstructive airway diseases the changes in the COVID-19 period were stronger in several countries/regions. In all countries/regions a decrease in dispensed DDDs of antibiotics for systemic use (from −39.4% in Romagna to −14.2% in Scotland) and nasal preparations (from −34.4% in Lithuania to −5.7% in Sweden) was observed. We observed a stockpiling effect in the total market in March 2020 in six countries/regions. In Czechia the observed increase was not significant and in Slovenia volumes increased only after the end of the first lockdown. We found an increase in average therapeutic quantity per pack dispensed, which, however, exceeded 5% only in Slovenia, Germany, and Czechia. Conclusions: The findings from this first European cross-national comparison show a substantial decrease in dispensed volumes of antibiotics for systemic use in all countries/regions. The results also indicate that the provision of medicines for common chronic conditions was mostly resilient to challenges faced during the pandemic. However, there were notable differences between the countries/regions for some therapeutic areas

Moving Stories: Agency, Emotion and Practical Rationality

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding

In Search for the Rationality of Moods

What it is about mood, as a specific type of affect, that makes it not easily amenable to standard models of rationality? It is commonly assumed that the cognitive rationality of an affective state is somehow depended upon how that state is related to what the state is about, its so called intentional object; but, given that moods do not seem to bear an intentional relation to an object, it is hard to see how they can be in the offing for rational assessment. In the first part of the paper I outline three ways of attributing intentionality to moods, raising for each one of them a series of problems, thus casting doubt on the viability of an intentionalist grounding for the rationality of moods. I then move to an examination of the view of moods as background feelings, which are intimately related to how we perceive the world; however, in my view, that approach fails to provide standards of assessment that would permit appraising the mood itself as rational or irrational. Finally, I look at an account of moods as mechanisms whose function is to monitor the balance between environmental demands and one’s physical or psychological resources. That is a promising way to proceed in our exploration of mood states; it faces though some formidable phenomenological challenges. All in all, defending the rationality of moods calls for a rethinking of the assumptions that are prevalent in the current literature over the representational dimension of affective states