Open Knowledge Resources for Higher Education: Scholarly Publications, Course Materials, Academic Software

This paper will explain why electronic knowledge resources in academia cannot only be regarded as private commodities, but also as public goods. After sketching a concept of public goods for a postnational, global society, three types of electronic knowledge resources are distinguished: scholarly publications, course materials and academic software. With the help of practical examples, similarities between these resources are developed. Finally, it will be explained what advantages the status of public good for knowledge resources would have and how it could be achieved by the academic community

Open Educational Resources – ein Policy-Paper

Die erfolgreiche Etablierung des Open-Source-Modells sowie die in den 1990er Jahren entstandene und seitdem erstarkte Open-Access-Initiative haben die Diskussion über Open Content wieder belebt. Zusätzlichen Aufschwung erhält das Thema durch die breite Akzeptanz jener innovativen Technologien, die zur Demokratisierung des Internet beitragen, indem sie die Lernenden zu Akteurinnen und Akteuren machen und ihnen u.a. auch die Werkzeuge zur Entwicklung digitaler Inhalte an die Hand geben. Auf europäischer Ebene wird Open Content im Sinne der freien Zugänglichkeit zu Bildungsinhalten als ein wichtiger Schritt zur Erhöhung der Chancengleichheit und als ein weiterer Baustein auf dem Weg zur Harmonisierung des europäischen Hochschulraums im Sinne der Bologna-Deklaration gesehen. Der vorliegende Beitrag beleuchtet die wesentlichen Merkmale von Open Content im Vergleich zu Open Source und Open Access und stellt eine national getragene Maßnahme zur institutionellen Verankerung von Open Content vor. (DIPF/ Orig.

Integral Management: Adaptationsmöglichkeiten und Modifikationserfordnerisse des Balanced-Scorecard-Konzeptes bei der Anwendung in Non-Profit-Organisationen

Non-Profit-Organizations of the Third Sector have lately gained an increasing importance both in scientific research and as far as their economical weight is concerned. Adapting the concept of the Balanced Scorecard for those organizations, their particularities need to be determined and based on the findings, the need of changes within and additions to the concept need to be questioned and discussed.Non-Profit-Organisationen, Balanced Scorecard, Controlling, Performance, Measurement

Thymic Medullary Epithelial Cell Differentiation, Thymocyte Emigration, and the Control of Autoimmunity Require Lympho–Epithelial Cross Talk via LTβR

Thymocytes depend on the interaction with thymic epithelial cells for the generation of a diverse, nonautoreactive T cell repertoire. In turn, thymic epithelial cells acquire their three-dimensional cellular organization via instructive signals from developing thymocytes. The nature of these signals has been elusive so far. We show that thymocytes and medullary epithelial cells (MECs) communicate via the lymphotoxin β receptor (LTβR) signaling axis. Normal differentiation of thymic MECs requires LTβR ligand on thymocytes and LTβR together with nuclear factor–κB-inducing kinase (Nik) in thymic epithelial cells. Impaired lympho–epithelial cross talk in the absence of the LTβR causes aberrant differentiation and reduced numbers of thymic MECs, leads to the retention of mature T lymphocytes, and is associated with autoimmune phenomena, suggesting an unexpected role for LTβR signaling in central tolerance induction

Heavy flavor jet tagging algorithm developments at CMS for HL-LHC

The rich physics program at the high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) requires all final state particles to be reconstructed with good accuracy. However, it also poses formidable challenge of dealing with very high pileup. Different identification algorithms need to be upgraded along with the detectors to improve the overall event reconstruction in such a hostile collision environment. The new timing device in the proposed CMS detector at the HL-LHC allows for the construction of timing observables at the track-level as well as at the jet-level. This information when given as inputs to the deep neural networks, have a potential to improve the existing algorithms used for heavy flavor (HF) jet tagging. In this paper, the latest developments on the studies for HF jet tagging performance at the HL-LHC are presented

Does Depression Co-Occur Within Households? The Moderating Effects of Financial Resources and Job Insecurity on Psychological Contagion

The empirically related psychopathologies of stress and depression exact an enormous economic toll and have many physical and behavioral health effects. Most studies of the effects of stress and depression focus on their causes and consequences for a single, focal individual. We examine the extent to which depression, as indicated by filling antidepressant prescriptions (SSRI and Benzodiazepines), co-occurs across spouses, constituting a negative spillover effect. To better understand the conditions that affect within-household contagion of depression, we examine whether the stress and uncertainty occasioned by job change and financial stress (net worth) increases spillover effects among spouses. We use panel data from various Danish administrative registers from the year 2001–2015 with more than 4.5 million observations on more than 900,000 unique individuals and their spouses from Danish health registers. Spouses in a household with their partner using antidepressants have a 62.1% higher chance of using antidepressants themselves, with the one year lagged effect being 29.3% and a two-year lagged effect of 15.1%. The effects become larger by 14.8% contemporaneously and 20% in the two-year lagged model if the focal individual changed employers. There was also a substantively unimportant effect of lower financial wealth to increase inter-spousal contagion

An EAGLE’s View of Ex-situ Galaxy Growth

Modern observational and analytic techniques now enable the direct measurement of star formation histories and the inference of galaxy assembly histories. However, current theoretical predictions of assembly are not ideally suited for direct comparison with such observational data. We therefore extend the work of prior examinations of the contribution of ex-situ stars to the stellar mass budget of simulated galaxies. Our predictions are specifically tailored for direct testing with a new generation of observational techniques by calculating ex-situ fractions as functions of galaxy mass and morphological type, for a range of surface brightnesses. These enable comparison with results from large FoV IFU spectrographs, and increasingly accurate spectral fitting, providing a look-up method for the estimated accreted fraction. We furthermore provide predictions of ex-situ mass fractions as functions of galaxy mass, galactocentric radius and environment. Using z = 0 snapshots from the 100cMpc3 and 25cMpc3 EAGLE simulations we corroborate the findings of prior studies, finding that ex-situ fraction increases with stellar mass for central and satellite galaxies in a stellar mass range of 2× 107 - 1.9× 1012 M⊙. For those galaxies of mass M*>5× 108M⊙, we find that the total ex-situ mass fraction is greater for more extended galaxies at fixed mass. When categorising satellite galaxies by their parent group/cluster halo mass we find that the ex-situ fraction decreases with increasing parent halo mass at fixed galaxy mass. This apparently counter-intuitive result may be due to high passing velocities within large cluster halos inhibiting efficient accretion onto individual galaxies

Disruption of Kcc2-dependent inhibition of olfactory bulb output neurons suggests its importance in odour discrimination

Synaptic inhibition in the olfactory bulb (OB), the first relay station of olfactory information, is believed to be important for odour discrimination. We interfered with GABAergic inhibition of mitral and tufted cells (M/T cells), the principal neurons of the OB, by disrupting their potassium- chloride cotransporter 2 (Kcc2). Roughly, 70% of mice died around 3 weeks, but surviving mice appeared normal. In these mice, the resulting increase in the intracellular Cl− concentration nearly abolished GABA-induced hyperpolarization of mitral cells (MCs) and unexpectedly increased the number of perisomatic synapses on MCs. In vivo analysis of odorant-induced OB electrical activity revealed increased M/T cell firing rate, altered phasing of action potentials in the breath cycle and disrupted separation of odour- induced M/T cell activity patterns. Mice also demonstrated a severely impaired ability to discriminate chemically similar odorants or odorant mixtures. Our work suggests that precisely tuned GABAergic inhibition onto M/T cells is crucial for M/T cell spike pattern separation needed to distinguish closely similar odours