Editorial: Sterben und Tod

Editorial zum Schwerpunktheft "Sterben und Tod

End of life in prison: Talking across disciplines and across countries

What a good end of life means is a particularly relevant question in the context of confinement and prison. Most of the questions and issues raised by end of life for those living in liberty also apply to the correctional setting. However, the institutional particularities and logics of the prison create unique barriers and make it difficult in practice to reconcile concerns in regard to end of life—like care and comfort—with the mandate of corrections—confinement and punishment. At present, the literature on end of life in prison is dominated by U.S. contributions. We have therefore invited researchers from various disciplines in various countries to analyze the topic from their disciplinary perspectives and within the respective institutional frames of their national contexts. Keywords: end of life, ethics, practice, palliative care, priso

Punitiveness of electronic monitoring: Perception and experience of an alternative sanction

Electronic monitoring (EM) serves as an alternative sanction to incarceration. An important aspect that remains only scarcely debated in the literature is EM’s punitiveness and, more specifically, exactly how punitive EM is in comparison to different forms of incarceration. Responding to this gap, we propose a systematic meta-analysis of relevant studies that scrutinizes and compares different studies on EM and its punitive effects (or perceptions of its degree of punitiveness) in relation to incarceration. Ultimately, there is no simple and straightforward answer: EM’s level of punitiveness differs with the various sociodemographic variables of respondents included in the studies and the various characteristics of the penal system. It is necessary to assess the degree of punitiveness of EM to determine the conditions under and terms with which it should be applied, for example, as a humane substitute for incarceration or as an additional pain of the penal system

Critical Post‐Humanism and Social Work in the City: About Being Entangled as Researcher and Professional

Social work has a long history of dealing with social issues and working towards an inclusive city. The complexity of these issues requires conceptual thinking that goes beyond “the human” and encompasses spatiality, materiality, as well as non‐human beings and their connectedness. I propose to explore “post”‐theories for this purpose, which constitute a major reconfiguration of thinking in the field of social work and research on social inclusion in general. This article outlines important elements of “post”‐theories that connect with major claims of social work such as the aim of social justice, empowerment, and ethical stances towards research and practice. It further outlines in which sense these elements connect with social work and what that could mean for analysing social problems and how to approach them. The contribution provides thoughts on how post‐humanism might provide inspiration to think as researchers and act as professionals concerning questions of social justice and inclusion

Adult Attachment and Personality as Predictors of Jealousy in Romantic Relationships.

Functional relationships between romantic jealousy and traits, such as neuroticism or adult attachment styles, are well-known. For the first time, we conducted a joint analysis of the Big Five traits and attachment dimensions as predictors of jealousy, which considered gender differences as well as differences in infidelity experiences and relationship status. In 847 participants, path modeling showed that higher neuroticism, lower agreeableness, and lower openness predicted higher romantic jealousy. The attachment dimensions "anxiety" and "depend" partly mediated the effect of neuroticism and fully mediated the effect of agreeableness on romantic jealousy. The direct and indirect relationships did not differ as a function of gender, relationship status, and infidelity experiences. These findings contribute to a better understanding of individual differences in romantic jealousy from a personality perspective

Monitoring of the radio galaxy M 87 at Very High Energy with MAGIC during a low emission state between 2012 and 2015

AbstractWe present the preliminary results from observing the nearby radio galaxy M 87 for 156 hours (between the years 2012 and 2015) with the MAGIC telescopes, which lead to a significant very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) detection of the source in quiescent states each year. Our VHE analysis combined with quasi-simultaneous data at other energies (from gamma-rays, X-rays, optical and radio) provides a unique opportunity to study the source variability and its broadband spectral energy distribution, which is found to disfavour a one-zone synchrotron/synchrotron self-Compton model. Therefore, other alternative scenarios for the photon emission are explored. We also find that the VHE emission is compatible with being produced close to the source radio core as previous data already indicated. A detailed paper presenting full results of the observing campaign is in preparation

Diversity of Rhodopirellula and related planctomycetes in a North Sea coastal sediment employing carB as molecular marker.

Rhodopirellula is an abundant marine member of the bacterial phylum Planctomycetes. Cultivation studies revealed the presence of several closely related Rhodopirellula species in European coastal sediments. Because the 16S rRNA gene does not provide the desired taxonomic resolution to differentiate Rhodopirellula species, we performed a comparison of the genomes of nine Rhodopirellula strains and six related planctomycetes and identified carB, coding for the large subunit of carbamoylphosphate synthetase, as a suitable molecular marker. In this study, we investigated the diversity of Rhodopirellula in coastal intertidal surface sediments of Sylt island, North Sea, using the 16S rRNA and carB genes as molecular markers. The carB clone and pyrosequencing libraries revealed the presence of 12 species of Rhodopirellula and of 66 species in closely related undescribed genera, a diversity that was not detected with a 16S rRNA gene library. This study demonstrates that the carB gene is a powerful molecular marker for detecting Rhodopirellula species in the environment and may be used for the taxonomic evaluation of new strains