Neoliberale Transformation der österreichischen Beschäftigungspolitik für Jugendliche

Arbeitsmarkt- und ausbildungspolitische Aktivitäten für Jugendliche am Übergang von der Pflichtschule in den Beruf sind auch in Österreich zunehmend von neoliberalen Konzepten wohlfahrtsstaatlichen Umbaus geprägt. Der Umbau ist einerseits durch eine verstärkte ­Orientierung an aktivierenden Maßnahmen, andererseits durch den Ausbau sozialinvestiver Strategien ­gekennzeichnet, die als förderlich für Wirtschaftswachstum und Wettbewerbs­fähigkeit gelten und insbesondere auf die »Erweiterung des Humankapitals« zielen. Der Artikel untersucht die damit verbundenen Ambivalenzen mittels einer detaillierten Analyse von ­ExpertInneninterviews. Die Sozialinvestitionsstrategie konstituiert eine neue Art des Regierens, die auf die Subjektivität von Jugendlichen zielt und sie zur eigenständigen Anpassung an den ­Wettbewerb drängt. Formen des Scheiterns, Abweichens und Verweigerns werden dagegen pathologisiert und dienen als Legitimation eines wachsenden Zugriffs auf Jugendliche, wie er exemplarisch durch die Einführung der Ausbildungspflicht realisiert wird.Neoliberal conceptions about the transformation of the welfare state influence increasingly the activities on employment and vocational training policies for young people, who leave compulsory school and start to work. This implies an orientation toward activating measures and social investment strategies. Both focus on the »accumulation of human capital« and are expected to accelerate economic growth and competitiveness. Based on expert interviews, this article scrutinizes the ambivalences of such measures. The social investment strategy constitutes a new way in governance, which focuses on the subjectivity of youth, furthermore pushing them towards selfadaptation to a competitive world. Failure, deviation and disobedience are considered pathological and serve as legitimation for imposing even more rigid measures on young people, as the example, of making vocational training mandatory, shows exemplarily

The LUMIERE dataset: Longitudinal Glioblastoma MRI with expert RANO evaluation.

Publicly available Glioblastoma (GBM) datasets predominantly include pre-operative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or contain few follow-up images for each patient. Access to fully longitudinal datasets is critical to advance the refinement of treatment response assessment. We release a single-center longitudinal GBM MRI dataset with expert ratings of selected follow-up studies according to the response assessment in neuro-oncology criteria (RANO). The expert rating includes details about the rationale of the ratings. For a subset of patients, we provide pathology information regarding methylation of the O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter status and isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1), as well as the overall survival time. The data includes T1-weighted pre- and post-contrast, T2-weighted, and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) MRI. Segmentations from state-of-the-art automated segmentation tools, as well as radiomic features, complement the data. Possible applications of this dataset are radiomics research, the development and validation of automated segmentation methods, and studies on response assessment. This collection includes MRI data of 91 GBM patients with a total of 638 study dates and 2487 images

Evaluating automated longitudinal tumor measurements for glioblastoma response assessment.

Automated tumor segmentation tools for glioblastoma show promising performance. To apply these tools for automated response assessment, longitudinal segmentation, and tumor measurement, consistency is critical. This study aimed to determine whether BraTumIA and HD-GLIO are suited for this task. We evaluated two segmentation tools with respect to automated response assessment on the single-center retrospective LUMIERE dataset with 80 patients and a total of 502 post-operative time points. Volumetry and automated bi-dimensional measurements were compared with expert measurements following the Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (RANO) guidelines. The longitudinal trend agreement between the expert and methods was evaluated, and the RANO progression thresholds were tested against the expert-derived time-to-progression (TTP). The TTP and overall survival (OS) correlation was used to check the progression thresholds. We evaluated the automated detection and influence of non-measurable lesions. The tumor volume trend agreement calculated between segmentation volumes and the expert bi-dimensional measurements was high (HD-GLIO: 81.1%, BraTumIA: 79.7%). BraTumIA achieved the closest match to the expert TTP using the recommended RANO progression threshold. HD-GLIO-derived tumor volumes reached the highest correlation between TTP and OS (0.55). Both tools failed at an accurate lesion count across time. Manual false-positive removal and restricting to a maximum number of measurable lesions had no beneficial effect. Expert supervision and manual corrections are still necessary when applying the tested automated segmentation tools for automated response assessment. The longitudinal consistency of current segmentation tools needs further improvement. Validation of volumetric and bi-dimensional progression thresholds with multi-center studies is required to move toward volumetry-based response assessment

Size and shape dependent photoluminescence and excited state decay rates of diamondoids

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.We present photoluminescence spectra and excited state decay rates of a series of diamondoids, which represent molecular structural analogues to hydrogen-passivated bulk diamond. Specific isomers of the five smallest diamondoids (adamantane–pentamantane) have been brought into the gas phase and irradiated with synchrotron radiation. All investigated compounds show intrinsic photoluminescence in the ultraviolet spectral region. The emission spectra exhibit pronounced vibrational fine structure which is analyzed using quantum chemical calculations. We show that the geometrical relaxation of the first excited state of adamantane, exhibiting Rydberg character, leads to the loss of Td symmetry. The luminescence of adamantane is attributed to a transition from the delocalized first excited state into different vibrational modes of the electronic ground state. Similar geometrical changes of the excited state structure have also been identified in the other investigated diamondoids. The excited state decay rates show a clear dependence on the size of the diamondoid, but are independent of the particle geometry, further indicating a loss of particle symmetry upon electronic excitation.DFG, FOR 1282, Controlling the electronic structure of semiconductor nanoparticles by doping and hybrid formatio

Genetic Evidence for a Tight Cooperation of TatB and TatC during Productive Recognition of Twin-Arginine (Tat) Signal Peptides in Escherichia coli

The twin arginine translocation (Tat) pathway transports folded proteins across the cytoplasmic membrane of bacteria. Tat signal peptides contain a consensus motif (S/T-R-R-X-F-L-K) that is thought to play a crucial role in substrate recognition by the Tat translocase. Replacement of the phenylalanine at the +2 consensus position in the signal peptide of a Tat-specific reporter protein (TorA-MalE) by aspartate blocked export of the corresponding TorA(D+2)-MalE precursor, indicating that this mutation prevents a productive binding of the TorA(D+2) signal peptide to the Tat translocase. Mutations were identified in the extreme amino-terminal regions of TatB and TatC that synergistically suppressed the export defect of TorA(D+2)-MalE when present in pairwise or triple combinations. The observed synergistic suppression activities were even more pronounced in the restoration of membrane translocation of another export-defective precursor, TorA(KQ)-MalE, in which the conserved twin arginine residues had been replaced by lysine-glutamine. Collectively, these findings indicate that the extreme amino-terminal regions of TatB and TatC cooperate tightly during recognition and productive binding of Tat-dependent precursor proteins and, furthermore, that TatB and TatC are both involved in the formation of a specific signal peptide binding site that reaches out as far as the end of the TatB transmembrane segment

Safety of pulsed field ablation in more than 17,000 patients with atrial fibrillation in the MANIFEST-17K study

Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is an emerging technology for the treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF), for which pre-clinical and early-stage clinical data are suggestive of some degree of preferentiality to myocardial tissue ablation without damage to adjacent structures. Here in the MANIFEST-17K study we assessed the safety of PFA by studying the post-approval use of this treatment modality. Of the 116 centers performing post-approval PFA with a pentaspline catheter, data were received from 106 centers (91.4% participation) regarding 17,642 patients undergoing PFA (mean age 64, 34.7% female, 57.8% paroxysmal AF and 35.2% persistent AF). No esophageal complications, pulmonary vein stenosis or persistent phrenic palsy was reported (transient palsy was reported in 0.06% of patients; 11 of 17,642). Major complications, reported for ~1% of patients (173 of 17,642), were pericardial tamponade (0.36%; 63 of 17,642) and vascular events (0.30%; 53 of 17,642). Stroke was rare (0.12%; 22 of 17,642) and death was even rarer (0.03%; 5 of 17,642). Unexpected complications of PFA were coronary arterial spasm in 0.14% of patients (25 of 17,642) and hemolysis-related acute renal failure necessitating hemodialysis in 0.03% of patients (5 of 17,642). Taken together, these data indicate that PFA demonstrates a favorable safety profile by avoiding much of the collateral damage seen with conventional thermal ablation. PFA has the potential to be transformative for the management of patients with AF.Peer reviewe