La compréhension et la compréhensibilité de textes de vulgarisation scientifique: le projet PopSci – Understanding Science

Die öffentliche Akzeptanz und Wirkung natur- und technikwissenschaftlicher Forschung hängt grundlegend davon ab, ob sich die Ziele und Forschungsergebnisse an die Öffentlichkeit vermitteln lassen. Doch die Inhalte aktueller Forschungsvorhaben sind für ein Laienpublikum oft nur schwer zugänglich und verständlich. Vor dem Hintergrund, die gesellschaftliche Diskussion natur- und technikwissenschaftlicher Forschung zu verbessern, untersuchen und bewerten wir im Projekt PopSci – Understanding Science einen wichtigen Sektor des populärwissenschaftlichen Diskurses in Deutschland empirisch. Hierfür identifizieren wir die linguistischen Merkmale deutscher populärwissenschaftlicher Texte durch korpusbasierte Methoden und untersuchen deren Effekt auf die kognitive Verarbeitung der Texte durch Laien. Dazu setzen wir Vor- und Nachwissenstests ein. Außerdem messen wir die Blickbewegungen der Leserinnen und Leser, während sie populärwissenschaftliche Texte lesen. Aus dieser Kombination von unterschiedlichen Methoden versuchen wir, erste Empfehlungen zur Verbesserung des linguistischen Stils und der Wissensrepräsentation populärwissenschaftlicher Texte abzuleiten.The public accessibility and comprehension of scientific aims and results fundamentally influences the social acceptability and receptiveness of research. The contents of up-to-date research in the (natural) sciences are, however, not easily accessible to a lay audience because of many interfering factors. Aiming at the optimization of scientific publications in German print and online media, we investigate and validate present-day popular science discourse within our project PopSci – Understanding Science. For this purpose, stylistic features of German popular-science writing are identified through corpus-based research and their effects on the lay reader’s processing of these texts are measured experimentally. The resulting recommendations will improve the linguistic style and knowledge representation of written and web-based publications.L’acceptation par le public et l’impact de la recherche dans les domaines des sciences naturelles et techniques dépendent fondamentalement du fait que les objectifs et les résultats de recherche peuvent être communiqués facilement au public ou non. Toutefois, les contenus de projets de recherche actuels sont souvent difficiles à accéder et à comprendre pour un public profane. Dans le projet PopSci – Understanding Science, nous examinons et évaluons de façon empirique une partie importante du discours scientifique populaire en Allemagne, afin d’améliorer le débat public sur la recherche dans les domaines des sciences naturelles et techniques. Pour ce faire, nous identifions les caractéristiques linguistiques des textes de vulgarisation scientifique allemand par des méthodes fondées sur les corpus et examinons leur effet sur le traitement cognitif des textes par des profanes. Pour cela, nous testons les connaissances des individus avant et après lecture des textes. Nous mesurons également les mouvements oculaires des lecteurs pendant qu’ils lisent des textes de vulgarisation scientifique. De cette combinaison de différentes méthodes, nous essayons de déduire de premières recommandations pour l’amélioration du style linguistique et la représentation de la connaissance dans les textes de vulgarisation scientifique

Policy Impacts in the Dairy Supply Chain: The Case of German Whole Milk Powder

The dairy sector is one of the most important agro-food markets in the European Union (EU). In addition to the fresh dairy products, cheese and butter considerable amounts of other dairy products with long sell-by dates are produced like skimmed milk, semi skimmed milk and whole milk powder. These products have some advantages in longer storage periods and easy transportation and thus they are often designated not only for domestic storage but also for international markets. As other internationally traded dairy products milk powders depict remarkable price variations in the last years which do find good matches in the domestic markets. Despite these variations the German industry regards milk powder as an interesting product for further investments driven by luminous international demand prospects. So the likely impacts between the international and the domestic prices movements are an important topic for the German dairy industry as well as German milk producers.In the past, the EU dairy market has been highly supported by the Common Market Organization (CMO) while, at the same time, milk supply has been restricted by the milk quota regime. High administrative price for dairy products were protected by significant import tariffs isolating the EU dairy sector from international trade. In addition, exports subsidies allowed successful competition with exports from third countries, not only for intervention products but also for other dairy products like whole milk powder. However, with the restructuring of the support starting with the Agenda 2000, the coupled market price support in form of intervention prices of butter and skimmed milk powder were stepwise reduced in favour of decoupled payments. Also invention purchases were restricted and the abolition of the milk quota regime was announced for 2014/15 and phased in by yearly increases of the national quotas. At the same time applied export refunds were suspended for most dairy products

Den dansk/svenske gårdhund

I efteråret 2018 opnåede den dansk/svenske gårdhund status af internationaltanerkendt racehund. Dette skete efter godt 30 års intensivt avlsarbejde med atfrembringe en homogen race på baggrund af den lille hvide gårdhund med pletter,der har gjort sit til at holde antallet af rotter nede på de danske gårde gennemårhundreder – muligvis lige siden vikingetiden. Denne artikel gør rede forgårdhundens gøen og laden i det danske landbosamfund op gennem tiden, ogfor hvordan det gik til, at den lille danske køter fra landet til sidst blev en smukog internationalt anerkendt racehund

A comparative study of S/MAR prediction tools

BACKGROUND: S/MARs are regions of the DNA that are attached to the nuclear matrix. These regions are known to affect substantially the expression of genes. The computer prediction of S/MARs is a highly significant task which could contribute to our understanding of chromatin organisation in eukaryotic cells, the number and distribution of boundary elements, and the understanding of gene regulation in eukaryotic cells. However, while a number of S/MAR predictors have been proposed, their accuracy has so far not come under scrutiny. RESULTS: We have selected S/MARs with sufficient experimental evidence and used these to evaluate existing methods of S/MAR prediction. Our main results are: 1.) all existing methods have little predictive power, 2.) a simple rule based on AT-percentage is generally competitive with other methods, 3.) in practice, the different methods will usually identify different sub-sequences as S/MARs, 4.) more research on the H-Rule would be valuable. CONCLUSION: A new insight is needed to design a method which will predict S/MARs well. Our data, including the control data, has been deposited as additional material and this may help later researchers test new predictors

Decoding Urban Archetypes: Exploring Mobility-Related Homogeneity among Cities

To make cities more sustainable and livable and to achieve climate targets in transportation, cities around the globe must undergo sustainable transformations. However, disparities in initial conditions pose challenges when trying to implement these sustainable changes. Identifying these differences aids in the comprehension of future developments. In this study, we establish an international comparison by decoding the mobility-related characteristics of cities and determining urban archetypes. Using publicly accessible data, we analyze and classify 96 cities in different countries. Therefore, we utilize principal component analysis to simplify the data. The emerging components serve as input for segmentation. This approach yields nine unique urban archetypes, ranging from Well-Functioning and Ancient Hybrid Cities in Europe to Paratransit and Traffic-Saturated Cities in the southern hemisphere. Our results show that there is a significant advantage to using a multidimensional segmentation basis, which we identify in an extensive literature review. The result is a finer segmentation, which is especially clear for European cities that demonstrate four different clusters. We discuss that the effect of future restrictions on private car usage will vary widely between the urban archetypes

Cooperation mechanisms to achieve EU renewable targets

There are considerable benefits from cooperating among member states on meeting the 2020 RES targets. Today countries are supporting investments in renewable energy by many different types of support schemes and with different levels of support. The EU has opened for cooperation mechanisms such as joint support schemes for promoting renewable energy to meet the 2020 targets. The potential coordination benefits, with more efficient localisation and composition of renewable investment, can be achieved by creating new areas/sub-segments of renewable technologies where support costs are shared and credits are transferred between countries. Countries that are not coordinating support for renewable energy might induce inefficient investment in new capacity that would have been more beneficial elsewhere and still have provided the same contribution to meeting the 2020 RES targets. Furthermore, countries might find themselves competing for investment in a market with limited capital available. In both cases, the cost-efficiency of the renewable support policies is reduced compared to a coordinated solution. Barriers for joint support such as network regulation regarding connection of new capacity to the electricity grid and cost sharing rules for electricity transmission expansion are examined and solutions are suggested. The influence of additional renewable capacity on domestic/regional power market prices can be a barrier. The market will be influenced by for example an expansion of the wind capacity resulting in lower prices, which will affect existing conventional producers. This development will be opposed by conventional producers whereas consumers will support such a strategy. A major barrier is the timing of RES targets and the uncertainty regarding future targets. We illustrate the importance of different assumptions on future targets and the implied value of RES credits. The effect on the credit price for 2020 is presented in an exemplary case study of 200MW wind capacity