Mediterranean winter rainfall in phase with African monsoons during the past 1.36 million years

Mediterranean climates are characterized by strong seasonal contrasts between dry summers and wet winters. Changes in winter rainfall are critical for regional socioeconomic development, but are difficult to simulate accurately1 and reconstruct on Quaternary timescales. This is partly because regional hydroclimate records that cover multiple glacial–interglacial cycles2,3 with different orbital geometries, global ice volume and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are scarce. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms of change and their persistence remain unexplored. Here we show that, over the past 1.36 million years, wet winters in the northcentral Mediterranean tend to occur with high contrasts in local, seasonal insolation and a vigorous African summer monsoon. Our proxy time series from Lake Ohrid on the Balkan Peninsula, together with a 784,000-year transient climate model hindcast, suggest that increased sea surface temperatures amplify local cyclone development and refuel North Atlantic low-pressure systems that enter the Mediterranean during phases of low continental ice volume and high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. A comparison with modern reanalysis data shows that current drivers of the amount of rainfall in the Mediterranean share some similarities to those that drive the reconstructed increases in precipitation. Our data cover multiple insolation maxima and are therefore an important benchmark for testing climate model performance

On creating education management arenas in Learning Locally

Mit dem Programm Lernen vor Ort wurden zwischen 2009 und 2014 Kommunen als Hauptakteure im Bildungswesen und mit der Aufforderung angesprochen, ein kohärentes Bildungswesen vor Ort als Voraussetzung für ein erfolgreiches Lernen im gesamten Lebenslauf zu schaffen. Der Beitrag stellt auf der Basis von 14 Fallstudien aus ausgewählten Kommunen Ergebnisse der wissenschaftlichen Begleitforschung der ersten drei Programmjahre vor. Mit Bezug auf das Theorie- und Analysepotenzial der Governance-Perspektive und das Konzept der Sozialen Welten und Arenen werden konflikthafte Aushandlungsprozesse als Bedingungen für den Aufbau von Arenen gefasst. Die Arena Bildungsmanagement wird dabei als sozialer Brückenbauer rekonstruiert, der die Arenen Integration in die kommunale Verwaltung, Einbindung relevanter Akteure und Bildungsmonitoring durch Koordination und Vernetzung, die Erhöhung von Transparenz und durch Bildungsmarketing und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit moderiert. (DIPF/Orig.)The five-year programme (2009–2014) Learning Locally invited communities to become champions for education, and to take the initiative to build a coherent local education system – a prerequisite for life-long learning. This article presents results from the first three years of the accompanying academic research, based on 14 case studies conducted in selected communities. Drawing on the theoretical and analytical potential of governance and the concept of social worlds and arenas, conflictual negotiation processes were found to be a condition for the creation of arenas. The Education Management arena is reconstructed as a social boundary spanner. Through coordination, networking, increased transparency as well as education marketing and public relations, Education Management facilitates the interaction of the arenas Integration in the Communal Administration, Involvement of Relevant Protagonists, and Education Monitoring. (DIPF/Orig.

Assessment of patients’ expectations: development and validation of the Expectation for Treatment Scale (ETS)

Objective To develop a short self-report instrument for the assessment of expectations (Expectation for Treatment Scale(ETS)) using acupuncture as a case example. Design A cross-sectional assessment with retest after 1 week. Setting A web-based survey with patients suffering from pain. Methods In a three-step approach, we reduced the initially collected number of items from 17 to 9 and to 5, including expectations about coping ability, vitality, physical health and reduction of patient complaints. Items were selected according to internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha); convergent and divergent validities with related constructs (optimism, pessimism, resilience, perceived sensitivity to medicines, depression and others); 1-week retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC)); and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results A total of 102 patients suffering from pain were included, and 54 of these patients completed the retest assessment. The final version of the ETS consisted of five items and had an excellent Cronbach’s alpha (0.90), with 72.33% variance on one single factor. Depression, pessimism and perceived sensitivity to medicines showed positive correlations with our expectation measure (r=0.23, r=0.20 and r=0.34, respectively); the correlation between the ETS and optimism was low (r=−0.07) and no correlation between the ETS and resilience was found (r=−0.07). Convergent validity was confirmed with a high correlation (r>0.90) between ETS and a treatment-specific measure of expectations. The retest ICC was 0.86, which showed high stability over 1 week. A CFA (n=439) with data from patients with low back pain confirmed the single-factor structure of the instrument. Conclusion The ETS showed strong psychometric properties and covered a distinct construct. As the next step, the ETS might be implemented in different clinical conditions and settings to investigate psychometrics and its predictive power for treatment outcomes

Advanced producer services in Germany: a relational perspective on spatial core–periphery structures, 2009–19

ABSTRACTThis paper challenges the traditional perspective of a territorial core–periphery pattern as an organizing principle of space by introducing a relational perspective through an empirical approach. We study spatial processes of knowledge creation among advanced producer services in Germany between 2009 and 2019. We use a unique longitudinal dataset to analyse if German regions have become more integrated into the intra-firm location networks nationally and globally, and how this translates into the processes of centralization and peripheralization. The current conceptualization of core–periphery in Germany is too static and does not reflect the economic development of the regions. We find that there is no trend of urban areas becoming more integrated and peripheral areas less integrated into these networks. Instead, our research finds a discrepancy between the federal territorial classification and the functional orientation of German regions. Regions classified as peripheral have not generally decreased in connectivity to other regions. In contrast, some have increased their connectivity and have become more central in relational terms. Overall, we identified peripheralization and centralization as a relational process with dynamic, overlapping and trans-scalar networks

Thermodynamic phase diagram of static charge order in underdoped YBa2Cu3O y

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