Why municipalities grow: The influence of fiscal incentives on municipal land policies in Germany and the Netherlands

It is generally assumed that municipalities attract residents and businesses as a result of intermunicipal competition for tax revenues. This growth-oriented behaviour poses a serious problem considering internationally acknowledged goals to limit land take. Nonetheless, research on how fiscal incentives affect municipal land policies is scarce. Adapting a neoinstitutionalist approach, we compare the two contrasting fiscal systems of Germany and the Netherlands. While clear incentives can be deducted from the different sources of municipal income, complex balancing measurements and consequential infrastructure investments make it difficult to predict a project’s profitability. According to the perspective of planning practitioners in municipalities around the growth centres of Utrecht and Berlin interviewed for this study, local pressures force them to keep allocating new building sites. In order to create effective policies to limit land take, it is important to understand not only the influence of fiscal incentives but also of place-specific pressures on municipal land policies

Pille Macht Diskurs: Hormonelle Kontrazeption im (post-)fordistischen Sexualitätsdispositiv

Wie hat sich die Anti-Baby-Pille in Deutschland von einer politisierten zu einer normalisierten Technik entwickelt? Die Autorin untersucht vielfältige historische Diskurse um die Pille in der BRD von 1958 bis 1989 und analysiert, wie die Pille als materielle Objektivation in gesellschaftliche Machtverhältnisse, Normierungsbestrebungen sowie Emanzipationsvorstellungen verstrickt war. Aus einer dispositivanalytischen Perspektive wird diese Entwicklung in den historisch-politischen Kontext des Übergangs von einer fordistischen zu einer postfordistischen Gesellschaftsformation eingeordnet und reflektiert. Theoretisch leistet die Arbeit damit einen Beitrag zur Verbindung eines geschlechtertheoretisch informierten Regulationsansatzes mit der an den Arbeiten von Michel Foucault orientierten Diskurs- und Dispositivtheorie sowie der Weiterentwicklung des Konzepts des Sexualitätsdispositivs

Determinants of older peoples's preferences for dispensing doctors

Objectives: Dispensing doctors (DDs) are a central part of the medication supply in Austria. Nevertheless, they are controversial and research pays little attention to perspectives of user-groups, especially older people. Therefore, this article deals with determinants of older people’s approval of dispensing doctors.Methods: For this purpose, data from a telephone survey with people over 60 years in Lower Austria are used and evaluated by means of a logit model.Results: The results show that accessibility of medicines is a major reason for the preference of DDs. Key factors are availability of a pharmacy in close proximity (OR: 0.44), independent use of a car (OR: 1.54) and individual mobility due to health reasons (OR: 1.14).Discussion: DDs are important for older people in terms of a spatially close drug supply. A pharmacy at the place of residence only outweighs the preference for DDs if it is actually accessible for older people (taking low travel costs into account).Conclusions: The aim must be to improve access to medicines in all communities where there is no pharmacy within a reasonable distance for people with health problems or those with restricted mobility

Hemostatic and thromboelastographic parameters in dogs with renal azotemia

Background and Aim: Humans and dogs with azotemia can develop coagulation disorders. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the coagulation profiles and thromboelastographic parameters in dogs with acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Materials and Methods: In this prospective study, 31 client-owned dogs with renal azotemia (creatinine >220 µmol/L) were enrolled. Clinical signs of hemostatic disorders, complete blood count, coagulation profile, D-dimers, thromboelastography, and 28-day survival data were obtained and analyzed using the t-test, Mann–Whitney U test, and Chi-square test. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. Results: Seventeen dogs with AKI, 10 with CKD, and four with acute-on-chronic kidney injury (AoC) were enrolled. Ten dogs (AKI, 8/17; CKD, 2/10) had thrombocytopenia. Prothrombin time was prolonged in four dogs with AKI and longer in dogs with AKI than in dogs with CKD (p = 0.004). The activated partial thromboplastin time was prolonged in 23 dogs (AKI, 14/17; CKD, 7/10; AoC, 3/4) and was longer in azotemic dogs than in healthy control dogs (p = 0.003). Thromboelastographic tracings were hypocoagulable in three dogs with AKI and hypercoagulable in 16 dogs (AKI 4/17, CKD 9/10, AoC 3/4). The thromboelastographic values for maximum amplitude (p < 0.001) and global clot strength (p < 0.001) were lower in dogs with AKI than in those with CKD. Conclusion: Hypercoagulable thromboelastographic tracings were observed in dogs with CKD, whereas coagulation times were prolonged in dogs with AKI. However these findings should be validated by further studies

Applications of Micro-Raman Spectroscopy in Cultural Heritage – Examples from the Laboratory for Conservation Research of the Collections Centre of the Swiss National Museums

The paper reports on three applications of micro-Raman spectroscopy which were carried out in the Laboratory for Conservation Research of the Collections Centre of the Swiss National Museums. The first application addresses archaeological questions about three early mediaeval fibulae which were decorated with gemstones. The determination of different corrosion products on pigeon cameras by micro-Raman spectroscopy is described in the second part of this article. The last case study discusses an example from the field of preventive conservation where changes on metal coupons from the so-called Oddy test were analysed

Unsupervised real-world knowledge extraction via disentangled variational autoencoders for photon diagnostics

We present real-world data processing on measured electron time-of-flight data via neural networks. Specifically, the use of disentangled variational autoencoders on data from a diagnostic instrument for online wavelength monitoring at the free electron laser FLASH in Hamburg. Without a-priori knowledge the network is able to find representations of single-shot FEL spectra, which have a low signal-to-noise ratio. This reveals, in a directly human-interpretable way, crucial information about the photon properties. The central photon energy and the intensity as well as very detector-specific features are identified. The network is also capable of data cleaning, i.e. denoising, as well as the removal of artefacts. In the reconstruction, this allows for identification of signatures with very low intensity which are hardly recognisable in the raw data. In this particular case, the network enhances the quality of the diagnostic analysis at FLASH. However, this unsupervised method also has the potential to improve the analysis of other similar types of spectroscopy data

Optimizing a superconducting radio frequency gun using deep reinforcement learning

Superconducting photoelectron injectors are promising for generating highly brilliant pulsed electron beams with high repetition rates and low emittances. Experiments such as ultrafast electron diffraction, experiments at the Terahertz scale, and energy recovery linac applications require such properties. However, optimizing the beam properties is challenging due to the high number of possible machine parameter combinations. This article shows the successful automated optimization of beam properties utilizing an already existing simulation model. To reduce the required computation time, we replace the costly simulation with a faster approximation with a neural network. For optimization, we propose a reinforcement learning approach leveraging the simple computation of the derivative of the approximation. We prove that our approach outperforms standard optimization methods for the required function evaluations given a defined minimum accurac

RNA Sequencing of Collecting Duct Renal Cell Carcinoma Suggests an Interaction between miRNA and Target Genes and a Predominance of Deregulated Solute Carrier Genes

Collecting duct carcinoma (CDC) is a rare renal cell carcinoma subtype with a very poor prognosis. There have been only a few studies on gene expression analysis in CDCs. We compared the gene expression profiles of two CDC cases with those of eight normal tissues of renal cell carcinoma patients. At a threshold of |log2fold-change| ≥1, 3349 genes were upregulated and 1947 genes were downregulated in CDCs compared to the normal samples. Pathway analysis of the deregulated genes revealed that cancer pathways and cell cycle pathways were most prominent in CDCs. The most upregulated gene was keratin 17, and the most downregulated gene was cubilin. Among the most downregulated genes were four solute carrier genes (SLC3A1, SLC9A3, SLC26A7, and SLC47A1). The strongest negative correlations between miRNAs and mRNAs were found between the downregulated miR-374b-5p and its upregulated target genes HIST1H3B, HK2, and SLC7A11 and between upregulated miR-26b-5p and its downregulated target genes PPARGC1A, ALDH6A1, and MARC2. An upregulation of HK2 and a downregulation of PPARGC1A, ALDH6A1, and MARC2 were observed at the protein level. Survival analysis of the cancer genome atlas (TCGA) dataset showed for the first time that low gene expression of MARC2, cubilin, and SLC47A1 and high gene expression of KRT17 are associated with poor overall survival in clear cell renal cell carcinoma patients. Altogether, we identified dysregulated protein-coding genes, potential miRNA-target interactions, and prognostic markers that could be associated with CDC