Opening Public Transit Data in Germany

Open data has been recognized as a valuable resource, and public institutions have taken to publishing their data under open licenses, also in Germany. However, German public transit agencies are still reluctant to publish their schedules as open data. Also, two widely used data exchange formats used in German transit planning are proprietary, with no documentation publicly available. Through this work, one of the proprietary formats was reverse-engineered, and a transformation process into the open GTFS schedule format was developed. This process allowed a partnering transit operator to publish their schedule as open data. Also, through a survey taken with German transit authorities and operators, the prevalence of transit data exchange formats, and reservations concerning open transit data were evaluated. The survey brought a series of issues to light which serve as obstacles for opening up transit data. Addressing the issues found through this work, and partnering with open-minded transit authorities to further develop transit data publishing processes can serve as a foundation for wider adoption of publishing open transit data in Germany

Technik als Politik.: Zur Transformation gegenwärtiger Grenzregimes der EU

The article focuses from a micro-political perspective on the fundamental change taking place within contemporary border regimes. It asks for the political dimensions of the technological upgrading of surveillance and control of the border. It will be demonstrated that the modes of producing security are in no way of homogeneous political nature. Firstly, there is a kind of military-style politics of radical exclusion and walling-off at work, which can be observed in the technology and the aligned institutional and tactical aspects of the SIVE-project. Secondly, border protection, e. g., on airports or at the Eurotunnel operates with step-by-step procedures and a machine-like mode of producing suspicion, seeming to produce a high degree of democratic and liberal legitimacy. Thirdly, with the combination of biometric identification and data bank management the mode of producing security tends to result in authoritarian surveillance and control. However, this in no way is the permanent operational mode of surveillance and control, but it is one control-level within a flexible regime, able to turn rapidly from liberal to authoritarian modes of political regulation

Past-as-Past in counterfactual desire reports: a view from Japanese

The semantic contribution of Fake Past in counterfactual expressions has been actively debated in recent semantic literature. This study deepens our current understanding of this natural language phenomenon by digging into the behavior of Past tense in Japanese counterfactual desire reports. We show that  the Past-as-Past approach to Fake Past makes correct predictions about its semantic behavior

Risk and security: diagnosis of the present in the context of (post-)modern insecurities

This essay claims that the upsurge of security nowadays is not caused by specific events such as 9/11, Fukushima, or similar catastrophes. Our assumption is, in contrast, that it is the constitution of functionally differentiated societies itself which allows the security and risk discourse to be applied to all types of issues and phenomena, even though security and risk have only went viral as universal societal problems in the late 20th century. We will flesh out this approach using three bodies of work essential to the German debate. With regard to social policy, Franz-Xaver Kaufmann argues that the viral nature of the security issue arises from the fact that the security concept in modern society is split into system security and self-confidence. Niklas Luhmann’s concept of risk – stemming from systems theory – shows that the prominence of the topic is the result of the intrinsically modern compulsion of having to forejudge an uncertain future. In contrast, Ulrich Beck’s work on (global) risk societies is centred on the catastrophic potential inherent in (post-)modern risks as a cause for the rise of security debates. The sociological analysis employed here not only explains the rise of risk and security topics; it also provides society with a characterization of itself, which in turn can re-affect society and ultimately motivate a different historiographical self-description

No X-Ray Excess from the HESS J1741-302 Region except a New Intermediate Polar Candidate

With the Suzaku satellite, we observed an unidentified TeV gamma-ray source HESS J1741$-$302 and its surroundings. No diffuse or point-like X-ray sources are detected from the bright southern emission peak of HESS J1741$-$302. From its neighborhood, we found a new intermediate polar candidate at the position of (\alpha, \delta)_{\rm J2000.0} = (\timeform{17h40m35.6s}, \timeform{-30D14m16s}), which is designated as Suzaku J174035.6$-$301416. The spectrum of Suzaku J174035.6$-$301416 exhibits emission lines at the energy of 6.4, 6.7 and 7.0 keV, which can be assigned as the K$\alpha$ lines from neutral, He-like and H-like iron, respectively. A coherent pulsation is found at a period of 432.1 $\pm$ 0.1 s. The pulse profile is quasi-sinusoidal in the hard X-ray band (4$-$8 keV), but is more complicated in the soft X-ray band (1$-$3 keV). The moderate period of pulsation, the energy flux, and the presence of the iron K$\alpha$ lines indicate that Suzaku J174035.6$-$301416 is likely an intermediate polar, a subclass of magnetized white dwarf binaries (cataclysmic variables). Based on these discoveries, we give some implications on the origin of GCDX and brief comments on HESS J1741$-$302 and PSR B1737$-$30.Comment: Accepted by PAS

Toward Novel Vaccines Against Tuberculosis: Current Hopes and Obstacles

Approximately 2 million people die of tuberculosis (TB) each year. The current vaccine, Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG), albeit widely employed, does not protect against adult pulmonary disease, and new vaccines are urgently needed to reduce the incidence of TB worldwide. New insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie the interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and its host have been exploited to develop novel vaccine candidates that recently have entered clinical trials. This review provides a brief overview of different approaches toward a new vaccination strategy and summarizes major challenges for the next decade