A quantum of solace? European peace movements during the Cold War and their elective affinities

The article discusses the European dimension of antinuclear protests in Europe during the Cold War. In conceptual terms, explanations of peace movement mobilisation during the early 1980s as result of a value change to post-materialist values are criticised. Contrary to this interpretation, peace activists, in particular women’s peace protests, stressed the material shortcomings they faced as a results of expenditure on nuclear armaments. In terms of their European character, antinuclear activists during the first mobilisation wave until 1963 developed substantial transnational contacts, but kept an orientation towards their nation as an identity space. During the campaign against the Euromissiles in the early 1980s, an increasingly dense network of elective affinities according to – for instance – denomination or professional expertise emerged. Attempts to connect peace activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain in a ›détente from below‹, however, eere hampered by practical problems and divergent perceptions of the political situation. Even while movement activists interacted and coordinated their efforts across national borders, they did not simply merge into a European civil society. Antinuclear peace movement activists, the article argues, did not constitute a European subject

The Gospel of Psychology: Therapeutic Concepts and the Scientification of Pastoral Care in the West German Catholic Church, 1945-1980

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has argued, any thorough assessment of religious change in the twentieth century has to pay attention to the interplay between the established churches and social forces in fields of society as different as the media, the economy, the arts, and the sciences. It is the aim of this article to stress both the emergence and the importance of hybrids between organized religion and the human sciences in the decades since the 1950s. I take the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as a perhaps somewhat unlikely but also illuminating example, although all major Christian denominations both in Germany and in other Western European countries have made ample use of social science methods such as statistics, sociology, and opinion-polling during that period. From the broad range of scientific approaches employed by the Catholic Church, the focus of this article is on the use of psychological techniques used for purposes of therapeutic intervention, or, in Anglo-Saxon parlance, counseling. The emerging psychologization of religious topics and pastoral action is seen as merely one example of the immense significance that the “psy disciplines” of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology have attained within the forms of knowledge and practice deployed to describe the “Self.” This process can also be interpreted as a particularly striking example of the “scientification of the social” in the twentieth century, that is, of the process in which human science concepts have shaped new terms and categories for the description of social contexts and offered forms of practical intervention in social problems

Convergence behavior that controls adaptive wind tunnel walls near the test section in the high angle of attack range

The NACA 0012 profile at Mach 0.5 was investigated in a wind tunnel with adaptive walls. It is found that adaptation of the flexible walls is possible in the high angle of attack range on both sides of maximum lift. Oil film photographs of the flow at the profile surface show three dimensional effects in the region of the corners between the profile and the sidewall. It is concluded that pure two dimensional separated flow is not possible

Noninvasively improving the orbit-response matrix while continuously correcting the orbit

Based on continuously recorded beam positions and corrector excitations from, for example, a closed-orbit feedback system we describe an algorithm that continuously updates an estimate of the orbit response matrix. The speed of convergence can be increased by adding very small perturbations, so-called dither, to the corrector excitations. Estimates for the rate of convergence and the asymptotically achievable accuracies are provided

Cerebellum to motor cortex paired associative stimulation induces bidirectional STDP-like plasticity in human motor cortex

The cerebellum is crucially important for motor control and adaptation. Recent non-invasive brain stimulation studies have indicated the possibility to alter the excitability of the cerebellum and its projections to the contralateral motor cortex, with behavioral consequences on motor control and adaptation. Here we sought to induce bidirectional spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP)-like modifications of motor cortex (M1) excitability by application of paired associative stimulation (PAS) in healthy subjects. Conditioning stimulation over the right lateral cerebellum (CB) preceded focal transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the left M1 hand area at an interstimulus interval of 2 ms (CB→M1 PAS(2 ms)), 6 ms (CB→M1 PAS(6 ms)) or 10 ms (CB→M1 PAS(10 ms)) or randomly alternating intervals of 2 and 10 ms (CB→M1 PAS(Control)). Effects of PAS on M1 excitability were assessed by the motor-evoked potential (MEP) amplitude, short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI), intracortical facilitation (ICF) and cerebellar-motor cortex inhibition (CBI) in the first dorsal interosseous muscle of the right hand. CB→M1 PAS(2 ms) resulted in MEP potentiation, CB→M1 PAS(6 ms) and CB→M1 PAS(10 ms) in MEP depression, and CB→M1 PAS(Control) in no change. The MEP changes lasted for 30-60 min after PAS. SICI and CBI decreased non-specifically after all PAS protocols, while ICF remained unaltered. The physiological mechanisms underlying these MEP changes are carefully discussed. Findings support the notion of bidirectional STDP-like plasticity in M1 mediated by associative stimulation of the cerebello-dentato-thalamo-cortical pathway and M1. Future studies may investigate the behavioral significance of this plasticity

CLIC Post-Collision Diagnostics

We discuss non-conventional diagnostics for the beam line between the interaction point and the beam dump of CLIC. The main focus is put on the beamstrahlung monitor, but also other systems such as a coherent pair monitor, tail monitors, and interferometric beam dump thermometer are considered