К вопросу о философском осмыслении экологических проблем

Вопросы по охране окружающей среды стали актуальной темой для обсуждения на протяжении последних 20-30 лет. Глобальная экологическая ситуация заметно ухудшается. Для философии проблемы взаимодействия человека, общества и природы, их единения видятся в духовном постижении человеком самого себя и природы. Поэтому, появившиеся новые экологические проблемы ставят перед философами задачу поиска новых гармоничных способов восстановления отношений человека с естественной средой. Один из них - понимание модели дальнейшего устройства социума как эколого-информационной культуры. Questions on environmental protection became a hot topic for discussion for the past 20-30 years. The global environmental situation is deteriorating significantly. For the philosophy of the problem of interaction between man, society and nature, their unity seen in the spiritual comprehension of the man himself and nature. Therefore, new environmental problems pose philosophers the task of finding new ways to restore the harmonious human relationships with the natural environment. One of them - the understanding of the model of society as a device to further environmental information culture

Approximate information filtering in structured peer-to-peer networks

Today';s content providers are naturally distributed and produce large amounts of information every day, making peer-to-peer data management a promising approach offering scalability, adaptivity to dynamics, and failure resilience. In such systems, subscribing with a continuous query is of equal importance as one-time querying since it allows the user to cope with the high rate of information production and avoid the cognitive overload of repeated searches. In the information filtering setting users specify continuous queries, thus subscribing to newly appearing documents satisfying the query conditions. Contrary to existing approaches providing exact information filtering functionality, this doctoral thesis introduces the concept of approximate information filtering, where users subscribe to only a few selected sources most likely to satisfy their information demand. This way, efficiency and scalability are enhanced by trading a small reduction in recall for lower message traffic. This thesis contains the following contributions: (i) the first architecture to support approximate information filtering in structured peer-to-peer networks, (ii) novel strategies to select the most appropriate publishers by taking into account correlations among keywords, (iii) a prototype implementation for approximate information retrieval and filtering, and (iv) a digital library use case to demonstrate the integration of retrieval and filtering in a unified system.Heutige Content-Anbieter sind verteilt und produzieren riesige Mengen an Daten jeden Tag. Daher wird die Datenhaltung in Peer-to-Peer Netzen zu einem vielversprechenden Ansatz, der Skalierbarkeit, Anpassbarkeit an Dynamik und Ausfallsicherheit bietet. Für solche Systeme besitzt das Abonnieren mit Daueranfragen die gleiche Wichtigkeit wie einmalige Anfragen, da dies dem Nutzer erlaubt, mit der hohen Datenrate umzugehen und gleichzeitig die Überlastung durch erneutes Suchen verhindert. Im Information Filtering Szenario legen Nutzer Daueranfragen fest und abonnieren dadurch neue Dokumente, die die Anfrage erfüllen. Im Gegensatz zu vorhandenen Ansätzen für exaktes Information Filtering führt diese Doktorarbeit das Konzept von approximativem Information Filtering ein. Ein Nutzer abonniert nur wenige ausgewählte Quellen, die am ehesten die Anfrage erfüllen werden. Effizienz und Skalierbarkeit werden verbessert, indem Recall gegen einen geringeren Nachrichtenverkehr eingetauscht wird. Diese Arbeit beinhaltet folgende Beiträge: (i) die erste Architektur für approximatives Information Filtering in strukturierten Peer-to-Peer Netzen, (ii) Strategien zur Wahl der besten Anbieter unter Berücksichtigung von Schlüsselwörter-Korrelationen, (iii) ein Prototyp, der approximatives Information Retrieval und Filtering realisiert und (iv) ein Anwendungsfall für Digitale Bibliotheken, der beide Funktionalitäten in einem vereinten System aufzeigt

Case in Namdeutsch

This paper focusses on case marking in informal Namibian German (so called Namdeutsch). Whilst the use of nominative and accusative case is stable and similar to Standard German, there is a considerable amount of variation with regard to the dative case. This phenomenon is analysed in detail using corpus and questionnaire data. Multifactorial analyses reveal that several sociolinguistic and grammatical factors have a significant impact on the language use in this particular domain. Subsequently, the results are compared with other extraterritorial varieties of German and various similarities are found. This supports the idea that there are variety/language overarching principles at work

Mechanical losses in low loss materials studied by Cryogenic Resonant Acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectroscopy)

Mechanical losses of crystalline silicon and calcium fluoride have been analyzed in the temperature range from 5 to 300 K by our novel mechanical spectroscopy method, cryogenic resonant acoustic spectroscopy of bulk materials (CRA spectrocopy). The focus lies on the interpretation of the measured data according to phonon-phonon interactions and defect induced losses in consideration of the excited mode shape.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of the PHONONS 2007, submitted to Journal of Physics: Conference Serie

Towards Assessing the Success of Social Software in Corporate Environments

Induced by the widespread use of social software in personal contexts, companies wish to profit from its advantages. Owing to limited IT budgets and the need to justify investments in such systems, it is important to assess the benefits of employing social software in the corporate context. In this paper, we propose conceptual models for assessing the success of two specific types of social software: wikis and weblogs. These conceptual models are based on the DeLone and McLean IS Success Model as well as on an extensive review of social software literature. The two resulting models form the foundation for future empirical work in this area

An analysis of MRI derived cortical complexity in premature-born adults : regional patterns, risk factors, and potential significance

Premature birth bears an increased risk for aberrant brain development concerning its structure and function. Cortical complexity (CC) expresses the fractal dimension of the brain surface and changes during neurodevelopment. We hypothesized that CC is altered after premature birth and associated with long-term cognitive development. One-hundred-and-one very premature-born adults (gestational age <32 weeks and/or birth weight <1500 ​g) and 111 term-born adults were assessed by structural MRI and cognitive testing at 26 years of age. CC was measured based on MRI by vertex-wise estimation of fractal dimension. Cognitive performance was measured based on Griffiths-Mental-Development-Scale (at 20 months) and Wechsler-Adult-Intelligence-Scales (at 26 years). In premature-born adults, CC was decreased bilaterally in large lateral temporal and medial parietal clusters. Decreased CC was associated with lower gestational age and birth weight. Furthermore, decreased CC in the medial parietal cortices was linked with reduced full-scale IQ of premature-born adults and mediated the association between cognitive development at 20 months and IQ in adulthood. Results demonstrate that CC is reduced in very premature-born adults in temporoparietal cortices, mediating the impact of prematurity on impaired cognitive development. These data indicate functionally relevant long-term alterations in the brain’s basic geometry of cortical organization in prematurity

Toxicity of ethanol and acetaldehyde in hepatocytes treated with ursodeoxycholic or tauroursodeoxycholic acid

AbstractIn hepatocytes ethanol (EtOH) is metabolized to acetaldehyde and to acetate. Ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) and tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA) are said to protect the liver against alcohol. We investigated the influence of ethanol and acetaldehyde on alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH)-containing human hepatoma cells (SK-Hep-1) and the protective effects of UDCA and TUDCA (0.01 and 0.1 mM). Cells were incubated with 100 and 200 mM ethanol, concentrations in a heavy drinker, or acetaldehyde. Treatment with acetaldehyde or ethanol resulted in a decrease of metabolic activity and viability of hepatocytes and an increase of cell membrane permeability. During simultaneous incubation with bile acids, the metabolic activity was better preserved by UDCA than by TUDCA. Due to its more polar character, acetaldehyde mostly damaged the superficial, more polar domain of the membrane. TUDCA reduced this effect, UDCA was less effective. Damage caused by ethanol was smaller and predominantly at the more apolar site of the cell membrane. In contrast, preincubation with TUDCA or UDCA strongly decreased metabolic activity and cell viability and led to an appreciable increase of membrane permeability. TUDCA and UDCA only in rather high concentrations reduce ethanol and acetaldehyde-induced toxicity in a different way, when incubated simultaneously with hepatocytes. In contrast, preincubation with bile acids intensified cell damage. Therefore, the protective effect of UDCA or TUDCA in alcohol- or acetaldehyde-treated SK-Hep-1 cells remains dubious

Smart-Its - communication and sensing technology for UbiComp environments

More and more Ubiquitous computing scenarios arise where computers are embedded into everyday objects as secondary ariefacts. The need for a generic platform to enhance such artifacts is addressed by the Smart-Its project. TecOs Smart- Its are small-scale embedded computer devices that can be easily attached to everyday objects and simply programmed for a special task. Just like paper Post-Its are able to add some information to an object a Smart-Its could add some computing, perception and communication capability to an object. All this capability was integrated into the tiny Smart-Its board itself that is able to operate without any additional infrastructure. This paper introduces the architecture of the Smart-Its hardware, the design decisions for the hardware itself and presents experiences we made while constructing and operating these devices; some of these experience are also based on the deployment and use of the first 160 Smart-Its devices