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Berlin Text System 3.1 User Manual : Editorial Software of the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae Project
(2018)
The Berlin Text System (BTS) Version 3.1 manual introduces a Java-based software designed for editing and annotating Ancient Egyptian texts. BTS integrates a CouchDB database and an Elastic search engine to support its main components: Text Editor, Lemma List, Thesaurus, and Abstract Text.
The Text Editor facilitates transliteration, translation, lemmatization, and annotations, allowing for detailed lexical and grammatical analysis. Hieroglyphic transcriptions can be entered via a specialized Hieroglyph Type Writer based on JSesh.
The Lemma List ist ready to contain pre-Coptic lemmata, divided into Hieroglyphic/Hieratic and Demotic scripts, providing comprehensive entries with passport data, transliterations, and translations.
The Thesaurus allows for metadata enrichment of texts with controlled vocabulary for consistent data management, supporting contextual analysis through structured metadata.
The manual covers BTS's user interface, including menu bar, toolbar, status bar, and workspace, divided into views for each main component. Features like Revision History for tracking and restoring versions, indexing, and search capabilities enhance user efficiency. BTS is a powerful tool for the study and preservation of Ancient Egyptian texts, integrating advanced database and search technologies with specialized textual analysis tools.
New, precise genetic engineering methods for genome alteration in living cells, which can be classed together under the generic heading “genome surgery”,are currently sparking a revolution in biomedical research. The Interdisciplinary Research Group Gene Technology Report is, in principle, in favour of research on these promising new methods for the medical sector. However, for the time being, it has clearly spoken out against gene surgery experiments on the human germ line, which could also enter the realm of possibility thanks to these methods.The research group, therefore, supports the call, which has already been discussed at length in scientific and public circles, for a moratorium for germ line experiments. The period of the moratorium should be used to debate the experimental,
ethical and legal aspects of germ line therapy in an open, transparent
and critical manner with a view to more clearly defining the opportunities and
risks of these technologies for man and nature, and to elaborating recommendations for future regulations. The goal of this analysis is to promote a discourse of this kind.
From exclusion to inclusion : improving clinical research in vulnerable populations ; memorandum
(2014)
Therapeutic care for vulnerable populations – meaning patient groups such as underage children and the mentally ill that have limited or no capacity for giving informed consent – is severely lacking. Thus, for example, a great portion of pharmaceuticals used in the treatment of children and youth have not been specifically designed for these groups, which often results in side effects that are disproportionate to those associated with such medicines when used by adults. Moreover, vulnerable populations are at times faced with having no therapies at all for some of their ailments, such that children and dementia sufferers, for example, are often considered to be “therapeutic orphans”. It is therefore urgent that clinical research be carried out among vulnerable populations in order to improve their therapeutic possibilities. The Clinical Research on Vulnerable Populations Research Group – a cooperative effort between the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin, Germany) and the European Academy of Technology Assessment (Bad Neuenahr, Germany) – has set itself the task of analyzing the state of clinical research on vulnerable populations so as to be able to develop suggestions for improving future research of this kind. The results of this work are presented in the following memorandum, which seeks to portray the state-of-the-art in this domain while also assessing the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary ethical and medical perspectives related to it. The memorandum is primarily oriented towards those in the relevant scientific disciplines who can benefit from obtaining an informed consensus regarding the current state of the discussions taking place around this topic.
The introductory personal remarks refer to my motivations for choosing research projects, and for moving from physics to molecular biology and then to development, with Hydra as a model system. Historically, Trembley’s discovery of Hydra regeneration in 1744 was the begin¬ning of developmental biology as we understand it, with passionate debates about preformation versus de novo generation, mechanisms versus organisms. In fact, seemingly conflicting bottom-up and top-down concepts are both required in combination to understand development. In modern terms, this means analysing the molecules involved, as well as searching for physical principles underlying development within systems of molecules, cells and tissues. During the last decade, molecular biology has provided surprising and impressive evidence that the same types of mol¬ecules and molecular systems are involved in pattern formation in a wide range of organisms, including coelenterates like Hydra, and thus appear to have been “invented” early in evolution. Likewise, the features of certain systems, especially those of developmental regulation, are found in many different organisms. This includes the generation of spatial structures by the interplay of self-enhancing activation and “lateral” inhibitory effects of wider range, which is a main topic of my essay. Hydra regeneration is a particularly clear model for the formation of defined patterns within initially near-uniform tissues. In conclusion, this essay emphasizes the analysis of development in terms of physical laws, including the application of mathematics, and insists that Hydra was, and will continue to be, a rewarding model for understanding general features of embryogenesis and regeneration.
The current debates on the demographic transformation have been characterised on the one hand by declining birth rates and on the other by increasing life expectancy. Such debates usually focus on the consequences for society, which are frequently described in dark terms. In this booklet, by contrast, you will find analyses and suggestions on how to improve the situation of children and parents to make it easier to realise the desire to have children.
Numerous high-quality primary text sources—in the context of the curation project described here, this means full-text transcriptions (and corresponding image scans) of German works originating from the 15th to the 19th centuries—are scattered among the web or stored remotely. E.g., transcriptions of historical sources are stored locally on degrading recording media and cannot be found, let alone accessed by third parties. Additionally, idiosyncratic, project-specific markup conventions and uncommon, out-of-date or inflexible storage formats often hinder further usage and analysis of the data. Often, textual resources are accompanied by scarce, insufficient or inaccurate bibliographic information, which is only one further reason why valuable resources, even if available on the web, remain undiscovered by and are of little use to the wider research community. The integration of these dispersed primary text sources into the sustainable, web and centres-based research infrastructure of CLARIN-D will be an important step to solve this problem. The Full Paper illustrates an exemplary approach taken by the »Deutsches Textarchiv« (DTA; www.deutschestextarchiv.de) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) to integrate dispersed textual resources and corresponding image scans from various sources into a large historical text corpus of its own and to insert these into the infrastructure of CLARIN-D.
The example of Spain illustrates how the production of socio-ecological scales is centred on the social transformation of nature and the construction of socio-ecological and political-ecological scalar gestalts. Concrete geographies, with choreographies of uneven and shifting social power relations, are etched into these ecological, social, political or institutional scalar configurations. These processes are infused with contested and contestable strategies of individuals and social groups, who mobilise spatial scales as part of struggles for control and empowerment, and contest the power geometries of extant scalar gestalts. Needless to say, the mobilisation of scale, the occupation of geographical scale, and the production of scale are central moments in such processes of socio-spatial change. Struggling for the command of scale, or strategizing around excluding particular groups from the performative capabilities of certain scales, shapes social processes, defines relative empowerment and disempowerment and gives rise to very specific socio-spatial relations.
A reaction to the article „The Lost Archive“, The Wall Street Journal 12.1.2008, page 1 (US edition) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120008793352784631.html The belief in the myth that old manuscripts should be mysterious and powerful is part and parcel of the age of Modernity. That such expectations were operative in the discussion on the Qumran fragments is still remembered, and more recently the Da Vinci Code, in itself a quite shallow story, sold extremely well. The fact that the Wall Street Journal placed an article on the “lost Bergsträsser-film archive” of Qur’anic manuscripts on its front page on 12th of January seems to be due to the myth of “textual wars” taking place in the world.
Understanding cooperative human behaviour depends on insights into the biological basis of human altruism, as well as into socio-cultural development. In terms of evolutionary theory, kinship and reciprocity are well established as underlying cooperativeness. Reasons will be given suggesting an additional source, the capability of a cognition-based empathy that may have evolved as a by-product of strategic thought. An assessment of the range, the intrinsic limitations, and the conditions for activation of human cooperativeness would profit from a systems approach combining biological and socio-cultural aspects. However, this is not yet the prevailing attitude among contemporary social and biological scientists who often hold prejudiced views of each other's notions. It is therefore worth noticing that the desirable integration of aspects has already been attempted, in remarkable and encouraging ways, in the history of thought on human nature. I will exemplify this with the ideas of the fourteenth century Arab-Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun. He set out to explicate human cooperativeness - "asabiyah" - as having a biological basis in common descent, but being extendable far beyond within social systems, though in a relatively unstable and attenuated fashion. He combined psychological and material factors in a dynamical theory of the rise and decline of political rulership, and related general social phenomena to basic features of human behaviour influenced by kinship, expectation of reciprocity, and empathic emotions.
The concept of ecosystem services was developed capitalizing on ecological knowledge that ecosystems perform various functions like increasing or retarding water fluxes, cleansing or polluting water, modifying microclimatic conditions, sustaining or impoverishing biological diversity and so on. There is growing body of ecological knowledge that management of agricultural landscape for its structural diversity is becoming the important pillar of the sustainability of rural areas. Programmes of environmental protection in rural areas should aim not only at introduction environmental friendly technologies of cultivation within farm. They should also be concerned with challenge of how to increase the resistance or resilience of the whole landscape against threats. Recognition of non -commodity effects of diversified agricultural landscape formed by introduction into cultivated fields shelterbelts, stretches of meadows, small mid -field water reservoirs and other biogeochemical barriers provide new options to combine societal demands with environment production. Co -adaptation of human activities with landscape services relies on policy that economic processes should be conformed with ecological processes operating in the region which are enhancing landscape capacities for naturalization of pollution, regeneration of wastes, recycling of water recourses as well as increasing resistance or resilience of the whole system to stresses caused by production of goals required by society. Recognition of system multifunctionality helps to achieve that goal. The knowledge on processes underpinning ecosystem services opened new frontiers for management of landscapes' structures towards enhancing their capacities to deliver requested services. Forests and shelterbelts show similar functions in the landscape but network of shelterbelts perform many similar services like forests growing on smaller part of landscape area. According to studies carried out by Research Centre for Agricultural and Forest Environment in Poland the following functions of shelterbelts are similar to those shown by forests when 4 -5% of the landscape area is under the network of shelterbelts: - modify the microclimatic conditions and heat and water balances; - control the water chemistry composition (control of diffuse pollution); - limit water and wind erosion; - protect the biodiversity; - increase the survival of the game animals; - enhance recreational value of the region; - provide wood and other products; - promote aesthetic values of the countryside. In this review the first four functions of agricultural landscape within Turew neighborhood will be presented.
With the present report the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities wants to draw attention to the results of one of its interdisciplinary projects, which are published elsewhere in more detail. The authors believe that their particular approach to the subject of "waste energy recovery", in combination with an interdisciplinary perspective, suggests a new way of discussing energy problems that has the potential to lead to qualified statements...
Ancient Greek philosophers were the first to postulate the possibility of explaining nature in theoretical terms and to initiate attempts at this. With the rise of monotheistic religions of revelation claiming supremacy over human reason and envisaging a new world to come, studies of the natural order of the transient world were widely considered undesirable. Later, in the Middle Ages, the desire for human understanding of nature in terms of reason was revived. This article is concerned with the fundamental reversal of attitudes, from “undesirable” to “desirable”, that eventually led into the foundations of modern science. One of the earliest, most ingenious and most interesting personalities involved was Eriugena, a theologian at the Court of Charles the Bald in the 9th century. Though understanding what we call nature is only one of the several aspects of his theological work, his line of thought implies a turn into a pro-scientific direction: the natural order is to be understood in abstract terms of ‘primordial causes’; understanding nature is considered to be the will of God; man encompasses the whole of creation in a physical as well as a mental sense. Basically similar ideas on the reconciliation of scientific rationality and monotheistic religions of revelation were conceived, independently and nearly simultaneously, by the Arab philosopher al-Kindi in Bagdad. Eriugena was more outspoken in his claim that reason is superior to authority. This claim is implicit in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa with his emphasis on human mental creativity as the image of God’s creativity; and it is the keynote of Galileo’s ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’ some 800 years later, the manifesto expressing basic attitudes of modern science. This article in English is based on the monography (in German): A. Gierer “Eriugena, al-Kindi, Nikolaus von Kues - Protagonisten einer wissenschaftsfreundlichen Wende im philosophischen und theologischen Denken”, Acta Historica Leopoldina 29 (1999), Barth Verlag in MVH Verlage Heidelberg, ISBN: 3-335-00652-6
The generation of viral mutants in vitro was demonstrated by treatment of the isolated RNA of Tobacco Mosaic Virus by nitrous acid. This agent causes deaminations converting cytosine into uracil, and adenine into hypoxanthine. Our assay for mutagenesis was the production of local lesions on a tobacco variety on which the untreated strain produces systemic infections only. A variety of different mutants are generated in this way. Quantitative analysis of the kinetics of mutagenesis leads to the conclusion that alteration of a single out of the 6000 nucleotides of the viral RNA is sufficient for causing a mutation.
Within the sedimentation diagram of infective RNA preparations isolated from Tobacco Mosaic Virus, undegraded molecules form a sharp peak with a molecular weight corresponding to the total RNA content of the virus particle. Degradation kinetics by ribonuclease is of the linear, single-target type, indicating that the RNA is single-stranded. The intact RNA of a virus particle thus forms one big single-stranded molecule. Quantitative evaluation of the effect degradation by RNA-ase on the infectivity of the RNA shows that the integrity of the entire molecule is required for its biological activity.
The development of modern science has depended strongly on specific features of the cultures involved; however, its results are widely and transculturally accepted and applied. The science and technology of electricity, for example, emerged as a specific product of post-Renaissance Europe, rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition that encourages explanations of nature in theoretical terms. It did not evolve in China presumably because such encouragement was missing. The transcultural acceptance of modern science and technology is postulated to be due, in part, to the common biological dispositions underlying human cognition, with generalizable capabilities of abstract, symbolic and strategic thought. These faculties of the human mind are main prerequisites for dynamic cultural development and differentiation. They appear to have evolved up to a stage of hunters and gatherers perhaps some 100 000 years ago. However, the extent of the correspondence between some constructions of the human mind and the order of nature, as revealed by science, is a late insight of the last two centuries. Unless we subscribe to extreme forms of constructivism or historical relativism, we may take the success and the formal structure of science as indications of a close, intrinsic relation between the physical and the mental, between the order of nature and the structure of human cognition. At the metatheoretical level, however, modern science is consistent with philosophical and cultural diversity.
Upon separation of the protein from the nucleic acid component of tobacco mosaic virus by phenol, using a fast and gentle procedure, the nucleic acid is infective in assays on tobacco leaves. A series of qualitative and quantitative control experiments demonstrates that the biological activity cannot depend on residual proteins in the preparation, but is a property of isolated nucleic acid which is thus the genetic material of the virus.