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- Akademienvorhaben Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (14)
- Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe Globaler Wandel (13)
- Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe Gegenworte - Hefte für den Disput über Wissen (8)
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- Akademienvorhaben Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (6)
- Akademienvorhaben Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache. Text- und Wissenskultur im alten Ägypten (6)
Untersucht wird die Rolle der Psalmen im christlichen Gottesdienst, wie sie in der spätantiken christlichen Exegese deutlich wird.
Single-cell analyses comprise a multitude of analytical methods that share a common feature, namely the focus on individual cells. This is in contrast to previous methods that provided summarized data for cell clusters, groups of cells, tissues and organs. The new field offers huge potential not only for basic research, but also for medical and biotechnological applications, as it opens up new levels in the context-related and personal interpretation of biological interconnections. This brochure on single-cell analysis provides an overview on the new possibilities from the viewpoint of developmental biology, biomedicine and bioinformatics, but also addresses possible social im-plications and consequences.
The neuronal dynamics of auditory language comprehension : (Akademievorlesung am 12. November 1998)
(1999)
Introduction : how much is enough, but not too much ; (Ernst-Mayr-Lecture am 27. Oktober 1998)
(1999)
Research in Silicon Valley
(1998)
The computer has come to play a transformative role in the ways we model, store, process and study text. Nevertheless, we cannot yet claim to have realised the promises of the digital medium: the organisation and dissemination of scholarly knowledge through the exchange, reuse and enrichment of data sets. Despite the acclaimed interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities, current digital research takes place in a closed environment and rarely surpasses the traditional boundaries of a field. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to continue questioning the models we use and whether they are actually suitable for our scholarly needs. There’s a risk that the affordances and limitations of a prevailing model may blind us to aspects it doesn’t support.
In her talk, Elli Bleeker discusses different technologies to model data with respect to their expressive power and their potential to address the needs of the scholarly community. Within this framework, she introduces a new data model for text, Text-As-Graph (TAG), and it’s reference implementation Alexandria, a text repository system. The TAG model allows researchers to store, query, and analyse text that is encoded from different perspectives. Alexandria thus stimulates new ways of looking at textual objects, facilitates the exchange of information across disciplines, and secures textual knowledge for future endeavours. From a philosophical perspective, the TAG model and the workflow of Alexandria raise compelling questions about our notions of textuality, and prompt us to reconsider how we can best model the variety of textual dimensions.
When managing large quantities of data, it is a common solution to utilize a centralized data management software to forge a connection between metadata and the data objects themselves. In case of text-based objects without any attached metadata, it is easy for humans to contextualize these objects by recognizing patterns such as filenames, titles, authors etc. This task becomes a challenge when dealing with non-text-based objects like images in the cultural heritage domain. Without metadata or expert knowledge, it becomes difficult to estimate the creation date of a painting or tell the name of its painter. Thus, the ability to contextualize data depends on whether there is a working connection between the metadata store and the data object itself. This connection fails as soon as the file is moved on the file system without having these changes also applied in the corresponding
data base, or when the file is shared without a reference to its original location. This paper presents an approach to overcome that type of co-dependency by utilizing XMP to embed cultural heritage metadata directly into image files to ensure their location-independent long-term preservation. The “Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi” Germany (CVMA) project serves as an example use-case.
quoteSalute strives to make data of digital scholarly editions of letters (DSELs) accessible in a playful fashion by enabling users to integrate salutations from DSELs in their own email correspondence. The foundation of quoteSalute is a curated TEI-XML text corpus which has been created by extracting <salute>-tags from TEI-XML-encoded DSELs. For providing users with fitting salutations, we annotated the data regarding language, level of politeness and intended gender of sender and receiver.
The short paper introduces the concept of possible branches of double-stranded DNA (later sometimes called palindromes): Certain sequences of nucleotides may be followed, after a short unpaired stretch, by a complementary sequence in reversed order, such that each DNA strand can fold back on itself, and the DNA assumes a cruciform or tree-like structure. This is postulated to interact with regulatory proteins.
Socioeconomic inequalities are functions not only of intrinsic differences between persons or groups, but also of the dynamics of their interactions. Inequalities can arise and become stabilized if there are advantages (such as generalized wealth including “human capital”) which are self-enhancing, whereas depletion of limiting resources is widely distributed. A recent theory of biological pattern formation has been generalized, adapted and applied to deal with this process. Applications include models for the non-Gaussian distribution of personal income and wealth, for overall economic growth in relation to inequalities and for effects of uncoupling strategies between developing and developed countries. Note added after publication: The equations (14) for the model of the income distribution, with its characteristic non-Gaussian extension towards higher incomes (fig.4), are closely related to the Fokker-Planck equation that is widely applied in many fields of physics.
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.
Current financial and monetary difficulties in Europe are overshadowing the issue of a lack of common European identity. 200 years of nation states seem to have suppressed 1800 years of a history shaped by mutual enrichment in politics, science and the arts – a European cultural heritage. It is for the humanities and social sciences (SSH) to research, document and preserve this heritage, where the European science academies play a major role. However, a pan-European research programme on European cultural heritage and identity is still lacking, and, in comparison to the rest of the European SSH research landscape, the science academies are terra incognita. This book provides an analytical report of the first survey of basic research in the SSH conducted by the European scientific academies and related research organisations. It not only provides greatly needed information about this important area of the European research landscape, but also investigates the potential for a pan-European academies’ research programme in the SSH (including a corresponding digital infrastructure) that could strengthen the integration of European research into cultural heritage and identity. The main topic of this publication is the working practices of the projects surveyed with a focus on: o the science academies of Europe o research fields and topics o running times and funding o staff and early-stage researchers o research sites and access to research material o digital research practices o publication, dissemination and visibility o international collaboration o project evaluation
For a fistful of blogs: Discovery and comparative benchmarking of republishable German content
(2014)
We introduce two corpora gathered on the web and related to computer-mediated communication: blog posts and blog comments. In order to build such corpora, we addressed following issues: website discovery and crawling, content extraction constraints, and text quality assessment. The blogs were manually classified as to their license and content type. Our results show that it is possible to find blogs in German under Creative Commons license, and that it is possible to perform text extraction and linguistic annotation efficiently enough to allow for a comparison with more traditional text types such as newspaper corpora and subtitles. The comparison gives insights on distributional properties of the processed web texts on token and type level. For example, quantitative analysis reveals that blog posts are close to written language, while comments are slightly closer to spoken language.
The African European Mediterranean Academies for Science Education (AEMASE) initiative is committed to promoting science outreach to society and to improving the quality and accessibility of science education in schools throughout the eponymous North-South region. To achieve these aims, one of AEMASE’s key activities is implementing IBSE in more schools and supporting the continued professional development of science educators in IBSE methodology and practice. In the long term, the AEMASE partner institutions, which come from all three geographical areas, seek to contribute to the steady development of quality science and innovation systems by focussing on stimulating and supporting the future generations of researchers and innovators. In this context, key AEMASE partner institutions held an international conference on science education in Rome in May 2014, hosted by the venerable Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Participants from six continents shared their professional experiences with IBSE and discussed best practices, challenges and future collaboration opportunities. The conference brought together representatives from three crucial areas of expertise: science, education, and policy. The outcomes of this conference are condensed in the report which serves as a testament to the relevance and importance of quality science education for modern societies.
In 20 articles experts from research, politics and research management discuss current challenges and future advancements of European research infrastructures for the humanities and social sciences, particularly in view of the funding scheme Horizon 2020 and the ESRFI Roadmap update. Starting with an overview of SSH infrastructures it elaborates on four specific areas that increasingly demand a pan-European approach. Drawing from the SSH infrastructure projects´ experience, it then (re-) defines the requirements and potential for next generation infrastructure projects. They highlight the developments and problems they anticipate, focussing in particular on advancing digitalisation in the SSH. The book draws together the insights gained at a conference of the same name, “Facing the Future”, held in Berlin in November 2013. The conference was attended by 70 experts from 19 European countries who met to discuss the new challenges posed by the increasing necessity of integrating digital research tools into everyday working life. It was organised by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), the federation of All European Academies (ALLEA), the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, and the German Data Forum. It took place as part of a project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) entitled Survey and Analysis of Basic Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe (SASSH).
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.
Der Fachkräftemangel in Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik (MINT) erweist sich immer mehr als Hemmnis für den Hochtechnologiestandort Deutschland. Für eine nachhaltige Sicherung des Fachkräftebedarfs ist eine attraktive MINT-Bildung Voraussetzung. Zudem stellt sich in einer Gesellschaft, die von Natur- und Technikwissenschaften geprägt ist, die Notwendigkeit, allen Menschen ein entsprechendes Grundverständnis zu vermitteln. Wissenschaft und Politik sind gefordert, didaktisch wirksame und für junge Menschen attraktive Konzepte für eine MINT-Bildung zu entwickeln und umzusetzen. Einerseits, um begabte junge Menschen gezielt zu fördern, andererseits,um eine basale MINT-Allgemeinbildung im Schulsystem zu verankern. Der Sammelband fasst die Ergebnisse einer interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) zusammen und analysiert die Ursachen für den mangelnden Erfolg von MINT-Initiativen in Deutschland und Europa, dokumentiert erfolgreiche Modellprojekte und zeigt Lösungswege für die Bildungs- und Wissenschaftspolitik auf. Ergänzt werden diese Beiträge mit den Erfahrungen engagierter Initiatoren von namhaften Modellprojekten.
Der Fachkräftemangel in Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik (MINT) erweist sich immer mehr als Hemmnis für den Hochtechnologiestandort Deutschland. Für eine nachhaltige Sicherung des Fachkräftebedarfs ist eine attraktive MINT-Bildung Voraussetzung. Zudem stellt sich in einer Gesellschaft, die von Natur- und Technikwissenschaften geprägt ist, die Notwendigkeit, allen Menschen ein entsprechendes Grundverständnis zu vermitteln. Wissenschaft und Politik sind gefordert, didaktisch wirksame und für junge Menschen attraktive Konzepte für eine MINT-Bildung zu entwickeln und umzusetzen. Einerseits, um begabte junge Menschen gezielt zu fördern, andererseits,um eine basale MINT-Allgemeinbildung im Schulsystem zu verankern. Der Sammelband fasst die Ergebnisse einer interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) zusammen und analysiert die Ursachen für den mangelnden Erfolg von MINT-Initiativen in Deutschland und Europa, dokumentiert erfolgreiche Modellprojekte und zeigt Lösungswege für die Bildungs- und Wissenschaftspolitik auf. Ergänzt werden diese Beiträge mit den Erfahrungen engagierter Initiatoren von namhaften Modellprojekten.
Over millennia human well-being has benefited from ecosystems, not only through tangible goods, but also through intangible assets known as cultural ecosystem services. Despite growing research over the last decade, cultural services assessment still remains arbitrary and is largely limited to marketable services such as tourism. Evident difficulties in standardizing definitions and measurements have challenged cultural services accounting in decision making processes. However, the imminent formation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services offers an opportunity to counterbalance this misrepresentation by establishing a scientific basis for consistently assessing cultural services. In that regard, the current review intends to facilitate discussion investigating the current state of cultural services accounting by offering an appraisal of existing evidence regarding cultural services indicator quality. The current review builds on scientifically recognized frameworks to develop a holistic understanding of how cultural services indicators are conceived within ecosystem services research. Among the measures found, benefit indicators were most frequently used for assessing inspirational, educational and recreational services. A broad variety of methods for accounting cultural services was found, mainly due to the varied aims of the studies. Most of the cultural services indicators were deficient concerning their clarity of definitions, purposes and understanding of the processes to be measured and referring only marginally to tradeoffs and bundles with other services. Only 17% performed multitemporal assessments and 23% used spatially explicit information. It seems that cultural services indicators quality could be greatly enhanced by investing more effort towards involving relevant stakeholders in conceptualization and communication phases, using participatory mapping tools to enhance visibility.
This study explores the potential of historical maps to detect, measure and monitor changes of trees outside forests. The main goal is to assess local-level changes of scattered trees and orchards and their land-use determinants in two areas in Southern Germany between 1901/1905 and 2009. Firstly, overall landscape changes are recorded. Secondly, the spatial-temporal trajectories of scattered trees and their land-use determinants are identified. Thirdly, changes in quantity and fragmentation patterns of traditional orchards are analyzed in their relationship to overall land-cover change. The results confirm major losses in scattered trees, mainly due to urbanization, agricultural intensification, and land abandonment. They further reveal that, while orchards have persisted in total area, they have undergone critical changes towards a simplified landscape structure and loss of the traditional land-use mosaic, which is a characterizing feature of high nature value landscapes. Multi-temporal assessment showed that most trends have been continuous and did not change directions over time, but rather accelerated during periods of rapid change (most dramatically in the 1950-1990 period). The case of orchards and scattered trees illustrates a major problem of cultural landscapes in Europe: Semi-natural landscape features of high nature value are threatened by both intensification and abandonment of land uses. This makes their conservation a potentially costly enterprise, as both opportunity costs for lost alternative land uses and for conservation management costs arise.
Agroecosystems are vital for supplying ecosystem services to human society, but most modern farming practices impact detrimentally on the environment. Public agricultural support policies have been critically important in influencing the transformation of the farm sectors; however, few of them have been dedicated to enhancing ecosystem services beyond agricultural commodities. The largest agricultural support system worldwide, the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), has now come to a critical point, as major decisions concerning its design and implementation after 2013 are about to be taken. The debate on this reform process presents a unique opportunity to trigger a transition from commodity-based subsidy policies to policies centered on efficient provision of ecosystem services from agricultural land. To prompt such discussion, we formulate key recommendations informed by a review of ecosystem services literature and address verifiable links to human well-being, non-market valuation for balanced services provision, treatment of ecosystem services bundles, site-specific and regionalized approaches, matching spatial scales for different ecosystem services, funding permanence for payment schemes, strong monitoring and adaptive approaches to tackling uncertainties, and coherent cross-sectoral policy design. If these issues were to be considered in formulating and implementing future CAP, it might become an exemplar for redirecting agricultural policies elsewhere in the world towards sustainability.
Most industrial countries have experienced a transformation of land use: from decreasing to expanding forest areas, the so-called forest transition. Outside closed forests, European rural landscapes exhibit a diversity of tree-based agricultural systems, but the question of whether this forest transition has also affected ‘trees outside forests’ has rarely been studied. The aim of this study is to analyze the spatial-temporal dynamics of farm trees and woodlands in an agricultural landscape in Eastern Germany from 1964 to 2008, based on aerial photographs and digital orthophotos. Taking a landscape ecological perspective, we quantify farm tree dynamics, disentangle processes of gain and loss in the socialist and post-socialist periods of Eastern Germany, and assess differences in ecosystem services provided by farm trees. A substantial increase of overall tree cover by 24.8% was observed for the selected time period, but trajectories have been disparate across different farm tree classes. The increase in tree cover was stronger in steep valleys than on hills and plateaus, indicating a significant interdependence between topography and trajectories of change. Patch numbers of farm trees did not increase, which suggests that the expansion of tree cover is mostly due to a spatial expansion of previously existing tree patches. Overall net gains in tree cover were rather similar during the socialist and post-socialist eras. The general increase in tree cover was accompanied by increases in agriculture-related ecosystem service provision, but the increase in pollination and pest control services was much lower than that in water purification services. These findings present the first empirical evidence from an industrialized country that there is also an ongoing ‘forest transition’ outside closed forests. Potential, partially counteracting drivers of change during the socialist and post-socialist periods have mainly been related to farm policies and the environmental consciousness of land users and society as a whole.
Eastern Mediterranean silvopastoral oak woodlands have been greatly damaged through forest conversion, illegal lumbering, overgrazing, and forest fires. The aim of this study was to assess land-use changes and the legacies that they have imprinted on the forest structure of Quercus macrolepis and accompanying Quercus pubescens and Quercus cerris woodlands on Lesvos Island, Greece. The size-structures of adult oak populations were analyzed as indicators of long-term oak regeneration, while short-term recruitment was determined by counting oak seedlings and saplings. The size-structure of the adult Q. macrolepis population was similar to the inverse J-shaped distribution typical for natural Mediterranean oak forests, indicating continuous recruitment with a constant mortality rate of mature individuals. Seedling and sapling densities were highly variable, but generally low in relation to adult oak densities. Recruitment of oak seedlings and saplings was positively related to determinants such as forest cover, adult oak density and basal area, woody plant richness, and litter cover. Both seedling and sapling occurrence was negatively associated with dung frequency, which suggests that sheep grazing imposes a barrier to oak recruitment. The study outlines a comprehensive land-use transition from the 1950s to the 1970s, during which a complex and multifunctional agrosilvopastoral land-use system was simplified to an intensive grazing system. The discrepancy between the successful long-term regeneration and the less successful short-term recruitment of oaks illustrates that intensified livestock grazing has been a major driver of vegetation change. Grazing impact is likely to interact with increasing drought conditions, which may trigger a negative feedback cycle that undermines the capacity of woodlands to sustain ecosystem services.
The potential of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses to sequester carbon offers a powerful tool for controlling the global climate regime, but practices capable of creating “collateral” benefits for landscape conservation have thus far been disregarded. This paper calls for greater integration of scattered trees into agricultural landscapes, hypothesizing that agroforestry practices effectively store carbon and deliver other important ecosystem services as well. Several agroforests from the Upper Lusatia area in Eastern Germany have been selected for analysis. They cover relatively large areas of land (8.2%), even within this intensively used agricultural landscape, and their extent increased from 1964-2008 by 19.4%. Practices of conserving or promoting the six agroforest classes are compared with a catalogue of essential properties for becoming effective “carbon offset projects”. Criteria from mandatory and voluntary carbon markets for carbon sequestration are then applied (additionality, baselines, permanence, and carbon leakage). The study concludes that steps towards realization of “carbon sequestration projects” should include collecting empirical evidence regarding the carbon sequestration potential of temperate agroforestry systems, developing localised demonstration projects, and upscaling these projects to participate in established carbon markets.
Numerous studies underline the importance of immaterial benefits provided by ecosystems and especially by cultural landscapes, which are shaped by intimate human–nature interactions. However, due to methodological challenges, cultural ecosystem services are rarely fully considered in ecosystem services assessments. This study performs a spatially explicit participatory mapping of the complete range of cultural ecosystem services and several disservices perceived by people living in a cultural landscape in Eastern Germany. The results stem from a combination of mapping exercises and structured interviews with 93 persons that were analyzed with statistical and GIS-based techniques. The results show that respondents relate diverse cultural services and multiple local-level sites to their individual well-being. Most importantly, aesthetic values, social relations and educational values were reported. Underlining the holistic nature of cultural ecosystem services, the results reveal bundles of services as well as particular patterns in the perception of these bundles for respondent groups with different socio-demographic backgrounds. Cultural services are not scattered randomly across a landscape, but rather follow specific patterns in terms of the intensity, richness and diversity of their provision. Resulting hotspots and coldspots of ecosystem services provision are related to landscape features and land cover forms. We conclude that, despite remaining methodological challenges, cultural services mapping assessments should be pushed ahead as indispensable elements in the management and protection of cultural landscapes. Spatially explicit information on cultural ecosystem services that incorporates the differentiated perceptions of local populations provides a rich basis for the development of sustainable land management strategies. These could realign the agendas of biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage preservation, thereby fostering multifunctionality.
Virtually all conventional text-based natural language processing techniques - from traditional information retrieval systems to full-fledged parsers - require reference to a fixed lexicon accessed by surface form, typically trained from or constructed for synchronic input text adhering strictly to contemporary orthographic conventions. Unconventional input such as historical text which violates these conventions therefore presents difficulties for any such system due to lexical variants present in the input but missing from the application lexicon. To facilitate the extension of synchronically-oriented natural language processing techniques to historical text while minimizing the need for specialized lexical resources, one may first attempt an automatic canonicalization of the input text. This paper provides an informal overview of the various canonicalization techniques currently employed by the Deutsches Textarchiv project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities to prepare a corpus of historical German text for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and integration into a robust online information retrieval system.
The article summarizes the contents and the structurtal premises of the “Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien” (TITUS), focussing on search functions and facilities and questions of the encoding of ancient languages written in various scripts. Examples are taken from Tocharian, Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and other ancient Indo-European languages covered by TITUS.
This paper is an updated presentation of the Ramses project being currently developed at the University of Liège. The first section stresses the main objectives and gives a technical description of the general architecture of Ramses software. The second part describes the encoding procedures and reviews the current state of the annotation. In the third section, some changes brought about by the use of large-scale corpora are discussed from an epistemological viewpoint. The paper ends with the presentation of some new avenues for research that will ensue from the use of a complex multilevel corpus.
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.
Die Erscheinungsform einer bestimmten Einzelsprache resultiert aus dem Nebeneinander und Zusammenwirken vertikaler und horizontaler Transmission von sprachlichen Merkmalen und umfasst demzufolge normalerweise neben Phänomenen, die über eine Kette früherer Sprechergenerationen ererbt wurden, auch solche, die aus anderen Sprachen entlehnt wurden. Deutliche Spuren einer komplexen Entstehungsgeschichte und der Interaktion verschiedener Sprachgemeinschaften lassen sich nicht erst im Altägyptischen oder gar erst in der Sprache des Neuen Reiches ausmachen, sondern bereits die frühesten schriftlichen Quellen aus der Zeit um 3000 v. Chr. erlauben – trotz ihrer Knappheit – überraschende Einblicke in die zeitgenössischen sprachlichen Verhältnisse. Bislang nur durch Sprachvergleich rekonstruierbare Entwicklungen sind nunmehr historisch nachweisbar, und das phonologische System einer dem Altägyptischen vorausgehenden und erheblich von ihm abweichenden Sprachstufe wird greifbar. Da das Voraltägyptische ein für eine afroasiatische Sprache eher untypisches Konsonanteninventar besitzt und sich zudem lexikalische Übereinstimmungen (nicht-genetischer Natur) mit indoeuropäischen Sprachen abzeichnen, erscheinen fundierte Hypothesen über die Herausbildung des Ägyptischen nicht länger unmöglich. Damit wäre das Ägyptische nicht nur die am längsten bezeugte Einzelsprache der Menschheitsgeschichte, sondern wohl auch die einzige, die von ihrer Entstehung bis zu ihrem Aussterben schriftlich dokumentiert ist.
The recent discoveries of the Czech mission show clearly that Abusir formed with Saqqara a single geographical unit in ancient Egypt and that the modern separation of them is outdated. Abusir seems to have played the crucial role as the last area into which the necropolis expanded after exhausting the space occuppied by the Archaic Cemetery of North Saqqara. In fact, it is the last vestige before the move from the area (including Dahshur and Meidum) to Giza at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty. The tombs of Hetepi and lty, discovered and explored during the past few years, are probably the final representatives of genuine Third Dynasty tomb evolution in the Saqqara-Abusir area which drew its last breath at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty. These tombs undoubtedly belonged to the upper class in the society of the day, though certainly not to members of the royal family. Their characteristics clearly show exactly what preceded later tomb development at Meidum, Dahshur and Giza.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
Norsk Ordbok is a 12 volume academic dictionary covering Norwegian Nynorsk literature and all Norwegian dialects from 1600 to the present. The dictionary is to be completed in 2014, the year of the bicentenary of the Norwegian constitution. The collection of data started in 1930 and the editing of the dictionary started in 1946. In the 1990s the Norwegian language collections were digitized, and from 2002 onwards Norsk Ordbok has been edited on a digital platform which communicates with a system of relational databases for manuscript storage. These databases include digitized slip archives, a draft manuscript from 1940, glossaries from the period between 1600 and 1850, canonical dictionaries from the period 1870-1910, bibliography, local dictionaries, text corpus (90 mill. words) etc. The source material is linked together in a Meta dictionary (MD). The MD is an electronic index with headwords in standard spelling, and it represents the hub of the language collections, where the source material from the databases is linked to headword nodes. This MD in turn communicates with the editing system and the dictionary database. The electronic linking up of the source material with the dictionary entries secures that the interpretation of data and product of scientific research can be reproducible in a very easy way. This is important to a scholarly dictionary. Further, the MD index system enables us to set a relative dimension for each dictionary entry and to make a master plan for setting alphabet dimensions for the whole dictionary. This is important to all modern dictionary projects with limited resources. The digitized source material, the digital editing platform and the digital dictionary product also point forward to new ways of presenting the data, and they point forward to future lexicographical research. The paper will present the digital resources of the Norsk Ordbok 2014 project, developed in close cooperation with the scientific programmers at the Unit of Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo. It will focus on the Norsk Ordbok 2014 experience with working on a fully digitized editing platform for the last 10 years, and it will also comment briefly on how the developed tools and resources point forward into Norwegian lexicography in the future.
Even a reductionist attempt to define scholarship is clearly fraught with difficulty, but an idealised historical lexicographer-cum-scholar must obviously have – inter alia and at the very least – a profound linguistic and textual knowledge of the language being documented, an ability to understand texts in their historical context and to analyse the meaning or function of lexical items as used in context, an ability to synthesise the results through generalisation and abstraction and to formulate them in a way that is both accurate, i.e. reflects actual usage, and user- or reader-friendly, i.e. is comprehensible to the user/reader. S/he must have encyclopedic or world knowledge and literary skills in order to understand general content words and explain their meaning and their semantic shifts perhaps over many centuries, and technical expertise to understand specialist terms and define their use in specific contexts, again perhaps over time. In respect of etymology s/he must not only have knowledge of older stages of the language and an ability to reconstruct unattested forms, but also knowledge of the other languages that have impacted on the language being documented, or at least familiarity with the scholarly historical dictionaries of those languages. That is a tall order indeed, impossibly tall for any one person today given today‘s demands on and expectations of lexicographers. Teams which include specialists in different areas or at least have access to consultants in such areas alongside generalists are needed if scholarly standards are to be met. The standard of scholarship is primarily a factor of the number and range as well as the knowledge and experience of the lexicographers, as is in large measure the pace of production. In this regard, it cannot be emphasised enough that scholarly historical lexicography of high quality is and will remain very time consuming.
In the last decade, interaction between scholarly lexicography and the public has grown enormously. While in the old days, the lexicographer and in particular, the scholarly lexicographer, had a tendency to describe the lexicon from an ivory tower, in a way that was for the general public rather unaccessible, a change has been evident for some time now. Interaction with the general public is now more and more appreciated and is even being stimulated within the lexicographic community. This holds too for the Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek (ANW), a project of the Institute for Dutch Lexicology in Leiden. The ANW is an online scholarly dictionary of contemporary Dutch. In its periodization it is the successor of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), which was completed in 2001 and covers the vocabulary of the Netherlands and Flanders up to around 1976. The editorial staff of the ANW would like to create a dictionary that is suitable for different audiences, ranging from language professionals and other academics to pupils, students and language enthusiasts in general. Consequently, interaction with the public is very important to the ANW editorial staff. It is realised in various ways. First, each dictionary article offers users the option to give feedback. Second, the editorial staff uses questions and comments gathered on internet forums, such as Meldpunt Taal (launched in June 2010) and Neo-term. The ANW staff also approaches the public directly through Twitter, with items such as ‘neologism of the week’, facts about spelling and answers to questions about language that have been received. A relatively new initiative is to call upon the public in the search for information for the dictionary, such as synonyms, pictures and the earliest use of words. Language games and word polls are other ways to increase the interest and involvement of the general public in the ANW.
The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB) is one of the big national dictionary projects started in the 19th century. SAOB is still in production – there are another two volumes out of 38 to printed before 2018. The structure inside the volumes is (of course) varied/varying. There are ten chief editors and five generations of editors involved in the project. In the 1980s the SAOB was OCR-scanned. The result was used for a webversion in the internet from 1997. The webversion is very frequently used but has a lot of shortcomings due to, among other things, a great typographic complexity and a scanning technology of the time. Now the editorial board is discussing the future: redigitalization (in China), updating of the webversion with new search tools, updating of the dictionary itself and some form of editing tool.
The FEW is a huge dictionary when we consider the sheer mass of data (25 volumes, 16000 pages) and its exhaustive aims. It has indeed the purpose of registering and etymologizing the whole lexicon, not only of French, but also of earlier stages of the language and of Occitan; of every Gallo-romance dialect; of every technical or professional genre; of every language register, including slang. Summing up, the FEW aims to include and describe every single lexical unit which exists or has existed in the territory of ancient Gaul. The sheer size of this undertaking means two things, which directly influence the digitalisation of the dictionary: Firstly, there is a a huge amount of data; secondly, the presentation and organization of the data is exceedingly complex. The reasons for digitalising the FEW are the easy searches for units, and the carrying out of searches using criteria that are not possible to use with the printed version. However, the fulfillment of these purposes includes some risks, and potentially the cutting of some corners, especially the temptation of renouncing reading.
Among mass digitization methods, double-keying is considered to be the one with the lowest error rate. This method requires two independent transcriptions of a text by two different operators. It is particularly well suited to historical texts, which often exhibit deficiencies like poor master copies or other difficulties such as spelling variation or complex text structures. Providers of data entry services using the double-keying method generally advertise very high accuracy rates (around 99.95% to 99.98%). These advertised percentages are generally estimated on the basis of small samples, and little if anything is said about either the actual amount of text or the text genres which have been proofread, about error types, proofreaders, etc. In order to obtain significant data on this problem it is necessary to analyze a large amount of text representing a balanced sample of different text types, to distinguish the structural XML/TEI level from the typographical level, and to differentiate between various types of errors which may originate from different sources and may not be equally severe. This paper presents an extensive and complex approach to the analysis and correction of double-keying errors which has been applied by the DFG-funded project “Deutsches Textarchiv” (German Text Archive, hereafter DTA) in order to evaluate and preferably to increase the transcription and annotation accuracy of double-keyed DTA texts. Statistical analyses of the results gained from proofreading a large quantity of text are presented, which verify the common accuracy rates for the double-keying method.
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.
In Lower Lusatia, eastern Germany, the changing impacts of lignite coal mining and potential climate change have put the naturally low water yield conditions under pressure. Water resources balances describe the hydrological situation in the region and the need for action due to changing boundary conditions. Extended transfer of flood water from neighbouring catchments is considered inevitable for sustainable regional development and the establishment of a quantitatively and qualitatively selfregulated water system. Using the river basin management system WBalMo®, potential water transfer scenarios to compensate for water deficits resulting from regional and global change are analysed.
The present study explores whether regional water resources can be used more efficiently by Brandenburg’s farming systems. A description of agriculture in Brandenburg today is followed by a systematic analysis of measures to raise the water efficiency. Brandenburg’s agricultural systems are divided into three sections: soil, plant production and livestock farming. Within these sections measures to increase water efficiency are listed and analysed with reference to five objective criteria for raising water use efficiency. In view of the complexity of farming systems in Brandenburg, general measures to raise water use efficiency could not be derived. Site-specific tillage practices and crop patterns adjusted to recent weather conditions may reflect the specific diversity of Brandenburg more efficiently.
Global climate change and aspects of regional climate change in the Berlin-Brandenburg region
(2011)
To obtain an estimate of the average temperature of the northern hemisphere during the last 1200 years, proxy data have been merged with instrumental recordings. These instrumental measurements are, with a few exceptions, only available for the recent 150 years. In the city of Berlin the temperature has been recorded since as early as 1701. However, during the first 150 years the measurements were problematic as location, measurement procedure and instruments changed frequently and without proper documentation. From 1847 onwards observations became more reliable once the Royal Prussian Meteorological Institute had been established. For the last 100 years temperature and precipitation measurements have been performed in parallel at Berlin-Dahlem and Potsdam. The datasets recorded in the city of Berlin and in Berlin-Dahlem have been merged to obtain a record of more than 300 years. It indicates that the temperature of Berlin has risen by 1.04°C during the last 100 years after correcting for the urbanisation effect. In the same period, the total number of frost days has significantly decreased by almost 17 days, and the number of summer days has significantly increased by about 12 days. Annual mean precipitation has hardly changed (decrease less than 0.2 %) during the last century. However, rainfall has decreased by about 4 % in summer and increased by 3 % in winter. All precipitation changes are below the 95 % ignificance level. Model projections indicate that warming will continue which means that Berlin-Brandenburg will experience a temperature rise of about 3-3.5°C by the end of this century for the IPCC scenario A1B. For the same scenario precipitation is expected to increase by 10-20 % in winter and to decrease by 10-30 % in summer: The seasonal precipitation changes compensate each other resulting in an almost unchanged annual mean.
This special issue of DIE ERDE presents selected key topics discussed within the BBAW working group, including work by group members and invited external researchers, containing nine articles highlighting “Regional Water Challenges” resulting from different kinds of environmental and social changes. We aim to present the complexity of interaction between changes and responses. While the first four articles focus on describing climatic and hydrological changes and their causes, the following five articles focus more on possible mitigation and adaptation measures.
Climate change is expected to increase water scarcity in northeast Germany. Land-use change is one of the options of mitigation that is intensely discussed in this region. This review aims at giving a compilation of existing data and modelling studies in order to investigate the potential and the limits of the land-use change approach.
The climate change debate has increased the need for knowledge on both long- and short-term regional environmental changes. In general, these changes may often be a product of multiple causes, which complicates the separation of single driving forces. In this review we focus on current water budget changes in Germany’s capital region, Berlin-Brandenburg, over the last 30 years. Available studies from a variety of disciplines (e.g. hydrology, water engineering, landscape ecology, nature conservation) were analysed in order to (1) identify both local and regional hydrological changes, (2) reveal their potential causes, and (3) discuss responses of ecosystems and society. These studies show that the Berlin-Brandenburg region is widely characterised by decreasing groundwater recharge, leading to decreasing groundwater and lake levels as well as decreasing fluvial discharge. These trends result both from complex, regional human impacts (e.g. long-term effects of hydro-melioration and changes in forest composition) and more general climate warming. The observed and assumed (future) changes of the regional water balance have been creating, and will continue to create, multifaceted impacts on existing ecosystems and society (e.g. wetland drying, decrease of biodiversity, decrease of productivity of grasslands and forests, increasing conflicts of interests). Several efforts to respond to the regional water deficit problem have already been undertaken, comprising for instance land-use optimisation, wetland restoration measures and the reestablishment of mixed deciduous forests. In general, however, the reviewed regional material on this topic reveals that the number and complexity of empirical studies are still poor. Thus, for both the identification and the explanation of current water balance changes and their effects, as well as for development and implementation of adaptive strategies, further multidisciplinary research efforts at different scales, including interregional comparisons, are required. Furthermore, both the observation of hydrological changes and the evaluation of adaptive and mitigative responses require at least continuous or, even better, extended monitoring efforts.
For decades, water resources have been used intensively for drinking water, industry, agriculture and energy production. This paper summarises the main anthropogenic influences on the water cycle in a Pleistocene landscape and associated geochemical reactions. The results allow the identification and description of the main hydraulic and geochemical processes that control water and solute fluxes in different hydrological compartments, in particular recharge and discharge regions. Under progressive climate change, this process-based knowledge should be used to adapt land and water management to minimise negative impacts on hydrological resources and stabilise the regional water balance in theBerlin-Brandenburg Pleistocene landscape. Based on these results, a risk assessment approach for validation of future management strategies under changing climate conditions is presented.
Since humans are preferentially settling in flood plains they often influence freshwater systems intensely. The first signs of anthropogenic impacts on surface waters in the Berlin-Brandenburg region are approximately 3000 years old. Considering the multiple and intense human uses of surface waters in this region, we analysed when, how and to which extent regional rivers and streams became impacted by dams, water mills and fish weirs resulting in changes in morphology, hydrology and ecological functioning. We hypothesise that the development and growth of cities in this region necessitated (1) efficient navigability of rivers linking them, (2) efficient use of hydropower resources for mills, and (3) significant pollution of surface waters especially with the beginning of industrial development. We analyse these hypotheses by means of three regional examples and delineate the effects of human uses on selected surface water bodies. Understanding the effects of these historic modifications of surface water supports the identification of options for a sustainable use of surface waters that are currently still subjected to multiple uses but face a significant decrease in discharge due to climate change.
Global change is posing a major challenge to existing forms of natural resource use, socio-economic development and institutional regulation. Although trends such as climate change, socio-economic transformation and institutional change are global in their scope, they have very specific regional outcomes. Regionally distinct coping strategies are required which take into account both the diversity of regional impacts of global change and the local contexts of appropriate responses. This paper explores the impacts of global change on the management of water infrastructure systems in the Berlin-Brandenburg region in terms of three concurrent and overlapping challenges: climate change, socio-economic change and institutional change. It subsequently examines how regional actors in the water sector are addressing these three dimensions of global change.
The article informs about historical developments and recent problems in the former wetlands of the Oderbruch, which has been cultivated for agricultural use for 300 years, and in the fen region of the Rhin-Havel-Luch. The periodically inundated floodplains of Oderbruch are characterised by rich-in-clay sedimentation soils, while Rhin-Havel-Luch is a year-round wet fen region with peat soils. In both areas land use necessarily requires an adequate regional water management, employing measures and system solutions for river training, dike construction, drainage and soil cultivation. Options for action and adaptation strategies for the next 20 to 40 years, based on many years of own analyses and case studies, are presented and discussed. The article also considers an aggravation of the problems to be expected from climate change.
This special issue of DIE ERDE presents selected key topics discussed within the BBAW working group, including work by group members and invited external researchers, containing nine articles highlighting “Regional Water Challenges” resulting from different kinds of environmental and social changes. We aim to present the complexity of interaction between changes and responses. While the first four articles focus on describing climatic and hydrological changes and their causes, the following five articles focus more on possible mitigation and adaptation measures.
This special issue of DIE ERDE presents selected key topics discussed within the BBAW working group, including work by group members and invited external researchers, containing nine articles highlighting “Regional Water Challenges” resulting from different kinds of environmental and social changes. We aim to present the complexity of interaction between changes and responses. While the first four articles focus on describing climatic and hydrological changes and their causes, the following five articles focus more on possible mitigation and adaptation measures.
Gedanken über die weitere Arbeit am Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache
An der Sprache des Rechts wird Kritik geübt, seit die Aufklärung die Verständlichkeit der Gesetze zu ihrem Anliegen gemacht hat. Mit den großen Kodifikationen des Rechts im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert hat die Kritik am angeblich schlechten, unverständlichen Juristendeutsch eine besondere demokratietheoretische Legitimation bekommen. Diese Sprachkritik sucht seit den siebziger Jahren vermehrt bei der Linguistik Rat, wie denn eine bessere Allgemeinverständlichkeit von Rechtstexten verwirklicht werden könnte. Der Band versammelt systematisch aufeinander bezogene Beiträge ausgewiesener Linguisten, Juristen und Schriftsteller zur Problematik des Verständnisses juristischer Sprache, zur Methodik empirischer Verständlichkeitsmessung und zu den Möglichkeiten transdisziplinärer Kooperation zwischen Rechts- und Sprachwissenschaftlern.
Responding to the Antique : a rediscovered Roman Circus Sarcophagus and its Renaissance Afterlife
(2005)
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.
The principal objective of this article is to reflect (in a philosophical manner) on recent developments in moral legislation in The Netherlands. The term ›moral legislation‹ refers to all forms of legislation on issues which can be regarded as ›moral‹ – such as euthanasia and animal experimentation. The reason for focussing on The Netherlands is that, on an international level, it is a country which has gained a reputation for being ›liberal‹, and is therefore admired by some and held in abhorrence by others.