Jährlich veranstaltet die GMK in Kooperation mit der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb) und gefördert durch das Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (BMFSFJ) sowie ...weiteren Partner*innen das Forum Kommunikationskultur als mehrtägige Fachtagung zu einem aktuellen medienpädagogischen und gesellschaftlich relevanten Thema.
Heat waves (HWs) are natural hazards characterised by episodes of hot weather. However, in the absence of a universal definition a wide variety of definitions is applied. In this study, ten different ...air temperature (T) based HW definitions are applied to the urban region of Berlin, Germany, to investigate and compare the occurrence and duration of HWs, and their long‐term trends from 1893 to 2017. We studied how long‐term trends depend on different definition of HWs, as well as if long‐term mean values and trends differ between inner‐city and peripheral locations of Berlin. Generally, results show significant increases in HW occurrence and duration for most definitions, although large differences exist between them. Temporal agreement between the definitions is low, 15 episodes in 125 years are identified by all definitions as HWs. Inner‐city regions of Berlin are subject to more frequent and longer HWs than peripheral regions, if definitions based on daily minimum or mean T are applied. Results also show that trend estimations of HW characteristics for HW definitions with “extreme” values for their detection criteria (e.g., in terms of duration or threshold) are highly sensitive to the applied method. We conclude that depending on the question under investigation, different HW definitions might be optimal and hence attempts for the development of “universal” definitions need to take this into account.
This study compares ten air temperature based heat wave (HW) definitions concerning long‐term mean values and trends in the region of Berlin, Germany, during the past 125 years. Results show increasing HW occurrence and length in the region, although large differences exist between the results for the different definitions. Inner‐city regions are subject to more frequent and longer HWs than peripheral regions, if definitions based on daily minimum or mean air temperature are applied.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
After Germany's defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters. Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt, while Germany had been ...reduced to rubble. In July of 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace: a peace that would finally put an end to the conflagration that had started in 1914, a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt. The award-winning historian Michael Neiberg brings the turbulent Potsdam conference to life, vividly capturing the delegates' personalities: Truman, trying to escape from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt, who had died only months before; Churchill, bombastic and seemingly out of touch; Stalin, cunning and meticulous. For the first week, negotiations progressed relatively smoothly. But when the delegates took a recess for the British elections, Churchill was replacedboth as prime minster and as Britain's representative at the conferencein an unforeseen upset by Clement Attlee, a man Churchill disparagingly described as a sheep in sheep's clothing." When the conference reconvened, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically, and the delegates struggled to find a new balance. Stalin took advantage of his strong position to demand control of Eastern Europe as recompense for the suffering experienced by the Soviet people and armies. The final resolutions of the Potsdam Conference, notably the division of Germany and the Soviet annexation of Poland, reflected the uneasy geopolitical equilibrium between East and West that would come to dominate the twentieth century. As Neiberg expertly shows, the delegates arrived at Potsdam determined to learn from the mistakes their predecessors made in the Treaty of Versailles. But, riven by tensions and dramatic debates over how to end the most
recent war, they only dimly understood that their discussions of peace were giving birth to a new global conflict.
The background to this article is the debate on cities as post-secular and super-diverse. The authors question that the concept of post-secular cities usefully sums up the complex processes currently ...characterizing religion in contemporary European cities. They propose that different historical memories are layered upon one another and they demonstrate how religious diversity and cities mutually shape one another. Based on empirical illustrations from research in Potsdam and Turin, the authors argue that cities affect religion by casting religious communities and their forms of sociality within particular spatial regimes and contributing to the territorialization of religious categories. Moreover, they state that religious groups shape cities by leaving durable architectural imprints on them. In particular, the article develops the notion of formations of religious super-diversity, which involves forms of religious belonging and identity that historically emerged through religious dissent and innovation, and shows that urban space is the iconic arena in which religious super-diversity becomes visible through the ways in which religious spatial strategies interact with cities’ spatial regimes. The authors identify three types of spatial strategies – place keeping, making and seeking – each of which expresses and responds to communities’ relationship to urban space in different ways. The typology is meant to serve as a tool to read complex processes taking into consideration both historical paths and contemporary religious formations.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Die seit dem Beginn der Rechtsstaatskrise in Polen (2015) geführte Debatte über die unzureichende Resilienz der deutschen Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit steht mit zwei konkreten Entwürfen zur Änderung ...von Art. 93 und 94 GG auf der Zielgeraden. Zur Stärkung der Resilienz des Thüringer Verfassungsgerichtshofes hat das Thüringen-Projekt jüngst konkrete Vorschläge unterbreitet. Bislang nicht im Fokus der Debatte stand die Justiz in Brandenburg. Angesichts der Konsequenzen, die ein Erstarken solcher Kräfte hätte, besteht noch vor der Wahl Handlungsbedarf.
In January 1998 a massive ice storm descended on New York, New England, and eastern Canada. It crushed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, forcing thousands of people into public ...shelters and leaving millions of others in their homes without electricity. In this riveting book Stephen Doheny-Farina presents an insider's account of these events, describing the destruction of the electric network in his own village and the emergence of the face-to-face interactions that took its place. His stories examine the impact of electronic communications on community, illuminating the relationship between electronic and human connections and between networks and neighborhoods, and exploring why and how media portrayals of disasters can distort authentic experience.Doheny-Farina begins by discussing the disaster and tracing the origins of the storm. He then goes back two hundred years to tell how this particular electric grid was built, showing us the sacrifices people made to create the grids that (usually) connect us to one another. Today's power grid, says Doheny-Farina, has become more vulnerable than we realize, as demand begins to outstrip capacity in urban centers around the nation. His book reminds us what those grids mean-both positively and negatively-to our electronically saturated lives.
Make Potsdam great again André, Tomczak; Lutz, Manuel; Zschoge, Holger
Suburban,
11/2018, Volume:
6, Issue:
2/3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Die Rekonstruktion der Stadtmitte Potsdams ist Paradebeispiel einer Stadtentwicklung von oben: Diskurse der Ästhetik und Wiederherstellung vergangener Pracht werden geschickt verknüpft mit Strategien ...der Privatisierung und Verwertung von Stadt. Das Narrativ der schönen und großartigen Stadt wird gebrochen durch Proteste, die sich seit mehreren Jahren gegen den Abriss der sozialistischen Leitbauten und für eine alternative, vielfältige, demokratische Entwicklung der Innenstadt für Alle einsetzen. Der Beitrag skizziert die Durchsetzung der Rekonstruktion der Stadtmitte als preußisches Disneyland, in der diese Alternativen marginalisiert und historische Brüche auslöschend eine feudale Stadtordnung rekonstruiert wird. Eingebunden als Akteure des Protests verknüpfen die Autoren verschiedene Perspektiven der Kritik: sie zeigen Hintergründe und Kontexte der lokalen Wiederaufbau-Allianz, die sich in planerischen und politischen Entscheidungsprozessen durchsetzen konnten.
Öffentliches Gedenken ist durchzogen von Konkurrenz. Private Erinnerungsgemeinschaften versuchen, sich gegenüber öffentlichem Gedenken zu behaupten, neue Räume zu besetzen oder vorherrschende Rituale ...zu überschreiben. Sie fordern damit ein anderes Erinnern, stoßen Debatten an und hinterfragen bestehende Werte. Die Beiträger*innen fragen im Kontext der Public History nach den dominierenden und marginalisierten Akteuren, nach den historischen Hintergründen der Konkurrenzen sowie nach Lösungsansätzen für bestehende Konflikte. Sie stellen insbesondere für Potsdam verschiedene Ansätze vor, wie Erinnerungsräume analog oder digital eingenommen und neue Dialoge eröffnet werden können.
•About 30.5% and 32.2% of ecosystems in China will face risk under global warming targets of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C, respectively.•Species richness and micro-meteorological factors have a similar degree ...of impact on ecosystem risk under global warming.•Ecosystems with high species richness may face with more damage from global warming when risk occurred.•Vulnerable regions to global warming targets of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C in China was identified.•Cropland, grassland and deciduous broadleaf forest are the most vulnerable vegetation types to global warming.
Assessing ecosystem risk is crucial to ecosystem management and to achieving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C or 2.0 °C global warming targets, but the spatial pattern and drivers of ecosystem risk are highly controversial. By simulating China’s ecosystem water use efficiency using the Lund–Potsdam–Jena global vegetation model, the ecosystem risk at the eco-geographical and vegetation-type scales was assessed in this study to identify the regions at risk under global warming, and the impacts of the species richness (ASR) and micro-meteorological factors on the ecosystem risk were investigated in the identified regions using the structural equation model (SEM). Our results indicate that about 30.5% and 32.2% of the ecosystems in China will face risk under global warming targets of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C, respectively. The ecosystem risk is spatially heterogeneous and biome-specific. The ecosystem risk will mainly occur in the mid-temperate humid/sub-humid region, warm temperate humid/sub-humid region, northern subtropical humid region, mid-subtropical humid region, and the Tibetan Plateau region in China, of which cropland, grassland, and deciduous broadleaf forests will account for 39%, 17%, and 14%, respectively. The results of the SEM analysis indicate that the micro-meteorological factors and ASR explain 48% of the variation in the ecosystem risk, and the micro-meteorological factors and ASR have similar but opposite influences on the ecosystem risk. For the ecosystems identified as at risk under global warming, the negative total effect of the micro-meteorological factors on the ecosystem risk is mainly due to the dominant role of the shortwave radiation in regulating the ecosystem risk; and the positive total effect of the ASR on the ecosystem risk indicates that the ecosystems with higher species richness may face more severe damage when the risk occurs. Therefore, we should carefully balance the effect of the ASR on the ecosystems’ abilities to adapt to changes and ecosystems’ abilities to recover from damage. Our results contribute to precise ecosystem management in China and provide evidence to support the idea that properly optimizing biodiversity can prevent and reduce the damage to ecosystems caused by global warming.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The Mediterranean Diet (MedDiet) has been acknowledged as a healthy diet. However, its relation with risk of major chronic diseases in non-Mediterranean countries is inconclusive. The Nordic diet is ...proposed as an alternative across Northern Europe, although its associations with the risk of chronic diseases remain controversial. We aimed to investigate the association between the Nordic diet and the MedDiet with the risk of chronic disease (type 2 diabetes (T2D), myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, and cancer) in the EPIC-Potsdam cohort.
The EPIC-Potsdam cohort recruited 27,548 participants between 1994 and 1998. After exclusion of prevalent cases, we evaluated baseline adherence to a score reflecting the Nordic diet and two MedDiet scores (tMDS, reflecting the traditional MedDiet score, and the MedPyr score, reflecting the MedDiet Pyramid). Cox regression models were applied to examine the association between the diet scores and the incidence of major chronic diseases.
During a follow-up of 10.6 years, 1376 cases of T2D, 312 of MI, 321 of stroke, and 1618 of cancer were identified. The Nordic diet showed a statistically non-significant inverse association with incidence of MI in the overall population and of stroke in men. Adherence to the MedDiet was associated with lower incidence of T2D (HR per 1 SD 0.93, 95% CI 0.88-0.98 for the tMDS score and 0.92, 0.87-0.97 for the MedPyr score). In women, the MedPyr score was also inversely associated with MI. No association was observed for any of the scores with cancer.
In the EPIC-Potsdam cohort, the Nordic diet showed a possible beneficial effect on MI in the overall population and for stroke in men, while both scores reflecting the MedDiet conferred lower risk of T2D in the overall population and of MI in women.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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