Standards vermitteln die Beziehungen zwischen Menschen, Dingen und Zeichen – besonders wirksam dort, wo sie nicht als Konvention, sondern als ›natürlich‹ erscheinen. Prozesse der Standardisierung und ...Naturalisierung gewinnen in modernen Gesellschaften zunehmend an Relevanz, sei es im Bereich der Ökonomie, des Selbstmanagements oder der (Lebens-)Wissenschaften. Verfahren der Standardisierung und der Naturalisierung stehen dabei in einem systematischen Verhältnis, sie erscheinen als komplementäre Operationen, durch die kulturelle Praxen, Wahrnehmungen und Technologien in einen Zustand der Selbstverständlichkeit übergehen. Aus medien- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive suchen die Beiträge des Bandes die Auseinandersetzung mit aktuellen und historischen Phänomenfeldern sowie mit übergreifenden theoretischen Konzeptualisierungen.
Materialitäten lassen sich in Figuren des Zyklischen denken: Dinge sind in eine Reihe von zyklisch ablaufenden Prozessen involviert und haben selbst Lebenszyklen, die sich der Wahrnehmung entziehen. ...Kulturelle Zyklographie der Dinge untersucht Verfahren/Techniken der Darstellung, Erzählung und Visualisierung von Lebenszyklen der Artefakte. Von fiktiven Ding-Autobiographien und Genres wie den It-Narratives über Reportagen bis hin zu wissenschaftlichen Objektbiographien und Technologien wie Dingtracking und dem Internet of Things reichen die Strategien, mit denen versucht wird, die stummen Dinge zum Sprechen zu bringen. Der Band vereint kultur-, medien-, und literaturwissenschaftliche Ansätze einer Betrachtung von Dingen in Kreisläufen. Dabei geraten Prozesse und Operationen in den Blick, in denen das Dingfeste und Formstabile der Kultur ins ,,Schwimmen" gerät. The book argues for theorizing material culture in categories cyclical and circular processes underlying the materiality and mediality of things. The basic assumption is that a constantly shifting formation of devices, methods, techniques, and technologies is responding to a need to overcome the opacity of the circulation and life cycles of artifacts. The book explores thing-cyclographical formats such as It-Narratives, the avant-gardist literatura fakta, scientific, aesthetic, documentarist object biographies in different media, and tracking-technologies in logistics.
Die globale Vernetzung moderner Verkehrs- und Nachrichtensysteme - von Eisenbahn und Dampfschifffahrt über Telegrafie und Telefonie bis hin zu Raumfahrt und Internet - macht auf einen fundamentalen ...Zusammenhang aufmerksam: Verkehr war und ist für alle Gesellschaften konstitutiv. Einrichtungen des Transports, des Austauschs und der Kommunikation sowie die damit verbundenen Infrastrukturen formen mediale Ensembles, in denen sich Parameter von Kultur und Technik genuin verbinden. Die Verkehrsgeschichte macht diesen Zusammenhang greifbar.Der Band versammelt exemplarische Analysen, die das Feld der Verkehrsgeschichte für eine kultur- und medienwissenschaftliche Betrachtung öffnen.
Traffic Näser-Lather, Marion; Neubert, Christoph
2015, Letnik:
88
eBook
Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices presents texts by international media and cultural scholars that address the relationship between symbolic and infrastructural dimensions of ...media, analysing traffic in terms of media ecology, as epistemological principle, and as (trans-)formative power. Contributors are: Menahem Blondheim, Grant David Bollmer, Richard Cavell, Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Norm Friesen, Elihu Katz, Peter Krapp, Martina Leeker, Jana Mangold, John Durham Peters, Gabriele Schabacher, Michael Steppat, Wolfgang Sützl, Hartmut Winkler.
How individual protein subunits assemble into the higher order structure of a protein complex is not well understood. Four proteins dedicated to the assembly of the V₀ subcomplex of the V-adenosine ...triphosphatase (V-ATPase) in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) have been identified in yeast, but their precise mode of molecular action remains to be identified. In contrast to the highly conserved subunits of the V-ATPase, orthologs of the yeast assembly factors are not easily identified based on sequence similarity. We show in this study that two ER-localized Arabidopsis proteins that share only 25% sequence identity with Vma21p can functionally replace this yeast assembly factor. Loss of AtVMA21a function in RNA interference seedlings caused impaired cell expansion and changes in Golgi morphology characteristic for plants with reduced V-ATPase activity, and we therefore conclude that AtVMA21a is the first V-ATPase assembly factor identified in a multicellular eukaryote. Moreover, VMA21p acts as a dedicated ER escort chaperone, a class of substrate-specific accessory proteins so far not identified in higher plants.
Vacuoles are multifunctional organelles essential for the sessile lifestyle of plants. Despite their central functions in cell growth, storage, and detoxification, knowledge about mechanisms ...underlying their biogenesis and associated protein trafficking pathways remains limited. Here, we show that in meristematic cells of the Arabidopsis thaliana root, biogenesis of vacuoles as well as the trafficking of sterols and of two major tonoplast proteins, the vacuolar H+-pyrophosphatase and the vacuolar H+-adenosinetriphosphatase, occurs independently of endoplasmic reticulum (ER)—Golgi and post-Golgi trafficking. Instead, both pumps are found in provacuoles that structurally resemble autophagosomes but are not formed by the core autophagy machinery. Taken together, our results suggest that vacuole biogenesis and trafficking of tonoplast proteins and lipids can occur directly from the ER independent of Golgi function.
BACKGROUND: It is well known that smoking has serious health effects. Despite public health initiatives to discourage smoking initiation and encourage smoking cessation, overall smoking rates have ...been constant for years and 17 million people currently smoke in Germany.
PURPOSE: This study aims to characterize barriers preventing adult smokers in Germany from quitting cigarette smoking and assessing the general motivation to quit smoking cigarettes. This approach allowed to probe for correlations between quit motivation, barriers, smoking behaviors and smokers’ characteristics.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Computer-assisted web interviews were conducted with 1,000 smokers aged 19 years and older in Germany between May and June 2021. Quotas on age, gender and federal state were used to ensure the respondent profile was representative for the smokers in Germany. Data on demographics, smoking behavior, quit attempts perceptions and usage of alternatives to cigarettes were collected.
KEY FINDINGS: The majority of smokers in Germany (54 %) report that they are not motivated to stop smoking cigarettes. Barriers and motivations to quit smoking cigarettes differed and allowed a distinction in subgroups of smokers. The most prominent subgroups constitute smokers over 50 years of age and smokers of disadvantaged socioeconomic status (education and income). Only 29 % of smokers in Germany intend to stop smoking and only 3 % of them plan to stop smoking in the following month.
CONCLUSION: Smokers cannot be considered as a homogeneous group of people, their motivation to stop smoking differs, which requires a differentiated approach towards them in order to be able to successfully move adult smokers away from cigarettes, the most harmful way of tobacco and nicotine consumption. Inclusive interventions based on the Tobacco Harm Reduction principle could prove useful, especially for smokers that do not quit smoking cigarettes.
BACKGROUND: It is well known that smoking has serious health effects. Despite public health initiatives to discourage smoking initiation and encourage smoking cessation, overall smoking rates have ...been constant for years and 17 million people currently smoke in Germany.
PURPOSE: This study aims to characterize barriers preventing adult smokers in Germany from quitting cigarette smoking and assessing the general motivation to quit smoking cigarettes. This approach allowed to probe for correlations between quit motivation, barriers, smoking behaviors and smokers’ characteristics.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Computer-assisted web interviews were conducted with 1,000 smokers aged 19 years and older in Germany between May and June 2021. Quotas on age, gender and federal state were used to ensure the respondent profile was representative for the smokers in Germany. Data on demographics, smoking behavior, quit attempts perceptions and usage of alternatives to cigarettes were collected.
KEY FINDINGS: The majority of smokers in Germany (54 %) report that they are not motivated to stop smoking cigarettes. Barriers and motivations to quit smoking cigarettes differed and allowed a distinction in subgroups of smokers. The most prominent subgroups constitute smokers over 50 years of age and smokers of disadvantaged socioeconomic status (education and income). Only 29 % of smokers in Germany intend to stop smoking and only 3 % of them plan to stop smoking in the following month.
CONCLUSION: Smokers cannot be considered as a homogeneous group of people, their motivation to stop smoking differs, which requires a differentiated approach towards them in order to be able to successfully move adult smokers away from cigarettes, the most harmful way of tobacco and nicotine consumption. Inclusive interventions based on the Tobacco Harm Reduction principle could prove useful, especially for smokers that do not quit smoking cigarettes.
BACKGROUND: It is well known that smoking has serious health effects. Despite public health initiatives to discourage smoking initiation and encourage smoking cessation, overall smoking rates have ...been constant for years and 17 million people currently smoke in Germany.
PURPOSE: This study aims to characterize barriers preventing adult smokers in Germany from quitting cigarette smoking and assessing the general motivation to quit smoking cigarettes. This approach allowed to probe for correlations between quit motivation, barriers, smoking behaviors and smokers’ characteristics.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Computer-assisted web interviews were conducted with 1,000 smokers aged 19 years and older in Germany between May and June 2021. Quotas on age, gender and federal state were used to ensure the respondent profile was representative for the smokers in Germany. Data on demographics, smoking behavior, quit attempts perceptions and usage of alternatives to cigarettes were collected.
KEY FINDINGS: The majority of smokers in Germany (54 %) report that they are not motivated to stop smoking cigarettes. Barriers and motivations to quit smoking cigarettes differed and allowed a distinction in subgroups of smokers. The most prominent subgroups constitute smokers over 50 years of age and smokers of disadvantaged socioeconomic status (education and income). Only 29 % of smokers in Germany intend to stop smoking and only 3 % of them plan to stop smoking in the following month.
CONCLUSION: Smokers cannot be considered as a homogeneous group of people, their motivation to stop smoking differs, which requires a differentiated approach towards them in order to be able to successfully move adult smokers away from cigarettes, the most harmful way of tobacco and nicotine consumption. Inclusive interventions based on the Tobacco Harm Reduction principle could prove useful, especially for smokers that do not quit smoking cigarettes.
The paper discusses concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘life’ as subjected to historical changes. The 21st century seems to be obsessed with ‘life’ and ‘nature’, which are reconfigured as objects of simulation ...practices and of a multitude of technoscientific enterprises as well as of political struggle. The historical influences and epistemological shifts of systems thinking are significant within two distinctive and interwoven fields: On the one hand the discourse of environmentalism with the paradigm of ecological crises, centered around ideas of resource management, sustainability, the general idea of an ‘endangered nature’ and the interconnectedness of global politics and individual actions. On the other hand the optimistic promises of artificial life, with synthetic biology and digital cyborg technologies as its avantgarde, which are very much driven by the idea of technoscientific mastery to surpass natures ‘weakness’ and by desires to improve ‘life’ and to even refashion ‘life itself’. On the field of historical ecology, concepts of systems thinking are traced back to the middle of the 19th century, where ecological thought emerged at the intersections of biology and geography. Meandering between vitalistic, holistic, and mechanistic concepts, between living and non-living elements, systems ecology finally substitutes ‘nature’, which in turn is re-established in its new ‘gestalt’ as computer simulated world model since the early 1970s. Resurrected as an interrelation of system variables at the level of global simulations ‘nature’ strikes as a zombie. As a second turning point of the rewriting of the matrix, of life we will discuss the advance of ‘games’ since the early 1970ies, with the example of ‘Game of life’ (‘Life’) as a significant landmark. When ‘life’ becomes ‘Life’, it is by computerized modeling in terms of dynamic processes. Computer games can be thought of as instances of the popularization of cybernetic system thinking, functioning as interdiscoursive fragments between the specialized discourse of system theories and the sphere of ‘common sense’ (Nohr 2008), where the specific “gaming situation” (Eskelinen 2001) foregrounds playful individual action and manipulation of system objects within a set of given rules or the manipulation of system rules itself on the level of the ‘code’. We will argue that both, the ecological discourse and the algorithmic model of self-reproduction of ‘Life’, are historically and systematically related manifestations and mediations of system theory. While they can be regarded as referring to different scales of application (macro-economic reasoning in the case of global eco-systems, modeling of bottom-up-complexity on a micro-level in the case of ‘Life’) and belonging to distinctive disciplines (economic and ecological research vs. mathematical theory of automata and artificial life studies), they share some common ground in being “algorithmic media” (Marks 2014) that are functional as “rhetorical software” (Doyle 1997) and as “allegorithms” (Galloway 2006) of the new compositions of the techno-biological and techno-ecological situation of the 21st century.
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