The confusion of languages as a plague and a giftor. No democracy without literacy

Ausgangspunkt des Textes sind die Begriffe Literarität und Öffentlichkeit und deren Bezug zur Demokratie. Die Autorinnen unterstreichen die Bedeutung von Literarität im digitalen Raum als dem global dominanten Raum schlechthin, der unsere öffentliche Welt prägt. Literarität verstehen sie als die globale Summe verschiedener Interpretationsweisen, die von verschiedenen Stimmen mit verschiedenen Augen und aus verschiedenen Perspektiven aufgegriffen, verarbeitet und weitergeleitet werden. Der öffentliche Raum ist ein durchmedialisierter Raum, voll von Zeichenwelten, die medial entschlüsselt werden müssen. Um dies zu bewältigen, braucht es die Kompetenz der Literarität. Die Autorinnen wörtlich: Literarität als Vermittlungswissenschaft vertritt keinen eigenen Gegenstandsbereich, sie ist mit keiner Disziplin ident, allerdings wird sie mit jeder Disziplin und mit jedem Feld „transportiert“, ob bewusst oder nicht, ob analysiert oder nicht, implizit oder explizit. Literarität ist überall, in jedem Bereich erlernbar. Gerade weil sie überall „gelernt“ werden kann, eignet sich Literarität zur Auseinandersetzung mit Übersetzungen von verschiedenen Vermittlungsebenen. Wieder einmal drängt sich die Gemeinsamkeit mit dem öffentlichen Raum auf – ob auf der Straße, im Amtsgebäude oder im Krankenhaus, überall werden direkt und indirekt Botschaften mitgeteilt und bestimmte Lesarten transportiert. Und so lassen sich beide, sowohl die öffentliche Vermittlung als auch das Lesen und Schreiben, als eingeschriebene Kulturtechniken der Vermittlung betrachten. Und weiter: In Zeiten von Fakes sagt uns das, dass man sich in den Techniken des Darstellens auskennen muss. Man muss die Mittel der literarischen und poetischen Überhöhung kennen, um Fakes und andere manipulative Techniken zu erkennen. (DIPF/Orig.)The text takes as its starting point the concepts of literacy and the public sphere and their relationship to democracy. The authors underline the importance of literacy in the digital space, the space that is globally dominant, which has left a mark on our public world. Literacy is understood to be the global sum of different ways of interpretation that are taken up, processed and transmitted by different voices with different eyes and from different perspectives. The public sphere is a thoroughly mediated space, full of worlds of signs that must be deciphered. The competence of literacy is required to accomplish this task. To quote the authors: Literacy as a science of communication does not represent a subject area of its own; it is not identical to any discipline, yet it is “conveyed” by every discipline and every field, whether consciously or not, whether analysed or not, implicitly or explicitly. Literacy is everywhere and is able to be learned in every area. Precisely because it can be “learned” everywhere, literacy is suitable for the examination of translations of different levels of communication. Once again the similarity to public space imposes itself—whether in the street, in public buildings or in hospitals, messages are communicated directly and indirectly and particular ways of reading are conveyed. And thus both public communication as well as reading and writing can be regarded as encoded cultural techniques of communication. And furthermore: in times of fakes, it means that one must be familiar with techniques of representation—one must be literate. (DIPF/Orig.

Work-sharing for a sustainable economy

Achieving low unemployment in an environment of weak growth is a major policy challenge; a more egalitarian distribution of hours worked could be the key to solving it. Whether worksharing actually increases employment, however, has been debated controversially. In this article we present stylized facts on the distribution of hours worked and discuss the role of work-sharing for a sustainable economy. Building on recent developments in labor market theory we review the determinants of working long hours and its effect on well-being. Finally, we survey work-sharing reforms in the past. While there seems to be a consensus that worksharing in the Great Depression in the U.S. and in the Great Recession in Europe was successful in reducing employment losses, perceptions of the work-sharing reforms implemented between the 1980s and early 2000s are more ambivalent. However, even the most critical evaluations of these reforms provide no credible evidence of negative employment effects; instead, the overall success of the policy seems to depend on the economic and institutional setting, as well as the specific details of its implementation. (authors' abstract)Series: Ecological Economic Paper

List of well-being indicators

This milestone presents a pool of available indicators and indicator systems which go beyond the narrow concepts of national economic accounts as well as a structuring of the indicators and indices according to central areas of well-being. The milestone builds the basis for Task 202.2, where a subset of indicators will be selected based on different theoretical frameworks, e.g. services / functionings, needs. Some of the indicators will be included in the macro-economic models in order to account for key dimensions of sustainability.Series: WWWforEurop

Ecological Macreconomics: Introduction and Review

The Great Recession of the past years has brought macroeconomics back. Many of the recession's phenomena, causes and consequences alike, cannot be understood using solely microeconomic decisionmaking. Over the past decades the economics profession has pursued the implications of rational choices and enshrined them in so-called "micro foundations" as a hallmark of modern economic theory. By focusing on the choices and actions of individual consumers, firms, or the government, however, one can easily miss important determinants of the economic system which only arise at the meso- or the macroeconomic levels where institutions, coordination, and complexity in general are important and sometimes even can take on a life of their own. To lesser extent, ecological economics has fallen prone to similar pitfalls by mostly focusing the unit of investigation on low-level, small-scale subsystems of the economy. There are, of course, notable exceptions including the early contributors Boulding and Georgescu-Roegen and the general interest of ecological economists in the field of (ecological) macroeconomics has been increasing. (authors' abstract)Series: Ecological Economic Paper

Towards an operational measurement of socio-ecological performance

Questioning GDP as dominant indicator for economic performance has become commonplace. For economists economic policy always aims for a broader array of goals (like income, employment, price stability, trade balance) alongside income, with income being the priority objective. The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission argued for extending and adapting key variables of macroeconomic analysis. International organisations such as the EC, OECD, Eurostat and UN have proposed extended arrays of macroeconomic indicators (see 'Beyond GDP', 'Compendium of wellbeing indicators', 'GDP and Beyond', 'Green Economy', 'Green Growth', 'Measuring Progress of Societies'). Despite these high profile efforts, few wellbeing and environmental variables are in use in macroeconomic models. The reasons for the low uptake of socio-ecological indicators in macroeconomic models range from path dependencies in modelling, technical limitations, indicator lists being long and unworkable, choices of indicators appearing ad hoc and poor data availability. In this paper we review key approaches and identify a limited list of candidate variables and - as much as possible - offer data sources.Series: WWWforEurop

Design and Evaluation of a Cross-Cultural Training System

Cross-cultural competency, and the underlying communication and affective skills required to develop such expertise, is becoming increasingly important for a wide variety of domains. To address this need, we developed a blended learning platform which combines virtual role-play with tutorials, assessment and feedback. A Middle-Eastern Curriculum (MEC) exemplar for cross-cultural training U.S. military personnel was developed to guide the refinement of an existing game-based training platform. To complement this curriculum, we developed scenario authoring tools to enable end-users to define training objectives, link performance measures and feedback/remediation to these objectives, and deploy experiential scenarios within a game-based virtual environment (VE). Lessons learned from the design and development of this exemplar cross-cultural competency curriculum, as well as formative evaluation results, are discussed. Initial findings suggest that the underlying training technology promotes deep levels of semantic processing of the key information of relevant cultural and communication skills

Computer-aided communication satellite system analysis and optimization

The capabilities and limitations of the various published computer programs for fixed/broadcast communication satellite system synthesis and optimization are discussed. A satellite Telecommunication analysis and Modeling Program (STAMP) for costing and sensitivity analysis work in application of communication satellites to educational development is given. The modifications made to STAMP include: extension of the six beam capability to eight; addition of generation of multiple beams from a single reflector system with an array of feeds; an improved system costing to reflect the time value of money, growth in earth terminal population with time, and to account for various measures of system reliability; inclusion of a model for scintillation at microwave frequencies in the communication link loss model; and, an updated technological environment