Trope Theory on the Mental/Physical Divide

In our everyday discourse, we distinguish without\ud fail between minds and bodies or between the mental and\ud the physical. Yet, in philosophy there is a tendency to get\ud rid of this divide. Roughly, the naturalist wants to reduce or\ud to identify the mental with the physical in order to provide a\ud unified basis for scientific research. The idealist, in\ud contrast, sticks to the mental as a precondition of grasping\ud the physical. The physical then tends to turn into mere\ud mental representations. These attempts to overcome the\ud divide, however, are not very promising. While the first\ud tries to assimilate the mental to the physical, the second\ud takes the opposite approach with the result that either the\ud mental or the physical goes by the board. Fortunately,\ud there is a third option: the realist maintains that the mental\ud exists along with the physical

Genetic Monitoring in the Workplace: A Tool Not a Solution

The authors differentiate between genetic monitoring and screening, and discuss the potential risks and benefits of predictive testing technologies

Essen and the Ruhr Area: The development of tourism and the role of small firms and entrepreneurs

The city of Essen is located at the centre of the Ruhr area, one of the largest urban and industrial agglomerations in Europe. Like many places in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia Essen had to deal with tremendous structural changes due to the downturn of coal mining and the steel industry since the 1960s. Nevertheless, in the meanwhile the city succeeded in creating a comparatively favourable starting position as an important centre for services, culture and new forms of tourism. Traditionally the headquarters of some of the largest German public companies are located here. Furthermore, the city has become an internationally renowned place of commercial fairs, conferences, and has a university. Essen hosts internationally acknowledged cultural institutions. And recently the building complex of the coal mine "Zollverein" became enlisted by the UNESCO as a World Heritage Memorial. In May 2006 the Ruhr area with Essen as its leading city was finally nominated as European Capital of Culture 2010. Taking all these factors together, a boost of the local tourism sector can be expected. In this context we discuss how the cities economy can gain from this development in the long run. We are interested in the related approaches of the tourism policy and the role of small firms and entrepreneurs in the process of developing a sustainable tourism infrastructure. It is of particular interest how public initiatives of tourism promotion and entrepreneurship support will be combined with the aim to use "industrial heritage tourism" and "cultural tourism" as a mode to economically revive the old industrialized Ruhr area. Thus, central questions of the papers are: Which policy strategies and support measures are appropriate in order to compete with success as an old industrialized area in the field of city and cultural tourism? Who tends to govern the newly establishing value chains? What position remains factual for local young firms therein? What role can public institutions play in order to ensure a high degree of value addition by local economic actors

Strengthening the German Craft sector through Innovation and Cooperation

The paper analyses different forms of region bound innovation and cooperation amongst small and medium sized firms of the German craft sector, mainly engaged in ?traditional? branches. The analysis is based on a recent questionnaire survey covering all trade groups of the craft sector and a comparison group of competitors in the industrial sector. Further data are generated through case studies in selected trades as well as through the analyses of published statistics and results of former research. The focus is on different strategies to cope with the challenges of present structural change: Which type of innovation are dominant in different craft trades, in firms of different size and in different places' To what an extent and in which way do the craft firms organise their innovation processes in collaboration with other firms' Which cooperation strategies do they follow in order to manage the trade-off between access to greater resources and loss of information to (regional) competitors' Which role do intermediary organisations play in the innovation process' The German craft sector (?Handwerk?) is defined by law as encompassing certain categorised occupations and currently includes 94 trades (?Gewerbe?) in 7 trade groups. Traditionally craft firms are SME and they are closely attached to intermediary organisations such as district based guilds, region based chambers, national professional associations. The sector provides facilities for vocational training for about one third of all German apprentices. Craft activity includes artistically creative trades as well as the mass production of goods, construction work and the provision of a wide range of services. Most of the trades serve the local and regional markets. A remarkable number of specialised firms - in some trades strongly clustered - also serve the national and partly the international market. Between 1994/95 and 2002 the sector as a whole faced a remarkable loss. Its share in the gross added value diminished from 10,7 % to 8 %. The annual turnover went down from 409 to 370 billion ?. The number of employees was reduced by 1,5 million. At present, about 4,5 million people are employed in nearly 562.000 firms. Surely the actual economic depression contributes to the decline, e.g. in the construction industries. However, other factors also seem to determine the structural changes such as the massive introduction of IT and the linked facilities for the industry - the strongest competitor of the craft sector in most of the branches - to realize very flexible the production of small series at moderate costs. The process of European integration, the changing demographical structure and newly emerging consumption patterns are other important determinants. The background for the paper is an explorative study conducted in 2002/2003 by the Rhine-Westphalia Institute of Economic Research (RWI). It aims to describe the character of the structural changes faced by the German craft sector and to identify strategies of firms to enhance their competitiveness in regional, national and international markets. The outcome shall contribute to appropriate policy measures, considering also the effects of the sectors development on the spatial economic structure

Alterung der Gesellschaft: Neue Herausforderungen für die Gründungsförderung in Deutschland? Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung bei Wirtschaftskammern und kommunalen Einrichtungen 2005 bis 2006

Die Alterung der Gesellschaft und deren Auswirkungen stellten in den vergangenen fünf Jahren ein sehr stark und mitunter kontrovers diskutiertes Thema dar. Die Konsequenzen der Bevölkerungsalterung sind vielschichtig und betreffen bei weitem nicht nur die Sicherheit der sozialen Sicherungssysteme (Börsch-Supan 2004; Schmidt 2004, 2005). Dabei wurde bis dato nur in sehr begrenztem Umfang die Verbindung zwischen demografischem Wandel, Gründungsgeschehen und Gründungsförderung betrachtet. Im Rahmen einer Studie für das BMWi hat sich das RWI Essen umfassend mit diesem Konnex auseinandergesetzt und hierzu jüngst den Endbericht vorgelegt (Engel et al. 2007). Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrags ist eine Aufbereitung der wesentlichen Erkenntnisse aus der Befragung bei Wirtschaftskammern und kommunalen Einrichtungen in den Jahren 2005 und 2006.Darüber hinaus werden Ergebnisse vertiefender Analysen dargestellt, die sich mit der Positionierung der Kammern in der Förderlandschaft bzw. denKooperationsstrategien detailliert auseinandersetzen. Hintergrund hierfür ist einerseits die Diskussion bezüglich der übersichtlichen Gestaltung des deutschen Förder- bzw. Beratungssystems (Klemmer et al. 1996; Kailer 2001: 113). Handlungsalternativen bieten sich vor allem in der engeren Abstimmung bzw. Bündelung von Angeboten verschiedener Einrichtungen. Andererseits hat die Nachfrage gerade älterer gründungsinteressierter Personen1 erheblich zugenommen. Die in den letzten Jahren zu beobachtende Veränderung im Kreis der Gründungsinteressierten gibt einen Vorgeschmack auf das Kommende.Da die Ausstattung mit Personal mit dieser Entwicklung scheinbar nicht Schritt hielt, erhöht sich der Druck auf die Gründungsberatung zu mehr Effizienz. Ausgehend davon spricht vieles dafür, sich mit den Anforderungen und Potenzialen älterer Gründungsinteressierter sowie mit den Einschätzungen der Kammern zu möglichen Anpassungserfordernissen in der Gründungsberatung auseinanderzusetzen. Das Ziel dieser Studie besteht darin, hierzu einen ersten, bundesweiten Überblick aus dem Blickwinkel der Gründungsintermediäre zu bieten

Scots pine litter decomposition along drainage succession and soil nutrient gradients in peatland forests, and the effects of inter-annual weather variation

Peer reviewe

Determinanten des Strukturwandels im Handwerk: Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojekts

Aufgabe der Studie ist es, Determinanten des Strukturwandels im deutschen Handwerk zu untersuchen. Zu berücksichtigen sind dabei u.a. technologische, demographische, produktionsorganisatorische und institutionelle Faktoren. Der Strukturwandel im Handwerks ist auf volkswirtschaftlicher, sektoraler und betrieblicher Ebene zu analysieren. Die Untersuchung ordnungs- und prozesspolitischer Einflüsse soll in Schlussfolgerungen münden, nicht zuletzt im Hinblick auf die künftige Gestaltung des Handwerksrechts. Die Komplexität der Fragestellung erfordert den Einsatz eines breiten Untersuchungsinstrumentariums. Der zur Anwendung gelangende Methodenmix umfasst insbesondere die Analyse von Primärstatistiken, rd. 60 Expertenbefragungen, eine schriftliche Befragung von Handwerks- und einer Kontrollgruppe nicht handwerklicher Unternehmen sowie eine Befragung von Bauunternehmen im Umland von Leipzig. Bei der retrospektiven Analyse wurde auf die Handwerksdatenbank des RWI zurückgegriffen. Eine eigene Hochrechnung zu ausgewählten Handwerkszweigen im Anschluss an die amtliche Handwerksberichterstattung lieferte die Datenbasis zur Untersuchung der aktuellen Entwicklung der Handwerkswirtschaft

Bi-criteria evaluation of the MIKE SHE model for a forested watershed on the South Carolina coastal plain

Hydrological models are important tools for effective management, conservation and restoration of forested wetlands. The objective of this study was to test a distributed hydrological model, MIKE SHE, by using bi-criteria (i.e., two measurable variables, streamflow and water table depth) to describe the hydrological processes in a forested watershed that is characteristic of the lower Atlantic Coastal Plain. Simulations were compared against observations of both streamflow and water table depth measured on a first-order watershed (WS80) on the Santee Experimental Forest in South Carolina, USA. Model performance was evaluated using coefficient of determination (<i>R</i><sup>2</sup>) and Nash-Sutcliffe's model efficiency (<i>E</i>). The <i>E</i> and root mean squared error (RMSE) were chosen as objective functions for sensitivity analysis of parameters. The model calibration and validation results demonstrated that the streamflow and water table depth were sensitive to most of the model input parameters, especially to surface detention storage, drainage depth, soil hydraulic properties, plant rooting depth, and surface roughness. Furthermore, the bi-criteria approach used for distributed model calibration and validation was shown to be better than the single-criterion in obtaining optimum model input parameters, especially for those parameters that were only sensitive to some specific conditions. Model calibration using the bi-criteria approach should be advantageous for constructing the uncertainty bounds of model inputs to simulate the hydrology for this type of forested watersheds. <i>R</i><sup>2</sup> varied from 0.60–0.99 for daily and monthly streamflow, and from 0.52–0.91 for daily water table depth. <i>E</i> changed from 0.53–0.96 for calibration and 0.51–0.98 for validation of daily and monthly streamflow, while <i>E</i> varied from 0.50–0.90 for calibration and 0.66–0.80 for validation of daily water table depth. This study showed that MIKE SHE could be a good candidate for simulating streamflow and water table depth in coastal plain watersheds