Berlin Group Research Articles

Mindfulness in Action: Buddhist Environmental Activism of Earth Holder Berlin

This study explores the intersection of mindfulness practice and environmental activism within the Earth Holder Berlin (EHB) group, a part of the Order of Interbeing (O of I) inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh. EHB, established in 2020, integrates the principles of engaged Buddhism and endeavors to advance social and ecological justice through mindful actions. Using a qualitative methodology, this research employs semi-structured interviews and participant observation to investigate the experiences of EHB members. The findings demonstrate the transformative potential of Buddhism in ecological discourse, illustrating how EHB members embody epistemic entanglement, intertwining their Buddhist backgrounds with climate knowledge. This integration not only enhances personal transformation but also serves as a catalyst for social and ecological justice, enriching our understanding of engaged Buddhism in contemporary environmental movements.

Reducing rehospitalization in cardiac patients: a randomized, controlled trial of a cardiac care management program (“Cardiolotse”) in Germany

BackgroundWe conducted a prospective, randomized, controlled, two-group parallel trial investigating the effectiveness of a care management program employing cardiac care navigators providing post-discharge support to patients compared to standard care.MethodsThe intervention commenced in 2019/2020 for 2862 patients hospitalized with heart failure, coronary heart disease, or cardiac arrhythmias in departments of cardiology across eight participating sites of a hospital group in Berlin, Germany. We analyzed the results using an intention-to-treat approach. The primary outcome was the all-cause rehospitalization rate after 12 months. Secondary outcomes included rehospitalizations due to one of the qualifying cardiac diagnoses, duration of rehospitalization, mortality, health-related quality of life, and several process indicators.Trial data were collected from a combination of face-to-face and phone interviews conducted by hospital staff throughout the 12-month follow-up period using standardized questionnaires. Administrative claims data were provided by a large statutory health insurer. Outcomes for the intervention and control groups were compared using logistic regression, generalized linear models (GLMs) with a negative binomial distribution, ordinary least squares, and Cox proportional hazards regression.ResultsCompared to the control group (N = 1294), the intervention group (N = 1256) had a lower rate of all-cause rehospitalizations (62.6% vs. 66.4%, p = 0.05) and shorter lengths of stay (14.49 vs. 16.89 days, p = 0.02) during the 12-month follow-up period. These differences were also present for rehospitalizations due to the cardiac diseases qualifying for study recruitment, with rehospitalization rates for the intervention and control groups being 58.0% vs. 61.4% (p = 0.08) and particularly pronounced for lengths of rehospitalization stay of 12.97 vs. 15.40 days (p = 0.01), respectively. Subgroup analyses indicated positive effects of the intervention for patients 70 years and older (p = 0.05), females (p = 0.06), and those with little or no German language proficiency (p = 0.03). Furthermore, we found positive effects on patients’ adherence to health-related behavioral recommendations (81.91% vs. 73.95%, p = 0.000).ConclusionsThis study adds to the body of evidence indicating that care management interventions supporting patients as they transition from the inpatient to the outpatient sector can lower rehospitalizations, decrease length of rehospitalization stays, and improve adherence to post-discharge recommendations.Trial registrationGerman Clinical Trial Register, DRKS00020424. Registered 2020-06-18. (retrospectively registered).

A Berlin-sided retrospective of the origins of metabolic control theory.

Metabolic control theory (MCA) is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The theory introduced quantitative terms that describe the importance of an enzyme for the regulation of the overall flux and of metabolite concentrations. MCA was developed independently by two groups. The Berlin group included Reinhart Heinrich, Tom A. Rapoport and Samuel M. Rapoport, and the Edinburgh group Henrik Kacser and James A. Burns. Here, I provide a brief reminiscence from the perspective of the Berlin group.

Overcoming stigma: the boundary work of privileged mothers of Turkish background in Berlin’s private schools

ABSTRACT Since their arrival in Germany as guest workers, women of Turkish background have been subject to stigma and discrimination. Based on interviews with 20 mothers of Turkish background in Germany who send their children to private schools, we reveal the complex experience of stigma and discrimination interwoven with the experience of immigrant motherhood and parenting in educational institutions. We then analyze the stigma-countering strategies adopted by mothers in Berlin’s private schools. We argue that mothers of Turkish background who send their children to private schools respond to stigma and discrimination by capitalizing on their own privileges: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and aspirational global cultural capital. While they adopt strategies motivated by their understanding of “good motherhood,” they deemphasize ethnic boundaries and emphasize class status with boundaries often drawn against “uneducated” and “Middle Eastern” immigrants, aiming to reposition themselves as members of a privileged international group in Berlin.

Logical empiricism in Turkish exile: Hans Reichenbach’s research and teaching activities at Istanbul University (1933–1938)

In this article, I seek to shed new light on a lesser-known stage of the development of Hans Reichenbach’s thought, namely his research, output and teaching activities at Istanbul University (1933–1938). I argue that the experience of Turkish exile was decisive in the elaboration of Reichenbach’s probability theory of meaning and knowledge. His work Experience and Prediction, produced while in Istanbul, should therefore be put in its Turkish context of elaboration and reception. To this end, I will take into consideration not only Reichenbach’s efforts to popularize and extend the Berlin Group’s program of scientific philosophy in Turkey and throughout Europe in the 1930s, but also the forgotten work of Reichenbach’s students—most of them women—at Istanbul University.

Abstract 11136: Obstructive Sleep Apnea in Aortic Dissection

Background: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) imposes an afterload burden on the left ventricle and increases the pressure gradient across the intrathoracic aorta. This might increase the likelihood of aortic dissection (AD). We hypothesized that patients with acute AD would have a high prevalence of previously undiagnosed OSA and a largely nocturnal presentation. Methods: 40 consecutive, consenting subjects with acute AD who survived to hospital discharge were collected from 4 institutions. Mean age was 57 (range 28-75), 24 were male. 25 had type A dissection and 15 type B. 37 completed the modified Berlin Questionnaire and 30 had attended overnight polysomnography. Presenting CT scans had aortic diameter measured at a) the sinotubular junction b) ascending aorta c) origin of innominate d) mid-arch e) origin of left subclavian f) mid-descending aorta g) level of diaphragm; CT scans at 3 months were available in 24 subjects. Results: AHI ranged from 0 - 89; prevalence of OSA (defined by apnea-hypopnea index [AHI] > 5) was 63%. There were no differences in aortic diameter at any level comparing OSA vs non-OSA, regardless of AHI cutoff (>5, >15, >30; figure). Over time aortic diameter decreased at the level of the sinotubular junction and ascending aorta (expected - due to surgery). Whether dissection occurred during overnight hours (10 PM - 7 AM) did not differ by presence/absence of OSA (regardless of AHI cutoff). In those with high-risk Berlin questionnaires (>=2 categories positive) 10/21 (48%) dissections occurred during sleeping hours vs 2/13 (15%) in low risk Berlin group (p = 0.08, Fisher’s exact test). Conclusions: Among patients with acute AD the prevalence of OSA was high. Aortic diameters, however, were not different according to level of AHI. Presence of OSA defined by polysomnography was not associated with a nocturnal presentation in this sample.

P0439 / #2139: INCIDENCE AND OUTCOME OF PEDIATRIC ARDS: RETROSPECTIVE COMPARAISON BETWEEN THE BERLIN DEFINITION AND THE PALICC CRITERIA

Aims & Objectives: Aim was to compare incidence and outcomes of pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (pARDS) according to Berlin definitions and Pediatric Acute Lung Injury Consensus Conference (PALICC) criteria. Methods: Data of all admitted patients (1 month to 14 years) to our Pediatric Intensive Care Unit over a 30-months period (July 2017–Dec 2019) were reviewed for presence of any respiratory distress at admission or during PICU stay. Patients with significant cardiac L-R shunt were excluded. PALICC and Berlin criteria were retrospectively applied to these patients. Collected data including criteria, severity and outcom. Patients was classified in 2 groups: the “PALICC only group” and the “Berlin with or without PALICC”. Results: A total of 568 admissions was recorded during the study period: Among them, 359 (63%) were identified had respiratory distress at admission or during PICU stay. A total of 87 childrens (15,3%; 95%) fulfilled definition of pARDS with either of the two PALICC and BERLIN criteria. 81 children (93,1%) fulfilled PALICC criteria and only 47 childrens (54%) fulfilled BERLIN definition. Statistical Agreement between two definitions was moderate (Kappa: 0,59; 95%, observed agreement 88%). More patients had severe ARDS in the “Berlin with or without PALICC group” as compared to the “PALICC only” group (61,7% vs. 25,2%). There was no difference regarding the duration of mechanical ventilation (8 vs. 10 days) but there was a non trend to increased mortality in the BERLIN group [36,1% vs. 22,1%). Conclusions: Compared to the Berlin definition, PALICC criteria seems to identify more patients with pARDS with more severe severity in “Berlin with or without PALICC” group with no difference in outcome.

Everyday Language Exposure Shapes Prediction of Specific Words in Listening Comprehension: A Visual World Eye-Tracking Study.

We investigated the effects of everyday language exposure on the prediction of orthographic and phonological forms of a highly predictable word during listening comprehension. Native Japanese speakers in Tokyo (Experiment 1) and Berlin (Experiment 2) listened to sentences that contained a predictable word and viewed four objects. The critical object represented the target word (e.g., /sakana/; fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/; horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/; cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/; book). The three other objects were distractors. The Tokyo group fixated the target and the orthographic competitor over the unrelated objects before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that they pre-activated the orthographic form of the target word. The Berlin group showed a weaker bias toward the target than the Tokyo group, and they showed a tendency to fixate the orthographic competitor only when the orthographic similarity was very high. Thus, prediction effects were weaker in the Berlin group than in the Tokyo group. We found no evidence for the prediction of phonological information. The obtained group differences support probabilistic models of prediction, which regard the built-up language experience as a basis of prediction.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism

The article examines the question of whether L. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had any influence on the formation and development of logical positivism. It is shown that the members of the Vienna Circle were familiar with the Tractatus, but practically did not accept anything from its content. Wittgenstein's reasoning about the world, about facts, about the structure of fact were rejected by them as a bad metaphysics, with which they fought. The denial of causality and the deprivation of the meaning of scientific laws could not be accepted by representatives of logical positivism, whose main task was the logical analysis of the language of science in order to cleanse it of metaphysical concepts and build a unified science on a solid empirical foundation. If the members of the Vienna Circle were even familiar with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, then representatives of the Berlin Group, the Lvov-Warsaw School, the Uppsala School and supporters of logical positivism in other countries hardly heard of it. This leads to the conclusion that Wittgenstein's Tractatus did not have any impact on the logical positivism.

Новая музыка в Австрии и Германии после 1918 года: от бунта к консолидации

The year 1918 opens a new political era as well as a new period in the history of art. It is associated with the promotion and strengthening of new music, which was accepted by the public only after the First World War. After the "heroic years" of the 1910s, new music gradually formed its own secessionist culture in the post-war period. It gave the right to compose new music as well as an opportunity to perform, listen, and evaluate it. The article covers the activities of several local new music societies in Vienna, Berlin, and Dresden (Schoenberg Society for Private Musical Performances, J. M. Hauer’s Free Movement group, The Berlin Group of H. Scherchen, The November Group, and E. Schulhoff’s circle). The article explores the repertoire which had no stylistic, national, ideological, or political restrictions. However, due to organizational and economic reasons it was limited mainly to chamber compositions. The article also focuses on the criticism of new music (Abnruch magazine in Vienna, Melos magazine in Berlin). The historical evidence analyzed in the article allows us to re-evaluate the role of the secessionist culture of new music in the post-war years, which contributed to significant changes in its performance, perception and evaluation. This, in turn, marked the beginning of the era of new music as an “organized activity"—the heyday of the festival movement in the mid-1920s. At the same time, radical art was rapidly losing its unity: the confrontation of divergent aesthetic trends (the Schoenberg school and Neoclassicism) resulted in a split. The revolutionary impulse gradually exhausted itself, new music was academized and became a tradition.

PayTechs im Open Banking

Open Banking enables the formation of digital ecosystems and reduces entry barriers for payment service providers from the fintech and non-banking sector. PSD II-compliant interfaces (APIs) to be implemented by account servicing payment service providers (ASPSPs) shall enable third party providers (3rdPP or TPP) to aggregate data, operations and transactions on online bank accounts starting from 14.9.2019 and thereby further foster opening of the banking sector (open banking). Access to accounts can be denied for objective reasons. The majority of the APIs was designed on the basis of the leading European standard framework of the Berlin Group with individual modifications. However, the requirements of the PSD II have not been fully met yet. Due to current technical obstacles the Austrian Financial Markets Authority (FMA) tolerates the account access methods used by third party providers until now in order to ensure frictionless working of payment services until all problems have been solved. Afterwards, third party providers shall only be allowed to use the designated PSD II API.

Bodies on stage between presence and absence

European theatre engages with the problems of our time with ever greater commitment and responsibility, crucial both on the existential and the social level. At the same time it is researching and experimenting with a language suited for the communicative and aesthetic horizon of our age. This essay, intended to inaugurate in this journal a series of critical studies of the theatre, analyses two works, highly successful internationally, emblematic both by their theme (the body, death, memory) on which they invite the spectators to reflect and the experimental technique through which they involve audiences. The performances analysed are “La Merda” by the Italian Cristian Ceresoli, interpreted by Silvia Gallarani and “Nachlass” by the Swiss-German Stephen Kaegi for the Berlin group Rimini Protokoll.

PRESENTATION

Marxism and Critical Theory derive from a long and broad intellectual tradition that originated in the nineteenth century in the so-called “Hegelian Left” group in Berlin, which included the young student Karl Marx. This German philosopher has left us a rich theoretical- critical legacy that, from philosophy to political economy, sociology, history, psychoanalysis, etc., allows us to subject capitalist society to a substantive social critique with emancipatory interest. Nevertheless, it is in this critical spirit that the idea of this publication emerged as a special issue entitled Marxism and Critical Theory. [...]

BUNDLE ADJUSTMENT OF SPACEBORNE DOUBLE-CAMERA PUSH-BROOM IMAGERS AND ITS APPLICATION TO LROC NAC IMAGERY

Abstract. The TU Berlin group of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team has implemented a Bundle Adjustment (BA) for spaceborne multi-lenses line scan imagers, by rigorously modeling the geometric properties of the image acquisition. The BA was applied to stereo image sets of the LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) and first results show, that the overall geometry of the stereo models were significantly improved. Ray intersection accuracies of initially up to several meters were homogenized within the integrated stereo models and improved to 0.14 m on average. The mean point error of the adjusted 3D object points was estimated by the BA to be 0.95 m. The inclusion of available Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) shots as 3D ground control to the BA, accurately tied to the image space by an aforegoing co-registration, allowed to register the final adjusted NAC DTM to the currently most accurate global lunar reference frame. The BA also provides accuracy assessments of the individual LOLA tracks used for georeference during the adjustment, which will be useful to further assess LOLA derived products.

The NextGenPSD2 Framework in a pan- European PSD2 Account Access context

European regulators have promoted increased innovation and competition in the retail payments market and now require banks to allow third-party providers access to online accessible bank accounts (XS2A). Based on the legal requirements and differences in national jurisdictions, the Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 has stipulated that pan- European XS2A interoperability requires harmonised standards and an open governance model for the creation of such standards. This paper describes the background and details of the harmonisation achieved within the NextGenPSD2 Framework, as well as implementation coverage and future evolution of this framework. The authors argue that the harmonised technical standardisation offered by NextGenPSD2 will help European market players to build new use cases, business models and schemes.

Unexpected role of natural killer cell‐derived interferon‐γ as a driver of NETosis and DVT

Unexpected role of natural killer cell‐derived interferon‐γ as a driver of NETosis and DVT

Finding Her Niche: An Interview with Emmanuelle Charpentier.

Finding Her Niche: An Interview with Emmanuelle Charpentier.

Large-scale QM/MM calculations of the CaMn4O5 cluster in the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II: Comparisons with EXAFS structures

Large-scale QM/MM calculations including hydrogen-bonding networks in the oxygen evolving complex (OEC) of photosystem II (PSII) were performed to elucidate the geometric structures of the CaMn4O5 cluster in the key catalytic states (Si (i=0–3)). The optimized Mn–Mn, Ca–Mn and Mn–O distances by the large-scale QM/MM starting from the high-resolution XRD structure were consistent with those of the EXAFS experiments in the dark stable S1 state by the Berkeley and Berlin groups. The optimized geometrical parameters for other Si (i=0, 2, 3) states were also consistent with those of EXAFS, indicating the importance of the large-scale QM/MM calculations for the PSII-OEC.

O teatro atravessado

O autor tenta dar conta aqui da multiplicidade de formas e de lugares da criação teatral contemporânea por meio da noção de “teatro atravessado”. Ele se apoia especialmente em três exemplos escolhidos por sua heterogeneidade: BR-3, trabalho site-specific do Teatro da Vertigem; as performances vídeo-teatrais do Grupo Berlin, em particular Land’s end; as criações literárias, visuais e tecnológicas do encenador Guy Cassiers. O entendimento é o de que esses espetáculos procuram produzir nos espectadores menos representações que perspectivas, para retomar a noção antropológica de Viveiros de Castro: deslizamentos perceptivos, desligamentos conceituais, desfiliações sociais, colocando em ação, cada um à sua maneira, a política do “mestre ignorante” à que se refere Jacques Racière. Eles promovem assim novos modos de subjetivação.Tradução do francês para o português de José da Costa (Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – UNIRIO)

Walter Dubislav’s Philosophy of Science and Mathematics

Walter Dubislav (1895–1937) was a leading member of the Berlin Group for scientific philosophy. This “sister group” of the more famous Vienna Circle emerged around Hans Reichenbach’s seminars at the University of Berlin in 1927 and 1928. Dubislav was to collaborate with Reichenbach, an association that eventuated in their conjointly conducting university colloquia. Dubislav produced original work in philosophy of mathematics, logic, and science, consequently following David Hilbert’s axiomatic method. This brought him to defend formalism in these disciplines as well as to explore the problems of substantiating (Begrundung) human knowledge. Dubislav also developed elements of general philosophy of science. Sadly, the political changes in Germany in 1933 proved ruinous to Dubislav. He published scarcely anything after Hitler came to power and in 1937 committed suicide under tragic circumstances. The intent here is to pass in review Dubislav’s philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science and so to shed ligh...