Open Access Books

In the spring of 2011, a diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information. This symposium brought together experts in information theory, computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. This volume presents new research by those invited to speak at the conference. The contributors to this volume use their wide-ranging expertise in the area of biological information to bring fresh insights into the many explanatory difficulties associated with biological information. These authors raise major challenges to the conventional scientific wisdom, which attempts to explain all biological information exclusively in terms of the standard mutation/selection paradigm. Several clear themes emerged from these research papers: 1) Information is indispensable to our understanding of what life is; 2) Biological information is more than the material structures that embody it; 3) Conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life. By exploring new perspectives on biological information, this volume seeks to expand, encourage, and enrich research into the nature and origin of biological information. Contents: Session One — Information Theory & Biology: Introductory Comments (Robert J Marks II): Biological Information — What is It? (Werner Gitt, Robert Compton and Jorge Fernandez) A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search (William A Dembski, Winston Ewert and Robert J Marks II) Pragmatic Information (John W Oller, Jr) Limits of Chaos and Progress in Evolutionary Dynamics (William F Basener) Tierra: The Character of Adaptation (Winston Ewert, William A Dembski and Robert J Marks II) Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation (George Montañez, Robert J Marks II, Jorge Fernandez and John C Sanford) Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems (Granville Sewell) Information and Thermodynamics in Living Systems (Andy C McIntosh) Session Two — Biological Information and Genetic Theory: Introductory Comments (John C Sanford): Not Junk After All: Non-Protein-Coding DNA Carries Extensive Biological Information (Jonathan Wells) Can Purifying Natural Selection Preserve Biological Information? (Paul Gibson, John R Baumgardner, Wesley H Brewer and John C Sanford) Selection Threshold Severely Constrains Capture of Beneficial Mutations (John C Sanford, John R Baumgardner and Wesley H Brewer) Using Numerical Simulation to Test the “Mutation-Count” Hypothesis (Wesley H Brewer, John R Baumgardner and John C Sanford) Can Synergistic Epistasis Halt Mutation Accumulation? Results from Numerical Simulation (John R Baumgardner, Wesley H Brewer and John C Sanford) Computational Evolution Experiments Reveal a Net Loss of Genetic Information Despite Selection (Chase W Nelson and John C Sanford) Information Loss: Potential for Accelerating Natural Genetic Attenuation of RNA Viruses (Wesley H Brewer, Franzine D Smith and John C Sanford) DNA.EXE: A Sequence Comparison between the Human Genome and Computer Code (Josiah Seaman) Biocybernetics and Biosemiosis (Donald Johnson) Session Three — Theoretical Molecular Biology: Introductory Comments (Michael J Behe): An Ode to the Code: Evidence for Fine-Tuning in the Standard Codon Table (Jed C Macosko and Amanda M Smelser) A New Model of Intracellular Communication Based on Coherent, High-Frequency Vibrations in Biomolecules (L Dent) Getting There First: An Evolutionary Rate Advantage for Adaptive Loss-of-Function Mutations (Michael J Behe) The Membrane Code: A Carrier of Essential Biological Information That is Not Specified by DNA and is Inherited Apart from It (Jonathan Wells) Explaining Metabolic Innovation: Neo-Darwinism Versus Design (Douglas D Axe and Ann K Gauger) Session Four — Biological Information and Self-Organizational Complexity Theory: Introductory Comments (Bruce L Gordon): Evolution Beyond Entailing Law: The Roles of Embodied Information and Self Organization (Stuart Kauffman) Towards a General Biology: Emergence of Life and Information from the Perspective of Complex Systems Dynamics (Bruce H Weber) Readership: Academics, researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates in bioinformatics. Biologists, mathematicians/statisticians, physicists and computer scientists.

The collective book Andean and Peruvian Architecture, Volume II: Contemporary Architecture, Technology, and Education brings together research that explores the relationship between architecture, society, education, and sustainability, offering critical perspectives and innovative proposals derived from formative research carried out at the Andean University of Cusco. The volume opens with Fragmented Urubamba: Four Urban-Architectural Perspectives that Rewrite Reality, by Efraín Ugarte-Salva and collaborators, which examines processes of territorial and urban fragmentation in the Sacred Valley, proposing alternative readings to understand and transform the city’s architectural dynamics. Next, Impact of Architectural Spaces on the Well-Being and Academic Experience of University Students, by Howard Callo and his team, analyzes how the spatial quality of university environments affects student performance, motivation, and well-being. In Can the Vernacular Contribute to the Development of Contemporary Architectures and Settlements?, Víctor Salas reflects on the value of traditional building practices as input for contemporary design, emphasizing the relevance of ancestral knowledge in addressing current challenges. Meanwhile, Dispute Prevention and Resolution Board: Gaps in Law 32069 in Environmental Matters, by David Durand, offers a legal-architectural approach that highlights regulatory gaps in resolving environmental conflicts. The pedagogical dimension is addressed in Academic Motivation and Learning Strategies in Architecture Students in the Pre-Pandemic Context, by Crayla Alfaro, and in Educating to Design and Designing to Transform: Principles of a Transformative Architectural Pedagogy, by Lenin Meléndez and Grecia Vargas, which propose pathways to strengthen disciplinary teaching. Finally, Unwanted Loneliness and Public Space, by Alhelí Álvarez, presents methodological and inclusive urban design guidelines aimed at mitigating social isolation through architecture and public space. This volume represents a significant academic contribution that articulates applied research, pedagogical innovation, and critical reflection, reaffirming the role of architecture as a discipline capable of influencing social and territorial transformation.

Im Rahmen des Projekts Duncker & Humblot reprints heben wir Schätze aus dem Programm der ersten rund 150 Jahre unserer Verlagsgeschichte, von der Gründung 1798 bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs 1945. Lange vergriffene Klassiker und Fundstücke aus den Bereichen Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Geschichte, Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft werden nach langer Zeit wieder verfügbar gemacht – und zwar sowohl gedruckt als auch in elektronischer Form. Einige Titel sind bereits erschienen. Täglich kommen weitere hinzu. Bis Ende des Jahres wird das »Duncker & Humblot reprints«-Programm auf ca. 1.500 Bände anwachsen. Möchten Sie regelmäßig über Neuerscheinungen aus dem reprints-Programm informiert werden? Dann abonnieren Sie unseren E-Mail-Benachrichtigungsdienst.

Television as we knew it is irrevocably changing. Some are gleefully announcing the death of television, others have been less sanguine but insist that television is radically changing underneath our eyes. Several excellent publications have dealt with television’s uncertain condition, but few have taken the specific question of what television’s transformations mean for the discipline of Television Studies as a starting point. The essays collected in this volume aim to fill this void. Two fundamental questions string the various contributions together. First, is television really in crisis or is the present not so extraordinary when revisiting television’s development? Second, should we invent new theoretical concepts or are our old ones still perfectly relevant? To answer such questions the authors in this volume take up diverse case studies, ranging from the academic series Reading Contemporary Television to Flemish Fiction, from nostalgic programming on broadcast television to YouTube, from tell-sell television shows to public television art in the 1980s.

“Beauty”, “Light”, “Time”, “Memory”, “Universality”, “Wisdom”, “Sacred” and “Essentiality” are the themes of the eight meditations by two enlightened architects and two kindred spirits, capable of uniting the North and South of Europe with their wise reflections: Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Campo Baeza. Eight meditations on themes that cut across time and fashion. Eight meditations by two learned architects whose readings have been assimilated and declined with respect to architecture. Eight meditations that emphasise how praxis must always be united with theoretics. Eight meditations by two architects who are convinced that successful architecture is the result of culture and reflection, not extemporaneity. Eight meditations that show how to be contemporary architects it is necessary to confront the past by considering it present.

The scientific field of leadership and followership is fast evolving and has seen several interesting developments over recent years. The early heroic views of leadership are slowly turning into more nuanced perspectives, including the understanding that leadership and followership are mutually dependent on each other. Likewise, there is a growing awareness that the focus on the positive side of leadership and followership can be fruitfully complemented by a focus on the darker sides of these constructs. According to the latest research plenty of “grey areas” exist, where further insights into leadership and followership are needed. We seek to emphasize the different shades of dark leadership by taking leaders, followers, and their interaction in specific contexts into account. Accordingly, many of the findings presented in this Research Topic align with a deviation away from the idea of the omnipotent leader. Not only leaders’ dark traits such as narcissism and psychopathy, but also followers’ Machiavellianism emerged as hindering factors for positive organizational functioning. Other results presented in this Research Topic will be fruitful to explain what drives leaders towards dark-side behaviors, the consequences of dark-side leader behaviors (e.g., different types of destructive leadership), and how followers respond to them (e.g., follower attributions of perceived abusive supervision). Contributions to this Research Topic are also pushing the boundaries of current theorizing, shedding further light on the “shades of grey," when it comes to the possibly unintended negative consequences of leadership and followership. In sum, the dark sides of leadership and followership are a natural part of an organizational reality that many employees face day in and day out. The aim of this Research Topic is to encourage an integrative view of leadership and followership and their dark sides, for a better understanding of complex organizational systems and implications for better practice.

Der 40. Geburtstag des Élysée-Vertrages im Jahre 2003 war Anlass zu deutsch-französischen Feierlichkeiten, die wie nie zuvor von Symbolik bestimmt waren und durch die Irak-Krise sowie die Spannungen in den transatlantischen Beziehungen eine besondere Bedeutung erhielten. Führende Politker beschworen die hohe Bedeutung des Vertrages, z.B. für die europäische Einigung. Die Autoren des Bandes stellen dieser Euphorie vertiefende wissenschaftliche Analysen entgegen. Das Vertragswerk wird in seinen historischen Kontext gestellt, sein Platz in den deutsch-französischen Beziehungen nach 1945 definiert und seine heutige Bedeutung beleuchtet. So beschränkt sich dieser Band bewusst nicht auf die im Vertrag fixierten Aktionsfelder, sondern analysiert darüber hinaus auch jene Aspekte, die dort nicht explizit geregelt werden. Eingeleitet werden die Beiträge durch eine Darstellung über den komplexen Hintergrund der internationalen Beziehungen in der Zeit des Kalten Krieges und der deutschen Teilung, um die Unterzeichnung des Vertrages und seine Bedeutung für die deutsch-französischen Beziehungen nach 1945 im bilateralen und multilateralen Kräftefeld zu verorten.

L'auteur a mené des enquêtes de terrain dans des quartiers populaires de villes mondes, Paris et New York, dans le sillage de l'ethnographe américaine Sally Merry, afin de saisir les enjeux liés à la coproduction de la sécurité, lors de programmes de sécurisation de ghettos urbains. Cette recherche comparative pluridisciplinaire est en outre heuristique, en ce sens où elle rend saillantes certaines réalités de la société américaine en matière de politiques de contrôle social, qui resteraient autrement confinées à la sphère de l'invisible. Même si l'importation de concepts innovants dans le domaine de la régulation sociale, vers des contextes sociopolitiques et culturels diversifiés, est indéniable, il s'avère que l'accent sera davantage mis soit sur la participation informelle des résidents d'îlots sociaux en faveur de la sécurité, soit sur la surveillance formelle, selon que l'on est sur l'une ou l'autre rive de l'Atlantique. Cette analyse apporte des éléments de réponse aux décideurs politiques locaux et nationaux, aux urbanistes, aux étudiants américanistes, géographes ou sociologues intéressés par ces questions urbaines, dans la mesure où le curseur se place du côté des destinataires et bénéficiaires de l'offre sécuritaire. Comment perçoivent-ils la privatisation grandissante de leur milieu de vie ? Celle-ci s'accompagne-t-elle d'une meilleure justice sociale dans les ghettos urbains, sur le plan de l'accès à la sécurité ?

The study of letter writing is at the heart of the historical-sociolinguistic enterprise. Private letters, in particular, offer an unprecedented view on language history. This book presents an in-depth study of the language of letters focussing on a unique collection of Dutch private letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which comprises letters from the lower, middle and upper ranks, written by men as well as women. The book discusses the key issues of formulaic language and the degree of orality of private letters, it questions the importance of letter-writing manuals, and reveals remarkable patterns of social, regional and gender variation in a wide range of linguistic features. Arguing for writing experience as an important factor in historical linguistics generally, the book offers numerous new perspectives on the history of Dutch. The monograph is of interest to a wide readership, ranging from scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, Germanic linguistics, sociology and social history to (advanced) graduate and postgraduate students in courses on language variation and change.

Paradise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America, an unusual travel guide that follows and renders visible the country’s paths of nature, history and civilisation. Christof Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US and in this book he attempts, from a European perspective, to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments, combining travel reporting with nature writing, personal observation and philosophical reflection. Mauch seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known. The journey begins in tiny Wiseman, Alaska and the final portrait is of Portland, Oregon, famously America’s most sustainable city. In between, Mauch’s wanderings in space and time, his serendipitous and planned encounters with places and people, bring to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans’ attitudes towards their often-perilous environment, the intertwining throughout history of valuation, conservation and destruction. Interactions between human beings and the environment have settled like sediment down the centuries and may be read in the present – in the form of landscapes and collective memory, in bodies of water and the earth’s strata, tree rings and human cells. One of Mauch’s dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed – the blues is the voice of the dispossessed and disadvantaged; and here environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous and other marginalised people is a recurring and haunting motif. This is a book of melancholia and hope – Mauch exposes the beauty, the imperilment, at times the wreckage, of the American environment. And he shows us that, more powerfully than abstract ideas, governmental edicts or technological forces, stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made in humans’ relationship to nature – in beautiful landscapes where danger lurks as well as in visions and behaviours that change the world and ecosystems. Above all, stories demonstrate that where we come from and where we are going are intimately connected and therefore nothing has to remain as it is. The stories told in Paradise Blues demonstrate that vulnerabilities and pressures are almost always political constructions and, for that reason, it must be possible to deconstruct them.

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the copy and the practice of copying, two topics that, while the focus of much academic discussion in recent decades, have been underrepresented in the discourse on transculturality. Here, experts from a wide range of academic disciplines present their views on the copy from a transcultural perspective, seeking not to define the copy uniformly, but to reveal its dynamic and transformative power. The copy and the practice of copying are thus presented as constituents of transculturality via thought-provoking contributions on topics spanning time periods from antiquity to the present, and regions from Asia to Europe. In so doing, these contributions aim to create the basis for a novel, interdisciplinary discourse on the copy and its transcultural impact throughout history.

Cancer care delivery refers to the multiple layers of the health care system that interact to affect outcomes for patients with cancer and the quality of that care. The factors included in the care delivery system that potentially alter outcomes include social dynamics, financing systems, organizational structures and processes, health technologies, provider and individual behaviors. Because women’s health care has its own unique challenges, the intersection between cancer care delivery and women’s health is to be examined in this Frontiers in Oncology issue. The unique opportunities and challenges of improving the health care system for women with breast and gynecologic cancers are to be explored in depth. We will visit many topics of cancer care delivery with the unique perspective geared towards the care of women’s malignancies.

Thermodynamics is one of the most exciting branches of physical chemistry which has greatly contributed to the modern science. Being concentrated on a wide range of applications of thermodynamics, this book gathers a series of contributions by the finest scientists in the world, gathered in an orderly manner. It can be used in post-graduate courses for students and as a reference book, as it is written in a language pleasing to the reader. It can also serve as a reference material for researchers to whom the thermodynamics is one of the area of interest.

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