"Mir hei e Verein": Eine Studie über Vereine, Sozialkapital und Wohlstand im Kanton Bern

In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir den Zusammenhang zwischen dem Sozialkapitalbestand der 382 Gemeinden des Kantons Bern und deren wirtschaftlichen Prosperität. Als Indikator für das Sozialkapital verwenden wir die Anzahl an Vereinen. Nach unseren Recherchen gibt es im Kanton Bern insgesamt 10 130 Vereine. Die statistischen Analysen zeigen, dass selbst unter Kontrolle von weiteren Merkmalen Gemeinden mit vielen Vereinen über ein höheres Einkommen pro Einwohner verfügen. In einer Unterstichprobe von 100 Gemeinden wurde zusätzlich eine schriftliche Befragung von 2 577 Vereinen durchgeführt. Die Resultate ergeben, dass für den Wohlstand der Gemeinden insbesondere die Anzahl an aktiven Mitgliedern ausschlaggebend ist. Vereine mit Fokussierung auf das Gemeinwohl (Putnam-Vereine) haben zudem eine grössere Bedeutung für den Wohlstand als Vereine, die eher Partikularinteressen vertreten (Olson-Vereine). Insgesamt bestätigen die Ergebnisse die Sozialkapitalthese.

Hans Brun: a Swiss pioneer in the surgery of the spinal cord, brain and herniated lumbar disc

INTRODUCTION Toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was Gowers, Horsley and Macewen who first reported successful surgical procedures for the treatment of subdural extramedullary tumors. Following this, Church and Eisendrath as well as Putnam and Warren reported unsuccessful attempts to treat subpial spinal pathologies in their patients. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did reports of successful interventions of this type accumulate. In the analysis of these case reports, the authors noticed a certain lack of accuracy about the anatomical allocations and descriptions of intra- and extramedullary spinal lesions. From this, the question of who actually carried out the pioneering works in the early twentieth century in the field of surgery of intramedullary pathologies arose. METHODS Analysis of the relevant original publications of Hans Brun and research on the poorly documented information about his life history by personally contacting contemporary relatives. RESULTS The literature analysis showed that the Swiss neurologist Otto Veraguth and surgeon Hans Brun made fundamental contributions to subpial spinal cord surgery at the very beginning of the last century that remain valid today. According to our research, Hans Brun should be remembered as the third surgeon (after von Eiselsberg and Elsberg) who successfully removed an intramedullary lesion in a patient. CONCLUSION Brun should be remembered as an early and successful surgeon in this specialized field. His operative work is described in detail in this article. At the same time, his achievements in the fields of brain and disc herniation surgery are presented.

36Cl production rate from K-spallation in the European Alps (Chironico landslide, Switzerland)

The abundant production of in situ cosmogenic 36Cl from potassium renders 36Cl measurements in K-rich rocks or minerals, such as K-feldspars, potentially useful for precisely dating rock surfaces, either in single-nuclide or in multi-nuclide studies, for example combined with 10Be measurements in quartz. However, significant discrepancies in experimentally calibrated 36Cl production rates from spallation of potassium (36PK-sp), referenced to sea-level/high-latitude (SLHL), limit the accuracy of 36Cl dating from K-rich lithologies. We present a new 36Cl calibration using K-feldspars, in which K-spallation is the most dominant 36Cl production pathway (>92% of total 36Cl), thus minimizing uncertainties from the complex multi-pathway 36Cl production systematics. The samples are derived from boulders of an ∼13.4 ka-old landslide in the Swiss Alps (∼820 m, 46.43°N, 8.85°E). We obtain a local 36PK-sp of 306 ± 16 atoms 36Cl (g K)−1 a−1 and an SLHL 36PK-sp of 145.5 ± 7.7 atoms 36Cl (g K)−1 a−1, when scaled with a standard scaling protocol (‘Lm’). Applying this SLHL 36PK-sp to determine 36Cl exposure ages of K-feldspars from 10Be-dated moraine boulders yields excellent agreement, confirming the validity of the new SLHL 36PK-sp for surface exposure studies, involving 36Cl in K-feldspars, in the Alps.