The Cultural Construction of Political Action: The Case of the European Community's Single Market Program. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 04.3, December 1993

Explaining the emergence of the European Community's Single Market Program requires making sense of how that institutional project carne onto the political agenda. I suggest that there are two features of the political process that have been not well understood. First, large-scale institutional projects usually require political opportunities to come to fruition. Second, they require strategic actors who can frame such projects in broad ways in order to attract a wide variety of groups. My basic argument is that the European Commission is an organization whose function is primarily to solve the bargaining game that characterizes interaction within the Community and act as a strategic actor. This does not suggest that they are always successful or are the only source of ideas, but instead that they are the collective actor responsible for trying to frame collective interests in new cultural ways. To illustrate this point, I document how the; Single Market program evolved within the Commission and how other important Community actors carne to sign on to its goals over time.

The Legal Construction of Membership: Nationality Law in Germany and the United States. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers No. 00.5, 2000

The argument of this paper is that several empirical puzzles in the citizenship literature are rooted in the failure to distinguish between the mainly legal concept of nationality and the broader, political concept of citizenship. Using this distinction, the paper analysis the evolution of German and American nationality laws over the last 200 years. The historical development of both legal structures shows strong communalities. With the emergence of the modern system of nation states, the attribution of nationality to newborn children is ascribed either via the principle of descent or place of birth. With regard to the naturalization of adults, there is an increasing ethnization of law, which means that the increasing complexities of naturalization criteria are more and more structured along ethnic ideas. Although every nation building process shows some elements of ethnic self-description, it is difficult to use the legal principles of ius sanguinis and ius soli as indicators of ethnic or non-ethnic modes of community building.

Construction of a New Familial Hypercholesterolemia Variant Data Base. A Systematic Review for a 2015 Update

Aims: Familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) is an autosomal dominant disorder with increased cardiovascular risk, caused by mutations in LDLR, APOB and PCSK 9 genes. Although it is described that over 1700 variants have been found, none of the existing databases are completely updated. The aim of this work is to construct a FH database in order to provide a unique source of verified information about variants associated with FH for a more accurate genetic diagnosis.

Web mining for translators: automatic construction of comparable, genre-driven corpora

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the efficacy of the application WebBootCaT to create specialised corpora automatically, investigating the translation of articles of association from Italian into English. The first section reflects on the relevant literature and proposes the utility of corpora for translators. The second section discusses the methodology employed, and the third section analyses the results obtained and comments on how language professionals could possibly exploit the application to its full. The fourth section provides a few concrete usage examples of the thus built corpora, to then conclude that WebBootCaT is a genuinely powerful tool that could be implemented by professional translators in order to save time and improve their translations in the long term.

The Art of Enduring Contradictory Goals: Challenges in the Institutional Co‐construction of a ‘Good Death’

This paper focuses on the normative notion of ‘good death’, its practical relevance as a frame of reference for ‘death work’ procedures in institutional elder care in Switzerland and the ways in which it may be challenged within migrant ‘dying trajectories’. In contemporary palliative care, the concept of ‘good death’ focuses on the ideal of an autonomous dying person, cared for under a specialised biomedical authority. Transferred to the nursing home context, characterised by long-term basic care for the very old under conditions of scarce resources, the notion of ‘good death’ is broken down into ready-to-use, pragmatic elements of daily routines. At the same time, nursing homes are increasingly confronted with socially and culturally diversified populations. Based on ethnographic findings, we give insight into current practices of institutional ‘death work’ and tensions arising between contradicting notions of a ‘good death’, by referring to decision-making, life-prolonging measures, notions on food/feeding and the administration of sedative painkillers.