Modeling endogenous technological change for climate policy analysis

The approach used to model technological change in a climate policy model is a critical determinant of its results in terms of the time path of CO2 prices and costs required to achieve various emission reduction goals. We provide an overview of the different approaches used in the literature, with an emphasis on recent developments regarding endogenous technological change, research and development, and learning. Detailed examination sheds light on the salient features of each approach, including strengths, limitations, and policy implications. Key issues include proper accounting for the opportunity costs of climate-related knowledge generation, treatment of knowledge spillovers and appropriability, and the empirical basis for parameterizing technological relationships. No single approach appears to dominate on all these dimensions, and different approaches may be preferred depending on the purpose of the analysis, be it positive or normative. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Minor Moves: Growth, Fugitivity, and Children's Physical Movement

From tendencies to reduce the Underground Railroad to the imperative "follow the north star" to the iconic images of Ruby Bridges' 1960 "step forward" on the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School, America prefers to picture freedom as an upwardly mobile development. This preoccupation with the subtractive and linear force of development makes it hard to hear the palpable steps of so many truant children marching in the Movement and renders illegible the nonlinear movements of minors in the Underground. Yet a black fugitive hugging a tree, a white boy walking alone in a field, or even pieces of a discarded raft floating downstream like remnants of child's play are constitutive gestures of the Underground's networks of care and escape. Responding to 19th-century Americanists and cultural studies scholars' important illumination of the child as central to national narratives of development and freedom, "Minor Moves" reads major literary narratives not for the child and development but for the fugitive trace of minor and growth.

In four chapters, I trace the physical gestures of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pearl, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy, Harriet Wilson's Frado, and Mark Twain's Huck against the historical backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Act and the passing of the first compulsory education bills that made truancy illegal. I ask how, within a discourse of independence that fails to imagine any serious movements in the minor, we might understand the depictions of moving children as interrupting a U.S. preoccupation with normative development and recognize in them the emergence of an alternative imaginary. To attend to the movement of the minor is to attend to what the discursive order of a development-centered imaginary deems inconsequential and what its grammar can render only as mistakes. Engaging the insights of performance studies, I regard what these narratives depict as childish missteps (Topsy's spins, Frado's climbing the roof) as dances that trouble the narrative's discursive order. At the same time, drawing upon the observations of black studies and literary theory, I take note of the pressure these "minor moves" put on the literal grammar of the text (Stowe's run-on sentences and Hawthorne's shaky subject-verb agreements). I regard these ungrammatical moves as poetic ruptures from which emerges an alternative and prior force of the imaginary at work in these narratives--a force I call "growth."

Reading these "minor moves" holds open the possibility of thinking about a generative association between blackness and childishness, one that neither supports racist ideas of biological inferiority nor mandates in the name of political uplift the subsequent repudiation of childishness. I argue that recognizing the fugitive force of growth indicated in the interplay between the conceptual and grammatical disjunctures of these minor moves opens a deeper understanding of agency and dependency that exceeds notions of arrested development and social death. For once we interrupt the desire to picture development (which is to say the desire to picture), dependency is no longer a state (of social death or arrested development) of what does not belong, but rather it is what Édouard Glissant might have called a "departure" (from "be[ing] a single being"). Topsy's hard-to-see pick-pocketing and Pearl's running amok with brown men in the market are not moves out of dependency but indeed social turns (a dance) by way of dependency. Dependent, moving and ungrammatical, the growth evidenced in these childish ruptures enables different stories about slavery, freedom, and childishness--ones that do not necessitate a repudiation of childishness in the name of freedom, but recognize in such minor moves a fugitive way out.

Comparison of dynamic balance in adolescent male soccer players from rwanda and the United States.

PURPOSE/BACKGROUND: Dynamic balance is an important component of motor skill development. Poor dynamic balance has previously been associated with sport related injury. However, the vast majority of dynamic balance studies as they relate to sport injury have occurred in developed North American or European countries. Thus, the purpose of this study was to compare dynamic balance in adolescent male soccer players from Rwanda to a matched group from the United States. METHODS: Twenty-six adolescent male soccer players from Rwanda and 26 age- and gender-matched control subjects from the United States were screened using the Lower Quarter Y Balance Test during their pre-participation physical. Reach asymmetry (cm) between limbs was examined for all reach directions. In addition, reach distance in each direction (normalized to limb length, %LL) and the composite reach score (also normalized to %LL) were examined. Dependent samples t-tests were performed with significant differences identified at p<0.05. RESULTS: Twenty-six male soccer players from Rwanda (R) were matched to twenty-six male soccer players from the United States (US). The Rwandan soccer players performed better in the anterior (R: 83.9 ± 3.2 %LL; US: 76.5 ± 6.6 %LL, p<0.01), posterolateral (R: 114.4 ± 8.3 %LL ; US: 106.5 ± 8.2 %LL, p<0.01) and composite (R: 105.6 ± 1.3 %LL; US: 97.8 ± 6.2 %LL, p<0.01) reach scores. No significant differences between groups were observed for reach asymmetry. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescent soccer players from Rwanda exhibit superior performance on a standardized dynamic balance test as comparison to similar athletes from the United States. The examination of movement abilities of athletes from countries of various origins may allow for a greater understanding of the range of true normative values for dynamic balance. LEVELS OF EVIDENCE: 3b.

Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

Changes in neuroticism following trauma exposure.

Using longitudinal data, the present study examined change in midlife neuroticism following trauma exposure. Our primary analyses included 670 participants (M(age) = 60.55; 65.22% male, 99.70% Caucasian) who completed the NEO Personality Inventory at ages 42 and 50 and reported their lifetime exposure to traumatic events approximately 10 years later. No differences in pre- and post-trauma neuroticism scores were found among individuals who experienced all of their lifetime traumas in the interval between the personality assessments. Results were instead consistent with normative age-related declines in neuroticism throughout adulthood. Furthermore, longitudinal changes in neuroticism scores did not differ between individuals with and without histories of midlife trauma exposure. Examination of change in neuroticism following life-threatening traumas yielded a comparable pattern of results. Analysis of facet-level scores largely replicated findings from the domain scores. Overall, our findings suggest that neuroticism does not reliably change following exposure to traumatic events in middle adulthood. Supplemental analyses indicated that individuals exposed to life-threatening traumas in childhood or adolescence reported higher midlife neuroticism than individuals who experienced severe traumas in adulthood. Life-threatening traumatic events encountered early in life may have a more pronounced impact on adulthood personality than recent traumatic events.

ENIGMA and the individual: Predicting factors that affect the brain in 35 countries worldwide.

In this review, we discuss recent work by the ENIGMA Consortium (http://enigma.ini.usc.edu) - a global alliance of over 500 scientists spread across 200 institutions in 35 countries collectively analyzing brain imaging, clinical, and genetic data. Initially formed to detect genetic influences on brain measures, ENIGMA has grown to over 30 working groups studying 12 major brain diseases by pooling and comparing brain data. In some of the largest neuroimaging studies to date - of schizophrenia and major depression - ENIGMA has found replicable disease effects on the brain that are consistent worldwide, as well as factors that modulate disease effects. In partnership with other consortia including ADNI, CHARGE, IMAGEN and others(1), ENIGMA's genomic screens - now numbering over 30,000 MRI scans - have revealed at least 8 genetic loci that affect brain volumes. Downstream of gene findings, ENIGMA has revealed how these individual variants - and genetic variants in general - may affect both the brain and risk for a range of diseases. The ENIGMA consortium is discovering factors that consistently affect brain structure and function that will serve as future predictors linking individual brain scans and genomic data. It is generating vast pools of normative data on brain measures - from tens of thousands of people - that may help detect deviations from normal development or aging in specific groups of subjects. We discuss challenges and opportunities in applying these predictors to individual subjects and new cohorts, as well as lessons we have learned in ENIGMA's efforts so far.

The Euroregional discourse. Increasing evidence towards legitimizing an institutional space

From a multilingual corpus composed of institutional websites published by the Euroregions, this article attempts to explore the discursive indications which tend to legitimize the notion of Euroregional space. The lexicometric and qualitative observations lead to a compliance to the normative objectives of the European politics and to the standardization of the euroregional representations, in spite of languages and issuing cross-border areas.

Selbstorganisierte Projektgruppen von Studierenden. Neue Wege bei der Kompetenzentwicklung an Hochschulen

In diesem Beitrag weisen wir auf die Bedeutung hin, die selbstorganisierte Projektgruppen von Studierenden für das (Aus-)Bildungsziel der überfachlichen Kompetenzentwicklung haben können. Nach einem kurzen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Förderung überfachlicher Kompetenzen an Hochschulen stellen wir am Beispiel des Augsburger „Begleitstudiums Problemlösekompetenz“ einen Ansatz zur Kompetenzentwicklung vor, der auf der Partizipation in studentischen Praxisgemeinschaften beruht. Wir erläutern vor diesem Hintergrund, wie sich selbstorganisierte Projektgruppen von Studierenden von anderen Gruppenformen im Rahmen von Lehrveranstaltungen unterscheiden, und machen anhand eines Beispiels deutlich, welchen Mehrwert diese Praxisgemeinschaften gegenüber anderen Ansätzen zur überfachlichen Kompetenzförderung an Hochschulen haben. (DIPF/ Orig.)

Entwicklungswege Jugendlicher zwischen Transition und Moratorium

Bisher stehen sich in der deutschen Jugendforschung mit dem Transitions- und Moratoriumsgedanken zwei Konzepte zur Beschreibung der Jugendphase gegenüber, deren ergänzender Charakter bisher kaum Beachtung gefunden hat. Um eine Verknüpfung leisten zu können, sollen beide Auffassungen von Jugend kurz skizziert und in die Beschreibung einer Typologie jugendlicher Entwicklungswege überführt werden. Im zweiten Teil werden auf der Basis von Sekundäranalysen empirische Evidenzen aufgezeigt, die eine Vertiefung der theoretischen Herangehensweise aussichtsreich erscheinen lassen. (DIPF/Orig.)

"Sanftes Monster Brüssel" – zur voraussichtlichen Repräsentation der Sozialwissenschaften in der zukünftigen europäischen Forschungsförderpolitik

Der Artikel befasst sich mit der europäischen Forschungsförderpolitik im Hinblick auf die Sozialwissenschaften. Derzeit laufen die Vorbereitungen für das nächste EU-Forschungsrahmenprogramm, das ab 2014 bis 2020 gültig sein wird. Es wird den Namen Horizon 2020 erhalten. Die Analyse skizziert die verschiedenen Aktivitäten, die nationale und europäische Erziehungswissenschaftsverbände entfaltet haben, um eine Repräsentation der Sozialwissenschaften im nächsten Rahmenprogramm zu gewährleisten. (DIPF/Orig.)

Der Trainingsraum: Unterrichtsstörung als Bumerang

Anhand eines schulischen Dokumentes zur Methode des Trainingsraums werden Anspruch und Umsetzung der Methode analysiert. Der Trainingsraum verspricht Lehrerinnen und Lehrern eine Methode an die Hand zu geben, um Unterrichtsstörungen erzieherisch in den Griff zu bekommen und vor allem: fortlaufenden Unterricht zu ermöglichen. Das Beispiel zeigt, inwieweit eine Verlagerung des Disziplinierungsproblems in den Trainingsraum doch wieder an den Ort des Geschehens - den Klassenraum - zurückführt. (DIPF/Autor)

Online Publizieren - auch in der Erziehungswissenschaft?!

Vor- und Nachteile im Vergleich von herkömmlichem zu elektronischem Publizieren werden erläutert. Mit Bezug auf eine DFG-Studie zum "Publikations- und Rezeptionsverhalten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Open Access" wird die Situation speziell in der Erziehungswissenschaft reflektiert und dabei besonders auf das Projekt "Fachportal Pädagogik" eingegangen, das u.a. Qualitätssicherung und Langzeitverfügbarkeit von elektronisch vorliegender erziehungswissenschaftlicher Fachinformation zum Ziel hat. (DIPF/pr)

Der Bildungsbericht 2011

Ziel des Bildungsberichts ist es, das Bildungsgeschehen und die Bildungswege von Kindern, Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen in der Stadt Essen anhand der ausgewählten Indikatoren abzubilden. Damit soll zunächst für Essen die Frage beantwortet werden, ob und in welchem Maß der allgemein behauptete Zusammenhang von sozialer Herkunft und Bildungserfolg besteht, um dann identifizieren zu können, wo die Stellschrauben für eine erfolgreiche Intervention sind. Der Aufbau des Bildungsberichts orientiert sich grundsätzlich an den chronologischen Stufen einer idealtypischen Bildungsbiographie und an den durchlaufenen Einrichtungen, wobei eine Einbettung in einen gesamthaften sozialen Kontext erfolgt. Hieraus begründet sich die thematische Spannbreite der zusammengestellten Informationen. Da die Lebens- und Aufwachsbedingungen im Stadtgebiet erheblich differieren, erfolgt die Berichterstattung in vielen Segmenten in kleinräumiger Betrachtungsweise. (DIPF/Orig.)

Bildungsbericht Dessau-Roßlau 2011

In dem Bildungsbericht [von Dessau-Roßlau] wurden thematische Schwerpunkte festgelegt, die sich weitestgehend auf das formale Lernen in Institutionen beziehen. Thematisch hat der Bildungsbericht die folgenden Schwerpunkte: Elementare Bildung, Allgemeinbildende Schulen, Berufsbildungssystem – Berufsbildende Schulen, Hochschulbildung, Erwachsenenbildung, Weiterbildung und informelles Lernen. Da insbesondere die Übergänge zwischen den Institutionen wichtige Punkte in der Bildungsbiographie sind, werden sie in den jeweiligen Kapiteln kurz anhand ihrer Besonderheiten und Auffälligkeiten beschrieben. Neben der allgemeinen Darstellung der Teilbereiche werden alle Bereiche in Bezug auf drei Einflussfaktoren untersucht: Demographischer Wandel, Soziale Ungleichheit, Geschlechtsspezifische Ungleichheit. Diese drei Themenkomplexe sind als Querschnittsthemen allen Schwerpunkten vorangestellt und beschreiben, welchen Einfluss die jeweiligen Faktoren haben bzw. wie groß ihr Einfluss auf die Teilbereiche ist. (DIPF/Orig.)

Witz komm 'raus, du bist umzingelt! Über das Misslingen zweier Karikaturen

Im Artikel werden zwei Karikaturen von Teresa Habild interpretiert. Thematisiert wird in beiden Darstellungen, wie in der Schule mit der unterschiedlichen Schichtzugehörigkeit von Kindern und Eltern umgegangen wird. Dabei zeigt die Interpretation, dass der vermeintliche Witz letztendlich auf Kosten der Dargestellten geht und sich mit den bestehenden Verhältnissen arrangiert. Es wird von der Künstlerin versäumt, genau diese bestehende Ungerechtigkeit des Systems Schule und dessen Ausleseprozess kritisch zu befragen. (DIPF/Autor)