Consecutive waves of paleolithic migrants crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America between 80,000 and 7,000 b.c. brought with them the shamanic way of harnessing supernatural powers. This way prevailed until the White intrusion 400 years ago, into the living space of the aboriginal peoples of North America. Wherever European political, religious, and economic dominance was established, shamanic institutions became the focus of negative attention. The shamanic practitioner was variously depicted by governmental and ecclesiastic authorities as a (...) charlatan and imposter or a purveyor of evil influence. Some well-known ethnological and medico-psychological experts have until very recently portrayed the shaman as a mentally deranged person whose “primitive” culture permits the acting-out of psychopathology in a prestigious role, a eurocentric and positivistic fallacy rooted in Western misinterpretations of learned behavior manifested during shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Legal measures to suppress shamanic ceremonials were taken in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance. This shaman-inspired movement, originating in the Prophet Dance of the Pacific Northwest (Spier 1935), sent waves of hectic sacro-nativistic ceremonial activity through many Amerindian tribes, and finally culminated in the Sioux uprising of 1890 which ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee (cf. Mooney 1896). (shrink)

Based on the concept of Informational Cities, which are the highly developed prototypical cities of the 21st century, we conducted a regional comparison of four Japanese cities in terms of their “cityness” and “informativeness”. The purpose of our articles is to specify the theoretical framework for measuring the informativeness and cityness level of any desired city, to quantify the chosen indicators in order to compare the investigated cities, and finally, to conclude what is their advancement level in terms of a (...) modern city of the knowledge society. Our methodology is based on a new approach to measure the position of a city in a national or a global scale, originating from information science and its indicators of the knowledge society. It includes such procedures as desktop research and bibliometrics, ethnographic field study, or grounded theory method. The investigated aspects under the notion of the informativeness level are the distinct labour market and mix of companies located in the city, as well as the progressive e-governance and advanced e-government. The notion of cityness level oscillates around the concept of space of flows in the city, including the flow of money, power, information, and human capital. In order to make our model practical and grounded on available evidence, we have chosen four Japanese cities to undergo the process. Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto are big and economically significant Japanese metropolises. However, our results show that they differ from each other regarding many important aspects. We were able to quantify their performances and create a ranking. The limitation of our approach appears to be the strict quantification method that makes the cityness and informativeness levels of the cities dependent on other cities’ performances, and that does not precisely reflect the actual dimension of the differences between them. Hence, in the future work we will develop a more flexible and independent approach, enabling us to make more accurate statements on cities’ advancement unregarded the advancement level of the other metropolises. (shrink)

The method of citation analysis has been elaborated by E. Garfield for the purpose of documentation of scientific literature. The data accumulated in "Citation Indices" can also be used as an empirical basis for certain investigations in the field of science of science. Techniques of citation analysis permit measurements of information activities of scientists. We refuse overdrawn interpretations of the results of citation analyses, for instance the indication of "scientific quality" or of "thematico-technical relations between ideas, problems etc.".

Thomas S. Kuhns Variante einer Theorie der Wissenschaftsgeschichte hat in einem Werk Ludwig Flecks (von 1935) einen wichtigen Vorläufer. Durch die Frage, wie es komme, daß die Flecksche Theorie seinerzeit nicht so bekannt wurde wie die Kuhnsche Bearbeitung etwa dreißig Jahre später, stellt sich das Problem der wissenschaftlichen Beachtung. Eine Theorie der wissenschaftlichen Beachtung muß zwei Dimensionen "thematischer Rahmen" und "wissenschaftliche Theorie" unterscheiden. Beachtung gefunden werden kann nur, wenn ein bestimmter Text sich innerhalb eines etablierten thematischen Rahmens befindet und wenn (...) die darin vertretene Theorie in Widerspruch zu Grundgesetzen etablierter Theorien steht. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhns Variante einer Theorie der Wissenschaftsgeschichte hat in einem Werk Ludwig Flecks einen wichtigen Vorläufer. Durch die Frage, wie es komme, daß die Flecksche Theorie seinerzeit nicht so bekannt wurde wie die Kuhnsche Bearbeitung etwa dreißig Jahre später, stellt sich das Problem der wissenschaftlichen Beachtung. Eine Theorie der wissenschaftlichen Beachtung muß zwei Dimensionen "thematischer Rahmen" und "wissenschaftliche Theorie" unterscheiden. Beachtung gefunden werden kann nur, wenn ein bestimmter Text sich innerhalb eines etablierten thematischen Rahmens befindet und wenn die darin (...) vertretene Theorie in Widerspruch zu Grundgesetzen etablierter Theorien steht. (shrink)

Wie entsteht eine Wahrnehmung? Wir betrachten einen derzeit nahezu vergessenen philosophischen wie psychologischen Ansatz, der eine solche Theorie entwickelte. Die Vorgeschichte dieser Theorie beginnt bei Alexius Meinongs Relationstheorie (1882) und dessen frühen Bemühungen zur Psychologie. Christian von Ehrenfels, aufbauend auf Meinongs Vorarbeiten sowie Ernst Machs Analyse der Empfindungen von 1886, gibt der Theoriegenese 1890 durch seine Arbeit über Gestaltqualitäten starken Auftrieb. Die Grazer Schule übernimmt das Thema unter dem Aspekt: Sind Gestalten als Ganzes erfaßbar, oder werden sie auf der Basis (...) elementarer Empfindungen erst durch einen psychischen Akt produziert? Anhand der geometrisch-optischen Täuschungen gehen zunächst Stephan Witasek und später Vittorio Benussi dieser Frage ab 1894 auch experimentell nach. Zunächst kann ausgeschlossen werden, daß solche Täuschungen Urteilstäuschungen sind, daß sie also Vorstellungstäuschungen sein müssen. Als wichtig für die psychologische Theorie der Vorstellungsproduküon erweist sich Meinongs philosophische Konzeption der Gegenstände höherer Ordnung. Rudolf Ameseder legt 1904 eine gegenstandstheoretische Skizze der Produktionstheorie vor. Benussi zeigt ebenfalls 1904 wiederum am Beispiel der optischen Täuschungen, daß diese keine Empfindungstäuschungen sind (was Witasek angenommen hatte), sondern Produktionstäuschungen. Damit ist experimentell belegt, daß es psychische Produktionen gibt. (shrink)

Wie entsteht eine Wahrnehmung? Wir betrachten einen derzeit nahezu vergessenen philosophischen wie psychologischen Ansatz, der eine solche Theorie entwickelte. Die Vorgeschichte dieser Theorie beginnt bei Alexius Meinongs Relationstheorie (1882) und dessen frühen Bemühungen zur Psychologie. Christian von Ehrenfels, aufbauend auf Meinongs Vorarbeiten sowie Ernst Machs Analyse der Empfindungen von 1886, gibt der Theoriegenese 1890 durch seine Arbeit über Gestaltqualitäten starken Auftrieb. Die Grazer Schule übernimmt das Thema unter dem Aspekt: Sind Gestalten als Ganzes erfaßbar, oder werden sie auf der Basis (...) elementarer Empfindungen erst durch einen psychischen Akt produziert? Anhand der geometrisch-optischen Täuschungen gehen zunächst Stephan Witasek und später Vittorio Benussi dieser Frage ab 1894 auch experimentell nach. Zunächst kann ausgeschlossen werden, daß solche Täuschungen Urteilstäuschungen sind, daß sie also Vorstellungstäuschungen sein müssen. Als wichtig für die psychologische Theorie der Vorstellungsproduküon erweist sich Meinongs philosophische Konzeption der Gegenstände höherer Ordnung. Rudolf Ameseder legt 1904 eine gegenstandstheoretische Skizze der Produktionstheorie vor. Benussi zeigt ebenfalls 1904 wiederum am Beispiel der optischen Täuschungen, daß diese keine Empfindungstäuschungen sind (was Witasek angenommen hatte), sondern Produktionstäuschungen. Damit ist experimentell belegt, daß es psychische Produktionen gibt. (shrink)

Wie entsteht eine Wahrnehmung? Wir betrachten einen derzeit nahezu vergessenen philosophischen wie psychologischen Ansatz, der eine solche Theorie entwickelte. Die Vorgeschichte dieser Theorie beginnt bei Alexius Meinongs Relationstheorie und dessen frühen Bemühungen zur Psychologie. Christian von Ehrenfels, aufbauend auf Meinongs Vorarbeiten sowie Ernst Machs Analyse der Empfindungen von 1886, gibt der Theoriegenese 1890 durch seine Arbeit über Gestaltqualitäten starken Auftrieb. Die Grazer Schule übernimmt das Thema unter dem Aspekt: Sind Gestalten als Ganzes erfaßbar, oder werden sie auf der Basis elementarer (...) Empfindungen erst durch einen psychischen Akt produziert? Anhand der geometrisch-optischen Täuschungen gehen zunächst Stephan Witasek und später Vittorio Benussi dieser Frage ab 1894 auch experimentell nach. Zunächst kann ausgeschlossen werden, daß solche Täuschungen Urteilstäuschungen sind, daß sie also Vorstellungstäuschungen sein müssen. Als wichtig für die psychologische Theorie der Vorstellungsproduküon erweist sich Meinongs philosophische Konzeption der Gegenstände höherer Ordnung. Rudolf Ameseder legt 1904 eine gegenstandstheoretische Skizze der Produktionstheorie vor. Benussi zeigt ebenfalls 1904 wiederum am Beispiel der optischen Täuschungen, daß diese keine Empfindungstäuschungen sind , sondern Produktionstäuschungen. Damit ist experimentell belegt, daß es psychische Produktionen gibt. (shrink)

Die Reihe formaler Sprachen, die im Verständnis von M.J. Cresswell "sinnvoll" als Modelle für natüriiche Sprachen anzusehen sind und die dabei auch semantische Vagheiten zu erfassen gestatten, nämlich die dreiwertige Logik (U. Blau), die Superbewertung (B.C. van Fraassen, K. Fine, M. Pinkal, J. Ballweg) und die unscharfe Logik (L.A. Zadeh), legt nahe, daß bei der Sprachanalyse Zadehs "Prinzip der Inkompatibilität" gilt: Hohe Präzision ist inkompatibel mit hoher Komplexität. Je komplexer man das Vagheitsproblem angeht, desto verschwommener wird der benutzbare Geltungswert. Zudem (...) wird die Sprachanalyse auf Empirie verwiesen: Die Superbewertung erfordert eine Beschreibung von Kontexten, die unscharfe Logik eine sprachempirische Untersuchung aller Geltungswerte. (shrink)

Die Reihe formaler Sprachen, die im Verständnis von M.J. Cresswell "sinnvoll" als Modelle für natüriiche Sprachen anzusehen sind und die dabei auch semantische Vagheiten zu erfassen gestatten, nämlich die dreiwertige Logik (U. Blau), die Superbewertung (B.C. van Fraassen, K. Fine, M. Pinkal, J. Ballweg) und die unscharfe Logik (L.A. Zadeh), legt nahe, daß bei der Sprachanalyse Zadehs "Prinzip der Inkompatibilität" gilt: Hohe Präzision ist inkompatibel mit hoher Komplexität. Je komplexer man das Vagheitsproblem angeht, desto verschwommener wird der benutzbare Geltungswert. Zudem (...) wird die Sprachanalyse auf Empirie verwiesen: Die Superbewertung erfordert eine Beschreibung von Kontexten, die unscharfe Logik eine sprachempirische Untersuchung aller Geltungswerte. (shrink)

In organizational psychology the positive effects of democratically structured enterprises on their employees are well documented. However, the longstanding viability as well as economic success of democratic enterprises in a capitalistic market environment has long been contested. For instance, this has given rise to widespread endorsement of the “degeneration thesis” and the so-called “iron law of oligarchy”. By reviewing 77 qualitative studies that examined 83 democratic enterprises within the last 50 years, the present systematic review provides evidence that such enterprises (...) are able to economically survive and prosper. The majority of studied enterprises either resisted pressures toward degeneration or subsequently regenerated after undergoing degenerative processes. Only 9.5% fully degenerated in accordance with the degeneration thesis and the “iron law of oligarchy”, while 27.0% of the democratic enterprises showed diverse and mixed forms of degeneration tendencies, indicating that the notion of an “iron law” needs to be revised. Within the nine investigated cases of Mondragon not one single enterprise or group fully degenerated. Three cases showed degenerative tendencies, another three one degeneration tendencies and simultaneously regeneration, one case fully resisted degeneration tendencies and two cases regenerated. Further, this systematic review provides an overview of organizational and external conditions, non-/democratic or non-/participative practices and psychological phenomena that contribute to the degeneration, regeneration, or resistance to degeneration. The described examples of such practices may help practitioners to implement and maintain democratic structures and processes in contemporary organizations. (shrink)

Der hier erstmals ver]ffentlichte Briefwechsel zwischen dem Psychiater C.G. Jung und dem Nobelpreistr{ger der Physik Wolfgang Pauli ist ein geistesgeschichtliches Dokument ersten Ranges. Ein privates Schicksal hat sie zusammengef}hrt, und daraus ist ein vorwissenschaftlicher Dialog erwachsen, in dem versucht wird, naturwissenschaftliches und psychologischesDenken zu vereinheitlichen. Die Briefe verdeutlichen, da~ es weder f}r den Psychologen zul{ssig ist, die methodischen Einsichten der Physik, noch f}r den Physiker, die Erfahrungen im Umgang mit dem Psychischenzu vernachl{ssigen.

In 1932, Wolfgang Pauli was a world-renowned physicist and had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also in pain. His mother had poisoned herself after his father's involvement in an affair. Emerging from a brief marriage with a cabaret performer, Pauli drank heavily, quarreled frequently and sometimes publicly, and was disturbed by powerful dreams. He turned for help to C. G. Jung, setting a standing appointment for Mondays at noon. Thus bloomed (...) an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. Eighty letters, written over twenty-six years, record that friendship. This artful translation presents them in English for the first time. Though Jung never analyzed Pauli formally, he interpreted more than 400 of his dreams--work that bore fruit later in Psychology and Alchemy and The Analysis of Dreams. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli exchanged views on the content of their work and the ideas of the day. They discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics. Their collaboration resulted in the combined publication of Jung's treatise on synchronicity and Pauli's essay on archetypal ideas influencing Kepler's writings in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Over time, their correspondence shaped and reshaped their understanding of the principle they called synchronicity, a term Jung had suggested earlier. Through the association of these two pioneering thinkers, developments in physics profoundly influenced the evolution of Jungian psychology. And many of Jung's abiding themes shaped how Pauli--and, through him, other physicists--understood the physical world. Of clear appeal to historians of science and anyone investigating the life and work of Pauli or Jung, this portrait of an incredible friendship will also draw readers interested in human creativity as well as those who merely like to be present when great minds meet. (shrink)

Educational reformers all around the globe are continuously searching for ways to make schools more effective and efficient. In Germany, this movement has led to reforms that reduced overall school time of high track secondary schools from 9 to 8 years, which was compensated for by increasing average instruction time per week in lower secondary school. Based on prior research, we assumed that this reform might increase gender disparities in STEM-related outcomes, stress, and health because it required students to learn (...) similar content in less amount of time. Therefore, we investigated how the school time reform affected gender disparities at the end of upper secondary school between 2011 and 2013. Specifically, we considered representative data of the last two cohorts who completed lower secondary school before the reform and the first two cohorts after the reform from the National Educational Panel Study. Potential differences in gender disparities were investigated for upper secondary school outcomes of subject-specific standardized test performance, self-concept, and interest in mathematics, biology and physics, as well as outcomes of school-related stress and health. Overall, we found substantial disparities between girls and boys, which seemed to change little after the reform. Exceptions were the statistically significant gender × reform interactions for one stress dimension and two health dimensions which increased for both boys and girls, but more strongly for girls. (shrink)

Studies on the development of cell populations are often based on results of the theory of stochastic birth- and death-processes (continuous or discrete (seee.g. references inVogel, Niewisch &Matioli (1969), in some cases, death may be interpreted not as actual death of the cell bute.g. as a recruitment of the cell considered into another cell compartment, etc.). It is usually assumed that the conditions for the development are homogeneous,i.e. that the probabilities of births and deaths are independent on the time. However, (...) in most situations, this assumption is not fulfilled (owing to the maturation and differentiation of cells, changes of the microenvironment, inducing factors, etc.). Then it is necessary to study the development of cell populations under non-homogeneous conditions. In this paper, some properties of appropriate birth- and death-processes under nonhomogeneous conditions are studied; formulae given in section 4 permit calculation of some characteristics describing the cell population size distribution at individual discrete epochs (at individual generations) during the development of the cell population considered. (shrink)

Students’ educational engagement is both an important predictor of study success and a key preventive factor for dropout. Vocational tracks in secondary education show high dropout rates. There is strong evidence that the solution to educational disengagement lies in student‐centred, powerful learning environments. This study investigates characteristics of PLEs from the perspective of students in vocational secondary education. Students’ perspectives on a learning environment are crucial for their satisfaction and learning engagement. Therefore, we investigated whether the perceived learning environment meets (...) the requirements of PLEs, and to what extent it meets students’ preferences. Additionally, it was investigated whether students who perceive their learning environment as more powerful, are also more engaged for school. Survey data of 532 students showed that student perceptions of their current learning environment were largely discrepant from the characteristics of PLEs. Students strongly asked for more challenging learning pathways, in combination with adaptive learning support. Students who perceived the characteristics of PLEs as being present, reported higher satisfaction and stronger engagement than students who perceived their education to be a less powerful environment. There is a need to redesign curricula in vocational education in such a way that these more intensely implement characteristics of PLEs. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume address global, regional, and local landscapes, cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures, and human and more-than-human ecology as they work to reveal place-specific tensional dynamics. This unusual book, which covers a wide-ranging array of topics, coheres into a work that will be a valuable reference for scholars of geography and the philosophy of place.

A massless electroweak theory for leptons is formulated in a Weyl space, W4, yielding a Weyl invariant dynamics of a scalar field φ, chiral Dirac fermion fields ψL and ψR, and the gauge fields κμ, Aμ, Zμ, Wμ, and Wμ †, allowing for conformal rescalings of the metric gμν and all fields with nonvanishing Weyl weight together with the corresponding transformations of the Weyl vector fields, κμ, representing the D(1) or dilatation gauge fields. The local group structure of this Weyl (...) electroweak (WEW) theory is given by $G = SO(3,1) \otimes D(1) \otimes \tilde G$ —or its universal coverging group $\bar G$ for the fermions—with $\tilde G$ denoting the electroweak gauge group SU(2)W × U(1)Y. In order to investigate the appearance of nonzero masses in the theory the Weyl symmetry is explicitly broken by a term in the Lagrangean constructed with the curvature scalar R of the W4 and a mass term for the scalar field. Thereby also the Zμ and Wμ gauge fields as well as the charged fermion field (electron) acquire a mass as in the standard electroweak theory. The symmetry breaking is governed by the relation D μ Φ 2 = 0, where Φ is the modulus of the scalar field and Dμ denotes the Weyl-covariant derivative. This true symmetry reduction, establishing a scale of length in the theory by breaking the D(1) gauge symmetry, is compared to the so-called spontaneous symmetry breaking in the standard electroweak theory, which is, actually, the choice of a particular (nonlinear ) gauge obtained by adopting an origin, ${\hat \phi }$ , in the coset space representing ϕ, with ${\hat \phi }$ being invariant under the electromagnetic, gauge group U(1)e.m.. Particular attention is devoted to the appearance of Einstein's equations for the metric after the Weyl symmetry breaking, yielding a pseudo-Riemannian space, V4, from a W4 and a scalar field with a constant modulus $\hat \phi _0$ . The quantity $\hat \phi _0^2$ affects Einstein's gravitational constant in a manner comparable to the Brans-Dicke theory. The consequences of the broken WEW theory are worked out and the determination of the parameters of the theory is discussed. (shrink)

Objectives:Social isolation is increasing in aging societies and several studies have shown a relation with worse cognition in old age. However, less is known about the association in the oldest-old (85+); the group that is at highest risk for both social isolation and dementia. Methods:Analyses were based on follow-up 5 to 9 of the longitudinal German study on aging, cognition, and dementia in primary care patients (AgeCoDe) and the study on needs, health service use, costs, and health-related quality of life (...) in a large sample of oldest-old primary care patients (AgeQualiDe), a multi-center population-based prospective cohort study. Measurements included the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6), with a score below 12 indicating social isolation, as well as the Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) as an indicator of cognitive function. Results:Dementia-free study participants (n = 942) were M = 86.4 (SD = 3.0) years old at observation onset, 68.2% were women. One third (32.3%) of them were socially isolated. Adjusted linear hybrid mixed effects models revealed significantly lower cognitive function in individuals with smaller social networks (β = 0.5, 95% CI = 0.3-0.7, p <.001). Moreover, changes in an individual's social network size were significantly associated with cognitive changes over time (β = 0.2, 95% CI = 0.1-0.4, p =.003), indicating worse cognitive function with shrinking social networks. Conclusion:Social isolation is highly prevalent among oldest-old individuals, being a risk factor for decreases in cognitive function. Consequently, it is important to maintain a socially active lifestyle into very old age. Likewise, this calls for effective ways to prevent social isolation. (shrink)