Birgit S Consequences

1970s, Calabrian Mountains, Italy. Andreas Kuhlemann is searching to find a place, a place he could call home. Born with a latent mental defect to a Norwegian receptionist and a German officer, after the war he was repatriated to his father’s town in Germany and from there, adopted by an Italian railroad worker. Always moving, always feeling lost. Meanwhile, Lorenzo Benedetta, who is searching for redemption, is Andreas's counterpoint. His search continues for forty hellish years, clawing his way back up after life kicks him down, determined to reach his goal. It's only when his unspeakable crime is brought to the courts that both men's stories come full circle. But will one find salvation and the other man's life have purpose, if only after death? If you ever wondered what happened to the Lebensborn children, those that were intended to fulfil the Fuehrer’s desire in creating a master race, this is the extraordinary story of one of them.

Regimes of Responsibility in Africa analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. By doing so, this collection develops a stronger grasp of the specific political, economic and social transformations taking place today in Africa. At the same time, while focusing on case studies from the African continent, the work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, adding to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.

An international journal of research in the public dimensions of science and technology.

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the notion of salience in linguistics and related disciplines. While in top-down salience, perceivers endogenously direct their attention to a certain stimulus, in the bottom-up salience, it is the stimulus itself which attracts attention. In prototypical cases of bottom-up salience, the stimulus stands out because it is incongruous with a given ground by virtue of intrinsic physical characteristics. But a stimulus may also cause surprise by virtue of deviating from a cognitive ground, e.g., when violating social or probabilistic expectations. This has prompted researchers to examine the relationship between expectations and the perceptual salience of linguistic stimuli in new ways. This e-book features contributions from different scientific frameworks. The reader will find commentaries, reviews, and original research articles on models of sociolinguistic and morphological salience, the role of attention, affect, and predictability, and on how salient items are processed, categorized and learned. Taken together, the articles in this volume contribute to our understanding of how the perceptual salience of linguistic forms and variants can be theoretically framed and methodologically operationalized in different areas of linguistic processing.

Traditionally, cognition and emotion are seen as separate domains that are independent at best and in competition at worst. The French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) famously said “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (The heart has its reasons that reason does not know). Over the last century, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have increasingly appreciated their very strong reciprocal connections and interactions. Initially this was demonstrated in cognitive functions such as attention, learning and memory, and decision making. For instance, an emotional stimulus captures attention (e.g., Anderson & Phelps, 2001). Likewise, emotional stimuli are better learned and remembered than neutral ones (e.g., McGaugh, 1990) and they can provide strong incentives to bias decision making (Bechara et al., 1997). In more recent years, cognitive control has also been found to be intimately intertwined with emotion. This is consistent with an approach that considers cognitive control as an adaptive learning process (Braver & Cohen, 1999), reinforcement learning in particular (Holroyd & Coles, 2002; Verguts & Notebaert, 2009). From this perspective, cognitive control is not a cool encapsulated executive function, but instead involves rapidly calculating the value of situational, contextual, and action cues (Rushworth & Behrens, 2008) for the purpose of adapting the cognitive system toward future optimal performance. A wide array of research has shed light on cognitive control and its interactions with affect or motivation. Behaviorally, important phenomena include how people respond to difficult stimuli (e.g., incongruent stimuli, task switches), negative feedback, or errors and how this influences subsequent task processing. Neurally, an important target structure has been the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and its connections to traditional “emotional” (e.g., amygdala) and “cognitive” areas (e.g., (pre)motor cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). ACC seems to play a predominant role in integrating distant effects from remote cognitive and emotion systems in order to guide and optimize behavior. The current special issue focuses on the bi-directional link between emotion and cognitive control. We invite studies that investigate the influence from emotion on cognitive control, or vice versa, the influence of cognitive control on emotion. Contributions can be of different types: We welcome empirical contributions (behavioral or neuroscientific) but also computational modeling, theory, or review papers. By bringing together researchers from the traditionally separated domains, we hope to further stimulate the crosstalk between emotion and cognitive control, and thus to deepen our understanding of both.

The causes and consequences of differences in microbial community structure, defined here as the relative proportions of rare and abundant organisms within a community, are poorly understood. Articles in “The Causes and Consequences of Microbial Community Structure”, use empirical or modeling approaches as well as literature reviews to enrich our mechanistic understanding of the controls over the relationship between community structure and ecosystem processes. Specifically, authors address the role of trait distributions and tradeoffs, species-species interactions, evolutionary dynamics, community assembly processes and physical controls in affecting ‘who’s there’ and ‘what they are doing.’

The leadership landscape has begun to shift. Researchers have started to realize that previous conceptualizations of leadership that focus only on the positive aspects of leadership are too narrow and may represent a romantic notion of leadership. A growing body of inquiry has emerged with a focus on the darker side of leadership. Allowing for the possibility that leaders can also do harm, either intentionally or unintentionally, broadens the scope of leadership studies and serves to increase the practical implications of leadership research. This book brings together contributions by scholars from several different countries addressing topics such as narcissistic and destructive leadership, ethical leadership and leader errors.

The Changing Global Economy and its Impact on International Entrepreneurship addresses different changes and challenges which small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) face in an economy where they need to compete at home and cannot refrain from participating in international markets. This volume presents a collection of 12 carefully selected chapters that highlight challenging real-world cases to illustrate a variety of difficult problems. The book presents an analytical framework with three levels of analysis - entrepreneurial level, firm level, and institutional level - to document comprehensive, realistic and experientially-based entrepreneurial initiatives, potent firm and public policy strategies with solid results.