Bøger udgivet af Sudwestdeutscher Verlag Fur Hochschulschriften AG

Nitrogen is one of the most important compounds on earth. All organisms need nitrogen to live and grow. Even the majority (78.08%) of the atmosphere (and so the air we breathe) is dinitrogen. Over the last century, human activities have dramatically increased emissions and removal of nitrogen to the global atmosphere by as much as three to five fold. Nitrous oxide is the fourth largest single contributor to positive radiative forcing, and serves as the only long-lived atmospheric tracer of human perturbations of the global nitrogen cycle. Nitrogen oxides belong to the so called indirect greenhouse gases. These indirect greenhouse gases control the abundances of direct greenhouse gases through atmospheric chemistry and contribute on this way to the greenhouse effect. For a better understanding of these feedback mechanisms it is necessary to know the source strength of nitric oxide and nitrous oxide. Thus, the knowledge about exchange processes of nitrogen is of interest and importance for scientist and policy makers, likewise.

Due to numerous achievements in the last years, solid-state NMR has evolved a potent tool for structural characterization of biomolecules. Not relying on single crystals or solubility, the technique particularly focuses on fibrillar and membrane proteins, which are difficult to characterize otherwise. Despite this enormous potential, numerous difficulties unsolved to date demand for further technical and methodological reworking. Among these, the achievable signal to noise and resolution are the most prominent limits. Whereas a series of limitations is induced by strong dipolar interactions among protons even under fast MAS (Magic Angle Spinning), a (partial) dilution of the proton content by deuterons bears a number of spectroscopic advantages. These are e.g. direct 1H detection with an excellent resolution, accessibility of long-range distance restraints, and proton based dynamics and surface accessibility determination. Besides, relaxation for various coherences is significantly decreased, making solution-NMR like multi-dimensional experiments for peak assignment etc. possible. The features of a dilute protonation explored in this work have lead to 12 peer-reviewed publications.

Recently, the importance of reacting to the emotional state of a user has been generally accepted in the field of human-computer interaction and especially speech has received increased focus as a modality from which to automatically deduct information on emotion. So far, mainly not very application-oriented offline studies based on previously recorded and annotated databases with emotional speech were conducted. However, demands of online analysis differ from that of offline analysis, in particular, conditions are more challenging and less predictable. Therefore, this book investigates real-time automatic emotion recognition from acoustic features of speech in several experiments for suitable audio segmenation, feature extraction and classification algorithms. Results lead to the implementation of the Open Source online emotion recognition framework EmoVoice. A further emphasis was set on multimodality and the use of speech emotion recognition in applications.

The conflicting relation and interplay between a canon fixed in wording and interpretation on the one hand, and the volatility and ambiguity of the "quotable quote" (Garber: Quotation Marks, 2003) on the other hand is the main objective of this work. Without quotation the canon cannot and will not survive. But how does quotation affect the authority of the canon? I argue that quotation 'classics' are not made, they are quoted: It is the quoter and not the author of a text who wields the (democratic) power of choosing the quotable. I investigate how the canon prescribed by the Chinese Communist Party becomes the classic chosen by individual quoters writing for the "People's Daily", the mouthpiece of this Party. The time frame under investigation reaches from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to the present. In five case studies I illuminate the reciprocal influence between quotation and canon, between innovation and imitation in modern China.

Drug resistance constitutes a major challenge in the treatment of metastatic neuroendocrine cancer. Chemotherapeutic regimes for these tumours employ weak-base drugs such as etoposide. Especially for this medication, a mechanism of resistance was suggested that linked increased acidification of intracellular compartments to the evolution of drug resistance. So far, most research groups have focused on the role of the driving force behind compartmental acidification, the vacuolar H+-ATPase, in drug resistance. However, chloride channels of the ClC-family also play a pivotal role in the pH homeostasis of cellular organelles, and recently the first evidence for a potential role of ClC-3 in drug resistance was given. Following this finding, this work aims to further elucidate the role of ClC-channels and compartmental acidification in the evolution of etoposide resistance. In this context it focuses on the question of whether an up-regulation of intracellular ClC-channels can be observed as a cellular response to chemotherapeutic drugs and whether it will entail increased compartmental acidity and thus contribute to the evolution of drug resistance in vitro.

Theory of Mind (ToM) defines the ability to understand other peoples' behaviour and emotions by understanding their mental states such as beliefs or intentions. In ToM research there is an interesting developmental course: When someone's intention is fulfilled, 2- to 3-year-olds attribute good emotions to the other, and they attribute bad emotions when his or her intention is not fulfilled. This process is defined as intention-based emotion attribution. Things get complicated in the case of fulfilled immoral intentions. While 4- to 5-year-olds ignore the immoral aspect by solely attributing "happy victimizer" emotions to the other, 6- to 7-year-olds attribute mixed emotions: A fulfilled intention makes someone feel good; but the moral rule violation also causes bad feelings. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in adults this work investigated neural networks of intention-based emotion attribution, and revealed common neural activity associated with non-immoral (neutral) and immoral intentions. This indicates that the development of neutral and immoral intention understanding might be associated with the maturation of common rather than distinct brain regions.

Field emission (FE) is defined as the emission of electrons from the surface of a condensed phase (metal or semiconductor) into another phase, usually a vacuum, under the action of high electrostatic field. Detailed description of theory of electron emission from metallic and semiconducting materials, as well as required measurement techniques are presented in this work. Description of mutual shielding effect, which is an important issue for cold cathode applications, and an overview of electro-thermal properties of carbon nanotubes and metallic nanowires can be find as well. Experimental part of the work is focused on results of comprehensive FE investigations of different materials suitable for cold cathodes applications, as well as on investigation of origins of a parasitic FE from Nb surfaces and photocathodes required for electron accelerators like the European X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL). Detailed description of a newly developed scanning anode FE microscope (SAFEM) can be found, too. The SAFEM was developed within this work and will be regularly used to ensure low parasitic FE from the actual photocathodes in the electron gun of the XFEL.

This dissertation describes an interdisciplinary study that considers linguistic and psychological findings to perform computer-aided categorization of opinions and emotions in texts. It discusses various emotional corpora (movie reviews, weblogs, product reviews, and natural-language dialogues) and describes different approaches to affect classification of their texts: a statistical approach that utilizes lexical, deictic, stylometric, and grammatical information; a semantic approach that relies on emotional dictionaries and on deep grammatical analysis; a hybrid approach that combines the statistical approach and the semantic approach. Furthermore, this thesis explores affect sensing using multimodal fusion that utilizes lexical and acoustic data. In conclusion, the thesis discusses significant contributions and describes future work.

Binding of Fas Ligand (FasL) to the Fas receptor triggers apoptosis of the receptor-bearing cell, which plays a pivotal role for homeostasis of the immune system and during acute immune responses. Similar to other TNF family members, the intracellular FasL domain is able to transmit signals into the FasL-bearing cell ("reverse signaling"). Recently, we have described a Notch-like proteolytic processing of FasL by the proteases ADAM10 and SPPL2a, which leads to the release of the intracellular domain (FICD) into the cytoplasm. Following the cleavage event, FICD translocates to the nucleus and influences gene transcription. To study the physiological importance of FasL reverse signaling in vivo on the level of the endogenous proteins, we have established a knockout/knockin mouse model in which wildtype FasL was replaced with a deletion mutant lacking the intracellular portion (FasL¿Intra). Our ex vivo and in vivo findings demonstrate that FasL reverse signaling is a negative modulator of certain immune responses. It is tempting to speculate that FasL reverse signaling might be a fine-tuning mechanism to prevent autoimmune diseases.

The study of rare hadronic B decays at LHCb and at the planned Super-B factories is a valueable tool in the search for new physics. The variety of hadronic decay channels allows for over-constraining measurements of flavour-changing neutral currents. The author discusses several aspects of new physics in rare hadronic B decays. In the first part of the book, the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with Minimal Flavor Violation is analysed. In this model, large effects can occur in rare B decays due to tan(beta)-enhanced corrections which have to be resummed to all orders. The known resummation formulae are generalised beyond the decoupling limit and novel effects in couplings involving genuine supersymmetric particles are studied. In the second part of the book, the possibility of probing new physics in electroweak penguins via hadronic B decays is discussed. Such kind of new physics is suggested by puzzling data in B-->K,pi decays. The author shows that a measurement of the purely isospin-violating decays Bs-->phi,pi(rho) could shed light on this puzzle. A model-independent study and a study of concrete well-motivated new physics scenarios are performed.