Universities should be role models in promoting sustainability by educating students and giving all universitymembers opportunities for information and networking, at best including the university’s external partners.This paper illustrates the setting-up of a one-week long event at the University of Applied Sciences Coburg aspart of the German-wide ‘Public Climate School’ campaign with various (extra)curricular events. The eventsimplemented were based on principles of Education for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Entrepre-neurship Education. The aim was to involve as many internal stakeholders as possible (teaching staff, students,non-academic staff) as well as partners from the university’s local environment. From the experiences and thefeedback of those involved, we found that internal communication, engagement of students as well as infor-mal events to exchange ideas and get to know local players are critical to success. We derive practical implica-tions for universities when planning and implementing the programs. Universities should be role models in promoting sustainability by educating students and giving all university members opportunities for information and networking, at best including the university’s external partners. This paper illustrates the setting-up of a one-week long event at the University of Applied Sciences Coburg as part of the German-wide ‘Public Climate School’ campaign with various (extra)curricular events. The events implemented were based on principles of Education for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Entrepreneurship Education. The aim was to involve as many internal stakeholders as possible (teaching staff, students, non-academic staff) as well as partners from the university’s local environment. From the experiences and the feedback of those involved, we found that internal communication, engagement of students as well as informal events to exchange ideas and get to know local players are critical to success. We derive practical implications for universities when planning and implementing the programs.

Zusammenfassung

Geführte Akustische Wellen (GAW) haben sich im Themengebiet des Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) etabliert. Neben ihren Vorteilen bei der Überwachung von Objekten und Detektion von Fehlstellen, gibt es jedoch auch einige Herausforderungen. Zu diesen zählt die dispersive Natur der häufig eingesetzten Lambwellen. Dispersion führt zu Signalverzerrung und reduziert dadurch die räumliche Auflösung und erschwert die Erkennung von schwach reflektierenden Fehlstellen. In diesem Beitrag wird der Einsatz eines Phased-Array-Systems zur Delaminationserkennung bei einem Mehrschichtsystem demonstriert, bei dem dispersive Lambwellen zum Einsatz kommen. Durch das Kompensieren der Dispersionseffekte kann die Sign Coherence Factor (SCF) Erweiterung des Total Focusing Method (TFM) Algorithmus eingesetzt und so auch schwach reflektierende Fehlstellen erkannt werden. Des Weiteren wird auf das Entstehen von Modenüberlagerungen bei Mehrschichtsystemen eingegangen, die bei der Auswahl der Arbeitsfrequenz und Sendesignallänge des Phased-Array-Systems berücksichtigt werden müssen.

Guided Acoustic Waves (GAW) are well established in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). However, in addition to their advantages in monitoring objects and detecting defects, there are also several challenges. These include the dispersive nature of the commonly used Lamb waves. Dispersion leads to signal distortion that reduces spatial resolution and makes it difficult to detect weakly reflecting defects. This paper demonstrates the use of a phased array system for delamination detection in a multilayer system using dispersive Lamb waves. By compensating for the dispersion effects, the Sign Coherence Factor (SCF) extension of the Total Focusing Method (TFM) algorithm can be used to detect even weakly reflective defects. Furthermore, the occurrence of mode superposition in multilayer systems is discussed, which must be taken into account when selecting the operating frequency and transmit signal length of the phased array system.

Post-COVID syndrome affects at least 10% of individuals recovering from COVID-19. Currently, there is no causal treatment. This retrospective cohort study aimed to evaluate the potential of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in treating post-COVID symptoms. TCM physicians in Germany and Austria completed online questionnaires to retrospectively record symptoms, treatment approaches, and outcomes for patients diagnosed with post-COVID. Nine physicians collected data from 79 patients (65% female, 47 ± 16 SD). The most common TCM treatments for post-COVID were acupuncture (n = 66; 85%), Chinese pharmacological therapy (n = 61; 77%), and Chinese dietary counseling (n = 32; 41%). After an average of 7 ± 4 TCM consultations, physicians rated global symptom improvement as 62% ± 29%. Significant alleviation from the start of TCM treatment was observed in major symptoms, such as fatigue (P < .001), impaired physical performance (P < .001), and exertional dyspnea (P < .001). TCM treatment was associated with significant improvements in post-COVID symptoms, warranting further evaluation through randomized controlled studies.

Estimating the magnitude of placebo responses across pharmacological and nonpharmacological trials is important for understanding their influence on trial outcomes. Yet, the extent to which more intense placebo interventions like sham acupuncture yield larger analgesic responses than placebo pills, and the factors predicting these responses, remain unclear. This meta-analysis investigated the magnitude and predictors of placebo analgesia responses in pharmacological vs acupuncture trials. Analyses included individual patient data from the placebo arm of 11 randomized controlled trials (RCTs): 9 pharmacological RCTs using placebo pills (N = 2021) and 2 acupuncture RCTs using sham acupuncture (N = 747). All trials were conducted in patients with chronic nociceptive pain (osteoarthritis, N = 2068; low back pain, N = 700). The placebo response was calculated as the change in pain intensity (0-100) between baseline and week 12. A random effects model demonstrated that placebo pills and patients with osteoarthritis exhibited smaller placebo responses than sham acupuncture and patients with low back pain (both P < 0.001, marginal effects). A mixed effects model showed that route of administration interacted significantly with baseline pain, premature termination, and the presence of adverse events. Together, predictors explained 20% to 25% of the individual variance in placebo responses, whereas 75% to 80% remained unaccounted for. In summary, sham acupuncture accounted for slightly larger placebo responses than placebo pills. Since basic trial and patient parameters explained only a small portion of this variability, we might need to start considering the patient's perception of the treatment—including cognition and emotions—to better predict placebo analgesia responses.

The increasing consumption of news online in the 21st century coincided with increased publication of disinformation, biased reporting, hate speech and other unwanted Web content.

We describe BiasScanner, an application that aims to strengthen democracy by supporting news consumers with scrutinizing news articles they are reading online. BiasScanner contains a server-side pre-trained large language model to identify biased sentences of news articles and a front-end Web browser plug-in. BiasScanner can identify and classify more than two dozen types of media bias at the sentence level, making it the most fine-grained model and only automatic application deployed as a browser plug-in. One special feature is the high-quality, LLM-generated explanations of the model’s decisions.

While prior research has addressed news bias detection, we are not aware of any automatic work that resulted in a deployed browser plug-in (c.f. also biasscanner.org for a Web demo).

The textual realm and the geographic/spatial realm intersect when we use human language to talk about geographic space. Various terms have been used to talk about this intersection (“geoparsing”, “georeferencing”, “toponym resolution”, “spatial grounding” etc.) and related applications such as geographic information retrieval. In this keynote, I will review some things that the community has accomplished since 2003, what occupies people’s minds at the moment, and I will raise a few research questions that would be interesting to answer, or that would unlock the potential for new kinds of applications. I conclude with some personal conjectures about how one version of the future might look like.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly used in neuropsychological assessment of various cognitive functions. Compared to traditional laboratory studies, VR allows for a more natural environment and more complex task-related movements with a high degree of control over the environment. However, there are still few studies that transfer well-established paradigms for measuring attentional distraction by novel sounds in laboratory settings to virtual environments and sports activities. In this study, the oddball paradigm, which is well established in laboratory settings for studying attention, is transferred to table tennis in a virtual environment. While 33 subjects played virtual table tennis, they were presented with a task-irrelevant sequence of frequent standard sounds and infrequent novel sounds. Trials in which an unexpected novel sound preceded the ball’s appearance resulted in a delayed racket movement compared to trials in which a standard sound was presented. This distraction effect was observed in the first part of the experiment but disappeared with increasing exposure. The results suggest that unexpected and task-irrelevant novel sounds can initially distract attention and impair performance on a complex movement task in a rich environment. The results demonstrate that versions of the well-established oddball distraction paradigm can be used to study attentional distraction, its dynamics, and its effects on complex movements in naturalistic environments.