***Angaben zur beteiligten Person Zenke: Christian Timo Zenke, Dr. phil. Dipl.-Kult., Erziehungs- und Kulturwissenschaftler, Akademischer Rat an der Fakultät für Erziehungswissenschaft der Universität Bielefeld.

By the term ‘New Atheism’ several authors and their books are subsumed under one label, most prominently The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, and God Is Not Great: Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. Besides an introduction to the ideas expressed in these books and the reception of the ‘New Atheists’ in the public discourse, the (...) article comprises a criticism of the label ‘New Atheism’. (shrink)

Balancing speed and quality during crises pose challenges for ensuring the value and utility of data in social science research. The COVID-19 pandemic in particular underscores the need for high-quality data and rapid dissemination. Given the importance of behavioural measures and compliance with measures to contain the pandemic, social science research has played a key role in policymaking during this global crisis. This study addresses two key research questions: How FAIR ( findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) are social science data (...) on the COVID-19 pandemic? Which study features are related to the level of FAIRness scores of datasets? We assess the FAIRness of n = 1131 articles, retrieved through a keyword search in the Web of Science database, employing both automated and manual coding methods. Our study inclusion criteria encompass empirical studies on the COVID-19 pandemic published between 2019 and 2023 with a social science focus and explicit reference to the underlying dataset(s). Our analysis of n = 45 datasets reveals substantial differences in FAIRness for different types of research on the COVID-19 pandemic. The overall FAIRness of data is acceptable, although particularly Reusability scores fall short, in both the manual and the automatic assessment. Further, articles explicitly linked to the Social Science concept in the OpenAlex database exhibit a higher mean overall FAIRness value. Based on these results, we derive recommendations for balancing ethical obligations and the potential tradeoff between speed and data (sharing) quality in social-scientific crisis research. (shrink)

Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute to (...) the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter’s terms of service in particular. (shrink)

The least element 0 of a finite meet semi-distributive lattice is a meet of meet-prime elements. We investigate conditions under which the least element of an algebraic, meet semi-distributive lattice is a (complete) meet of meet-prime elements. For example, this is true if the lattice has only countably many compact elements, or if |L| < 2ℵ0, or if L is in the variety generated by a finite meet semi-distributive lattice. We give an example of an algebraic, meet semi-distributive lattice that (...) has no meet-prime element or join-prime element. This lattice L has |L| = |LC| = 2ℵ0 where Lc is the set of compact elements of L. (shrink)

There are remarkable behavioral, neural, and genetic similarities between the way songbirds learn to sing and human infants learn to speak. Furthermore, the brain regions involved in birdsong learning, perception, and production have been identified and characterized in detail. In particular, the caudal medial nidopallium (the avian analog of the mammalian auditory‐association cortex) has been found to contain the neural substrate of auditory memory, paving the way for analyses of the underlying molecular mechanisms. Recently, the zebra finch genome was sequenced, (...) and annotated cDNA databases representing over 15,000 unique brain‐expressed genes are available, enabling high‐throughput gene expression analyses. Here we review the involvement of immediate early genes (e.g. zenk and arc), their downstream targets (e.g. synapsins), and their regulatory signaling pathways (e.g. MAPK/ERK) in songbird memory. We propose that in‐depth investigations of zenk‐ and ERK‐dependent cascades will help to further unravel the molecular basis of auditory memory. (shrink)