The problem of being a paradigm: the emergence of neural stem cells as example for “Kuhnian” revolution in biology or misconception of the scientific community?

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, “The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago” (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on landmark events taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, “no new neurons after birth”, from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm.     

Termine und Call for Papers

Termine und Call for Papers

Termine und Call for Papers     

Wenn im Coaching die Paardynamik die Oberhand gewinnt

With the aid of two coaching cases it is illustrated how the consultation process can lead to a negative result if the consulters are trying to leave out their so called private live because they are afraid.     

What really works?! Evaluating the effectiveness of practices to increase the managerial diversity of women and minorities

Many studies have investigated barriers for women and minorities on their way to the top, but very few studies have examined which organizational practices indeed increase the diversity of the top management in organizations. This research analyzes whether various diversity practices increase the proportion of women and minorities at the top. The results show that the more diversity management and family-friendly practices that are implemented, the higher is the proportion of women in management positions. However, the results do not show any effect for diversity training or that people with a migration background benefit from diversity practices.     

Termine und Call for Papers 1/2011

Termine und Call for Papers

Termine und Call for Papers 1/2011     

Financial Health Economics

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between financial and real health care markets. This link is important as financial returns drive investment in medical research and development (R&D), which, in turn, affects real spending growth. We document a “medical innovation premium” of 4–6% annually for equity returns of firms in the health care sector. We interpret this premium as compensating investors for government‐induced profit risk, and we provide supportive evidence for this hypothesis through company filings and abnormal return patterns surrounding threats of government intervention. We quantify the implications of the premium for the growth in real health care spending by calibrating our model to match historical trends, predicting the share of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to health care to be 32% in the long run. Policies that had removed government risk would have led to more than a doubling of medical R&D and would have increased the current share of health care spending by more than 3% of GDP.     

Feedback-Center zur Identifikation von Nachwuchsführungskräften Ein Instrument zwischen Entwicklung und Auswahl

Feedback-Center for identification of junior managers — an instrument between development and selection As an alternative to the classical Assessment-Center this article introduces the Feedback-Center as an instrument for diagnosis and support. The theoretical explanation of a project that was carried out in the course of an organizational development program in a middle-sized company is discussed. By social feedback, the participants of the Feedback-Center (in the case presented: the complete management of the company) get the chance to gain experience about themselves, to sort these different experiences and to plan and initiate steps to their own development, supported by their superiors as well as by the internal personnel manager and by the external consultants. The article describes the basic concept, the composition of the team of consultants and the practical realization of the Feedback-Center.     

Sparse regression techniques in low-dimensional survival data settings

In high-dimensional data settings, sparse model fits are desired, which can be obtained through shrinkage or boosting techniques. We investigate classical shrinkage techniques such as the lasso, which is theoretically known to be biased, new techniques that address this problem, such as elastic net and SCAD, and boosting technique CoxBoost and extensions of it, which allow to incorporate additional structure. To examine, whether these methods, that are designed for or frequently used in high-dimensional survival data analysis, provide sensible results in low-dimensional data settings as well, we consider the well known GBSG breast cancer data. In detail, we study the bias, stability and sparseness of these model fitting techniques via comparison to the maximum likelihood estimate and resampling, and their prediction performance via prediction error curve estimates.