Was würde Schumpeter tun? Entrepreneurship in Zeiten der Covid-Pandemie

Zweifelsohne markiert die Corona-Pandemie eine Zäsur in fast allen Lebensbereichen – und das nicht nur in einem oder wenigen Ländern, sondern annähernd weltweit. Die damit einhergehenden, radikalen Veränderungen in der Art und Weise wie wir leben und arbeiten, verleiht klassischen Konzepten wie der „schöpferischen Zerstörung“ wieder neue Aktualität. 70 Jahre nach dem Tod von Joseph A. Schumpeter sind seine grundlegenden Ideen zu Innovation und Entrepreneurship relevant und wichtig wie selten zuvor. Was würde also Schumpeter zur aktuellen Corona-Pandemie sagen, welche Schlussfolgerungen würde er ziehen? Dieser Beitrag nähert sich dieser Frage mit einer Reflektion der Kernbotschaften von Joseph Schumpeter, welche dann den aktuellen Fragestellungen der Pandemie gegenübergestellt werden. Der Artikel schließt mit einem spekulativen Einwurf ab, was Schumpeter konkret empfohlen hätte. The corona pandemic is a unique phenomenon in the younger history of humanity. It affects almost all countries on earth in all aspects of life. This leads to a revival of traditional ideas such as the established thinking of “creative destruction”. 70 years after the death of Joseph A. Schumpeter, his groundbreaking ideas of innovation and entrepreneurship are timely and relevant since their inception in the early 20th century. So, what would Schumpeter comment on the current corona pandemic? To approach this question, key messages of Schumpeter are introduced and reflected against key questions of the corona pandemic. The article closes with a speculative discussion on concrete actions Schumpeter would have taken living these days.

Biosynthesis and Cellular Functions of Tartaric Acid in Grapevines

Tartaric acid (TA) is an obscure end point to the catabolism of ascorbic acid (Asc). Here, it is proposed as a “specialized primary metabolite”, originating from carbohydrate metabolism but with restricted distribution within the plant kingdom and lack of known function in primary metabolic pathways. Grapes fall into the list of high TA-accumulators, with biosynthesis occurring in both leaf and berry. Very little is known of the TA biosynthetic pathway enzymes in any plant species, although recently some progress has been made in this space. New technologies in grapevine research such as the development of global co-expression network analysis tools and genome-wide association studies, should enable more rapid progress. There is also a lack of information regarding roles for this organic acid in plant metabolism. Therefore this review aims to briefly summarize current knowledge about the key intermediates and enzymes of TA biosynthesis in grapes and the regulation of its precursor, ascorbate, followed by speculative discussion around the potential roles of TA based on current knowledge of Asc metabolism, TA biosynthetic enzymes and other aspects of fruit metabolism.

Remote Operations Could Be the Future for Earth Sciences Teaching: A Speculative Discussion

The current COVID-19 pandemic has created havoc in the regular workings of many institutions, such as those dedicated to teaching; therefore, there is an urge for alternatives to traditional face-to-face teaching. However, for certain subjects, such as Earth Sciences, distance-teaching approaches could be seen as counterintuitive to the essential foundations of the subject (where empirical information, especially from fieldwork, is considered paramount for its foundation and growth). In this work, we consider remote operations that could complement, improve, and perhaps even replace the traditional approach for teaching Earth Sciences, potentially producing better learning outcomes, even in relation to laboratory and fieldwork, including studies involving locations outside of planet Earth. Additionally, we consider the possible advantages for other professional settings related to this area, such as those concerning terrain characterization for engineering works, mineral resources, and environmental studies, as well as possible support for space missions and stations in other astronomical bodies (where mineral exploration and extraction could be developed and, hence, benefit from remote operations).

Electronic Systems and Offsite Touristic Activities Based on Geological Concepts: A Speculative Discussion

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused havoc in many economic areas such as those related to tourism. This creates the need for alternative activities in this sector, especially given that it is not clear when the present emergency will end and there could be new situations of this kind. We consider here two main possibilities (virtual models and remote observations) for tourism related to geological objects (including those used by humans) and processes. These approaches could help to promote remote-operated tourism in other celestial bodies, helping to promote this kind of enterprise. These activities could be prepared with variable connection to education (for publics with diverse age ranges), prompting their use at any time of the year (hence minimizing the issue of seasonality). Our discussion suggests that remote observations will be the most interesting option since they could potentially give the users an unlimited diversity of experiences, it might give higher returns to local communities (but also higher loads on local environments) and they could find additional value in other geological applications. While our analysis is certainly very speculative at present, it can be submitted to falsification by the financial results.

A speculative discussion of four animal carcinogens endogenously produced in humans and a formula for cancer development

The major factors (macro) which cause human cancer have been elucidated and include tobacco use, diet, infection, reproductive and sexual behavior and, to a lesser extent, alcohol consumption and occupational factors. Several reports have been published about endogenous chemicals made in humans which produce DNA adducts; however, few have linked them to possible carcinogenic activity. This paper discussed four chemicals made in humans (formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, isoprene and ethylene oxide), pathways of their formation, their animal carcinogenicity and questions about these and other endogenous chemicals’ possible role in human cancer. In addition, the author posits a simplified formula for development of cancer and a formula for causing mutations by various agents.

What’s In a Norm? Foucault’s Conceptualisation and Genealogy of the Norm

In this article I survey Foucault’s remarks on norms and normalisation from across his oeuvre, with a view to reconstructing his genealogy of norms, leaning at points – following Foucault himself – on Georges Canguilhem’s seminal work on the topic. I also survey in tandem the existing secondary scholarship on this question, maintaining – pace other schol-ars – that Foucault’s position has not been adequately explicated despite sophisticated attempts. I argue that Foucault’s idiosyncratic conception of the norm, overlooked or mis-understood by other readers, is consistently of an ideal model guiding human action in any particular sphere. This concept is a relatively modern one that may be contrasted to the older form of restricting human behaviour according to binary discriminations that may be called ‘laws’ or ‘rules’. Foucault traces the form of the norm specifically to medieval pro-cesses for dealing with the plague, which later become highly generalised and diffused to produce a normalising society. I conclude with a more speculative discussion of how this society of the norm continues to utilise binarising rules, arguing that norms are typically used in order to ground binarising condemnations of abnormal cases, but that the nebu-lousness of norms ultimately allows any particular case to be condemned by such stand-ards.

Photography and Protest in Israel/Palestine : The Activestills Online Archive

This chapter will explore two key ways that photography plays a role within the aesthetics of protest. This will be done through a discussion of a small number of photographs of political demonstrations selected from the online archive of the Israel/Palestine-based photographic collective Activestills. The photographs discussed in the first section of the chapter present evidence of people carrying photographic images within demonstrations. While the second section deals with examples of the how photography has been used to document the immediate scene of protest for distant spectators. After these discussions of particular examples from the archive, the chapter concludes with a more speculative discussion of the Activestills archive itself.

Evolutionary aspects of reservoir computing

Reservoir computing (RC) is a powerful computational paradigm that allows high versatility with cheap learning. While other artificial intelligence approaches need exhaustive resources to specify their inner workings, RC is based on a reservoir with highly nonlinear dynamics that does not require a fine tuning of its parts. These dynamics project input signals into high-dimensional spaces, where training linear readouts to extract input features is vastly simplified. Thus, inexpensive learning provides very powerful tools for decision-making, controlling dynamical systems, classification, etc. RC also facilitates solving multiple tasks in parallel, resulting in a high throughput. Existing literature focuses on applications in artificial intelligence and neuroscience. We review this literature from an evolutionary perspective. RC’s versatility makes it a great candidate to solve outstanding problems in biology, which raises relevant questions. Is RC as abundant in nature as its advantages should imply? Has it evolved? Once evolved, can it be easily sustained? Under what circumstances? (In other words, is RC an evolutionarily stable computing paradigm?) To tackle these issues, we introduce a conceptual morphospace that would map computational selective pressures that could select for or against RC and other computing paradigms. This guides a speculative discussion about the questions above and allows us to propose a solid research line that brings together computation and evolution with RC as test model of the proposed hypotheses. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information’.

Reflecting Bicultural Mechanisms in Waterscape Design and Planning

This research investigates the ways practitioners uphold Indigenous and Western values water values in the design and management of waterscapes in New Zealand. Waterscapes are defined as a landscape in which water relationships are central to community social, ecological, recreational, spiritual and cultural interactions. Specifically, the purpose of this research is to understand how practitioners; landscape architects, planners, designers and environmental managers navigate the complexities of bicultural approaches in practice. The research optimizes two robust literature reviews and 13 semi-structured interviews conducted in New Zealand. Findings will be presented with a series of photos and frameworks followed by a speculative discussion on the applicability and future research opportunities in the Canadian context and beyond. The research contributes to policy discourse toward design and management practices and opportunities to employ a bicultural lens to achieve more collaborative outcomes. Click here to view a copy of this presentation.

Conclusion The Contested Politics of Economic Change in a Neoliberal Age

This chapter revisits the book’s central empirical and theoretical arguments and summarizes its central narratives about policy outcomes in fiscal policy, labor-market policy, and financial policy in France, Germany, and Italy in the era of transnational neoliberalism and economic austerity since the early 1990s. In each country, trajectories of adjustment have deviated from standard neoliberal prescriptions in favor of alternative political-economic visions deriving from statist liberalism in France, corporate liberalism in Germany, and clientelist liberalism in Italy. It returns to its central contention that the standard analyses of neoliberal reform fail to capture these dynamics, as do conventional institutionalist and interest-based accounts. It then reassesses the implications of its case material for the power of ideas in shaping trajectories of economic adjustment in advanced democracies. It concludes with a brief speculative discussion of the book’s implications for the future of capitalism and political democracy in a neoliberal era.