Open Access

Indoor spaces exhibit microbial compositions that are distinctly dissimilar from one another and from outdoor spaces. Unique in this regard, and a topic that has only recently come into focus, is the microbiome of hospitals. While the benefits of knowing exactly which microorganisms propagate how and where in hospitals are undoubtedly beneficial for preventing hospital-acquired infections, there are, to date, no standardized procedures on how to best study the hospital microbiome. Our study aimed to investigate the microbiome of hospital sanitary facilities, outlining the extent to which hospital microbiome analyses differ according to sample-preparation protocol. For this purpose, fifty samples were collected from two separate hospitals—from three wards and one hospital laboratory—using two different storage media from which DNA was extracted using two different extraction kits and sequenced with two different primer pairs (V1–V2 and V3–V4). There were no observable differences between the sample-preservation media, small differences in detected taxa between the DNA extraction kits (mainly concerning Propionibacteriaceae), and large differences in detected taxa between the two primer pairs V1–V2 and V3–V4. This analysis also showed that microbial occurrences and compositions can vary greatly from toilets to sinks to showers and across wards and hospitals. In surgical wards, patient toilets appeared to be characterized by lower species richness and diversity than staff toilets. Which sampling sites are the best for which assessments should be analyzed in more depth. The fact that the sample processing methods we investigated (apart from the choice of primers) seem to have changed the results only slightly suggests that comparing hospital microbiome studies is a realistic option. The observed differences in species richness and diversity between patient and staff toilets should be further investigated, as these, if confirmed, could be a result of excreted antimicrobials.

IT controlling is established as a tool for controlling information technology. The job description of the IT controller has changed only moderately over a long period of time. It was mainly associated with IT budgeting, IT portfolio management, IT cost planning, accounting and controlling. However, digitalization has brought movement in goals, contents and methods. New topics such as digital strategy management, cloud controlling, data science, etc. are being discussed. The task profile is changing away from pure IT cost analysis to the management of the digitization strategy with a focus on strategic IT portfolio management. Some voices are already talking about "smart controlling" or "digital controlling".  This book presents an IT controlling concept for the digital age and explains the relevant methods in a practical way.

Als Medien- und insbesondere Fernsehphänomen hat Harald Schmidt die TV-Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum maßgeblich beeinflusst. So ist es etwa der Harald Schmidt Show gelungen, halbironische Sprechweisen diskursfähig zu machen, die sich bis in die Gegenwart der Social Media verfolgen lassen. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes untersuchen vor diesem Hintergrund die »Methode Harald Schmidt«, d.h. die Unterminierung gängiger sozialer Vorstellungen bei gleichzeitiger Affirmation derselben. Die zentrale These lautet: Harald Schmidt hat grundlegende Voraussetzungen dafür geschaffen, eine weitestgehend neue Populärkultur ästhetisch wie kulturpraktisch zu etablieren.

Von Technik und Ästhetik zu sprechen, heißt, sich bereits begrifflich auf ein Feld einzulassen, das mindestens zwei divergente Perspektiven gemeinsam denkt. Dabei haben das Technische wie das Ästhetische die Bedeutung einer Interdependenz aufzuweisen: Das Technische konstituiert einerseits Funktionen, Formen und Gebrauchsaspekte - ästhetische Zustände evozieren andererseits zeichenhafte Realisierungen, phantasmatische Urteile und wahrnehmungsvermittelte Phänomene des Erscheinens. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes zeigen, wie bei der Konfrontation von Technik und Ästhetik eine Art Verkopplung und intrinsische Dynamik qua techno-ästhetischer Evokation entstehen kann.

The Concordia Research Station provides a unique location for preparatory activities for future human journey to Mars, to explore microbial diversity at subzero temperatures, and monitor the dissemination of human-associated microorganisms within the pristine surrounding environment. Amplicon sequencing was leveraged to investigate the microbial diversity of surface snow samples collected monthly over a two-year period, at three distances from the Station (10, 500, and 1000 m). Even when the extracted total DNA was below the detection limit, 16S rRNA gene sequencing was successfully performed on all samples, while 18S rRNA was amplified on 19 samples out of 51. No significant relationships were observed between microbial diversity and seasonality (summer or winter) or distance from the Concordia base. This suggested that if present, the anthropogenic impact should have been below the detectable limit. While harboring low microbial diversity, the surface snow samples were characterized by heterogeneous microbiomes. Ultimately, our study corroborated the use of DNA sequencing-based techniques for revealing microbial presence in remote and hostile environments, with implications for Planetary Protection during space missions and for life-detection in astrobiology relevant targets.

In the design of robot skills, the focus generally lies on increasing the flexibility and reliability of the robot execution process; however, typical skill representations are not designed for analysing execution failures if they occur or for explicitly learning from failures. In this paper, we describe a learning-based hybrid representation for skill parameterisation called an execution model, which considers execution failures to be a natural part of the execution process. We then (i) demonstrate how execution contexts can be included in execution models, (ii) introduce a technique for generalising models between object categories by combining generalisation attempts performed by a robot with knowledge about object similarities represented in an ontology, and (iii) describe a procedure that uses an execution model for identifying a likely hypothesis of a parameterisation failure. The feasibility of the proposed methods is evaluated in multiple experiments performed with a physical robot in the context of handle grasping, object grasping, and object pulling. The experimental results suggest that execution models contribute towards avoiding execution failures, but also represent a first step towards more introspective robots that are able to analyse some of their execution failures in an explicit manner.