Humboldt University of Berlin (German: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher as the University of Berlin (Universität zu Berlin) in 1809, and opened in 1810, making it the oldest of Berlin's four universities. From 1810 until its closure in 1945, it was named Friedrich Wilhelm University (German: Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität). During the Cold War the university found itself in East Berlin and was de facto split in two when the Free University of Berlin opened in West Berlin. The university received its current name in honour of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1949.The university is divided into nine faculties, including its medical school shared with the Free University of Berlin, has a student enrollment of around 32,000 students, and offers degree programmes in some 189 disciplines from undergraduate to postdoctorate level. Its main campus is located on the Unter den Linden boulevard in central Berlin. The university is known worldwide for pioneering the Humboldtian model of higher education, which has strongly influenced other European and Western universities.It was regarded as the world's preeminent university for the natural sciences during the 19th and early 20th century, as the university is linked to major breakthroughs in physics and other sciences by its professors, such as Albert Einstein. Past and present faculty and notable alumni include 53 Nobel Prize laureates (the most of any German university by a substantial margin), as well as eminent philosophers, sociologists, artists, lawyers, politicians, mathematicians, scientists, and Heads of State; among them are Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Otto von Bismarck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich Heine, Max Planck and the Brothers Grimm. As one of Germany's most prestigious institutions of higher education, Humboldt University of Berlin has been conferred the title of "University of Excellence" under the German Universities Excellence Initiative.
Increased access to finance is widely viewed as a key driver to increase adaptive capacity in response to climate change. However, apart from limited studies on borrowing behavior, little is known about how exposure to extreme heat is associated with microfinance clients’ financial behavior. This study addresses this gap by investigating the short-run associations of unusual heat with microfinance clients’ saving and withdrawal behavior. In a case study, it combines geo-located temperature data with a unique dataset of around 50,000 clients of a leading Microfinance Institution (MFI) in Benin. Applying two-way fixed effects, seemingly unrelated regression, and ordinary least squares models, the study finds that exposure to extreme heat is heterogeneously associated with microfinance clients’ financial behavior. Specifically, non-agricultural clients show suggestive evidence of the accumulation of precautionary savings after extreme heat days in the preceding quarter, while extreme heat days are negatively associated with agricultural clients’ savings. Microfinance clients increase their withdrawals when exposed to extreme heat within the preceding quarter, but the association is not robust for agricultural clients’ withdrawals in response to an increase in annual extreme heat days. Addressing the heterogeneous financial responses across different clients to extreme heat consequently requires explicit policy attention. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the associations between extreme heat and individual economic outcomes, how financial behavior relates to weather risk, and how microfinance clients respond to shocks.
The Bayes space provides a Hilbert space structure for analyzing probability density functions (PDFs), equipping them with a geometry that reflects their relative and constrained nature. A key tool in this framework is the centered logratio (clr) transformation, which establishes an isometric isomorphism between the Bayes space and (a subspace of) the classical L2 space. This makes it possible to apply functional data analysis (FDA) techniques, particularly functional principal component analysis (FPCA), to both univariate and multivariate density data in the context of dimension reduction. For multivariate PDFs, embedding them in the Bayes space enables an orthogonal decomposition into independent and interactive components. Furthermore, the independent part can be decomposed into mutually orthogonal geometric marginals. This structure provides more profound insights into the sources of variation in multivariate densities. We show that this decomposition of the total variance is optimal in a PCA sense, impacting the interpretation of the eigenfunctions and scores resulting from FPCA. We demonstrate that applying FPCA directly to multivariate densities is equivalent in a certain sense to applying multivariate FPCA to their decomposed form, with the resulting eigenfunctions and scores decomposing accordingly. The unique decomposition based on these theoretical results is applied to housing and geological empirical data respectively, demonstrating the interpretability and practical value of this approach.
When one object approaches another object which, upon touching, moves in the same direction, humans report a vivid impression of one launching the other. Visual adaptation can alter this perception of causality: observers less often report seeing a launch after viewing a stream of launch events. In three experiments, we further characterized how visual adaptation influences the perception of causality by determining the spatial specificity of adaptation and timecourse of recovery from adaptation. In Experiment 1, observers saw ambiguous test events (i.e., the overlap between the two objects varied over trials) at three different distances from the adapted location. Adaptation was strongest when the adaptor and test event were presented at the same location, and absent when the two were separated by just three degrees of visual angle. Moreover, the perception of causality gradually recovered from adaptation, but remained incomplete. In Experiment 2, both long and short adaptation sequences were highly effective in driving adaptation, and showed no difference in the recovery timecourse, which was complete following more experimental blocks. In Experiment 3, a break without any task-relevant visual input also led to a recovery over the same timespan, but this time, the recovery was instantaneous and incomplete. Altogether, our results provide evidence for highly spatially specific computations, instantaneously responding to the onset of adaptation and then recovering from the adaptation over a short time window.
Ghana’s cocoa frontier increasingly overlaps with mechanised artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM), creating competition over land and labour. This article examines how declining cocoa production and intensifying ASGM reorganise a local labour regime and reshape rural livelihood pathways in Juaboso District, Western North Region. It draws on 40 semi-structured interviews with cocoa farmers, ASGM workers and institutional actors, alongside observations at four ASGM sites, conducted in 2024. The analysis combines the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework for the 21st Century (SLF-21) with a labour-regime lens. The findings show that cocoa decline and political arrangements governing access to land, machinery, finance and licences create uneven openings for mining. Landowners and operators can convert cocoa land and capture mining rents, while young, often migrant, workers enter hazardous and insecure work. At the same time, ASGM expansion reduces labour availability for cocoa production, increases labour costs for cocoa farmers and degrades land and water used by farming households. Mining income can meet urgent household needs and, in some cases, support farming, but these gains coexist with risks that are shifted onto workers, non-mining farmers and younger generations. These risks are unevenly distributed across generations, with younger people likely to bear a greater burden through depleted land and water resources, and the health and educational consequences of mining-centred livelihood pathways.
Background Enhancing student learning with the use of cognitively and linguistically challenging questions is considered key for fostering student learning in classroom discourse. Theoretical models suggest that teachers’ use of questions is related to their achievement expectations for students. However, evidence for the interplay of teacher expectations, teacher questions, and student learning is scarce. Aims This study (1) describes the use of teacher questions in whole-classroom discourse, (2) examines relations between teacher expectations and teacher questions, (3) and investigates the effects of teacher questions on student achievement in reading, vocabulary, and mathematics. Sample The sample includes 329 first grade students and 17 teachers (nschools = 13) from 15 German language and 14 mathematics classrooms in Germany. Methods First, we coded the language-promoting quality of teacher questions based on video recordings of whole-classroom discourse. Second, we employed multilevel modeling to examine links between teachers’ (inaccurate) expectations, teacher questions, and later student achievement. Results Teacher questions were mostly of low language-promoting quality. Teachers asked significantly more questions in mathematics, including more open-ended questions. For mathematics, (inaccurately) low expectations were linked with higher frequencies of questions that promote elaboration and description. A positive effect on vocabulary emerged from questions that motivate students to hypothesize and conclude. Conclusions Overall, language-promoting questions occur comparatively rarely in content lessons. Evidence for class-level expectancy effects on teacher behavior was limited. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of teacher questioning is domain-specific.
