The paper looks at the digital portrait used in the form of avatars in various online worlds and communication networks. It describes an ongoing modal shift from an ontological understanding of the portrait towards the portrait as performative act.

In accordance with the Western semiotic divide between representational fiction and material reality proper, the portrait avatar is often still described as a representation that depicts the subject on the basis of a segregation between the living subject and the portrait. But the avatar-portrait functions as embodiment, thereby fulfilling a mainly performative and not epistemic purpose. Surpassing even the concept of the extension, the user and her portrait-avatar can be seen, rather, as a performing and communicating unit.

The paper looks at Eastern iconology, where the portrait is an energetic transmitter in which the depiction and the depicted converge in the realness of the picture. Key concepts such as prototype, archetype, and inverse perspective are discussed and applied to the art piece Can you see me now? by Blast Theory.

Nearshore circulation is the mean flow in the region from the shoreline to about a kilometer offshore. An understanding of nearshore circulation is important to understanding sediment transport, pollution dispersion, and the distribution of various marine invertebrates. This thesis addresses the following question. Are the dynamics of the alongshore current described by a 1-D balance (neglecting along­ shore variations) between wave and wind forcing against bottom stress and lateral mixing? Observations are used to close integrated momentum balance, suggesting that a 1-D balance is appropriate. The alongshore bottom stress must be parame­ terized in models. Various parameterizations are examined in detail and it is found that most nonlinear parameterizations are adequate for modeling purposes. The alongshore current may also be unstable. For marginally unstable Reynolds num­ bers, the instability of the alongshore current is investigated analytically, and an amplitude equation for a weakly nonlinear shear wave is derived. The characteris­tics of a equilibrated shear wave (obtained from a 2-D numerical model) are well described by the theory. FUture work will involve numerical modeling of nearshore circulation, and a nearshore circulation model I have implemented is described.

It was Nietzsche, habitually prophetic, who proclaimed in Beyond Good and Evil [date?][1886] that "[t]he time for petty politics is over; the very next century will bring the fight for the domination of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale politics." Perhaps, as suggestive as the arresting prophesy,[unclear] was Nietzsche's error in thinking that the geopolitical shift would come in the 20th century. True, there were two momentous wars in that century, called `world wars' by historians and statesmen, but these are better understood as intra-regional struggles for the control of Europe (though admittedly with wider global implications, especially for the colonial dimension of international relations). The labeling of these struggles as 'world' wars was mainly expressive of the reigning Eurocentric worldview.

This report summarizes the presentations and outcomes of a European-American Workshop about lifestyle changes as a mitigation strategies for global warming. The conference was held on May 1, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley and sponsored by the European Commission. The participants discussed various lifestyle approaches as a promising way to address environmental behavior and action within social and cultural contexts. The presenters and discussants acknowledged the theoretical and practical difficulties of this multi-faceted concept which relies on several sometimes virtually incommensurable traditions. Both a merely individualist interpretation of lifestyles (“green consumption”) and a rather socio-structural view (“green milieus”) are not well-geared to explain the often observed discrepancies between environmental attitudes and people’s action. Lifestyle research must address this gap by explaining individual decisions within societal contexts that provide but also limit the possibilities of lifestyle changes. Despite these difficulties, the huge appeal of the lifestyle approach that makes the work on these problems worthwhile is the prominent role of the term “lifestyle” in the public and political discourse about environmental change. However, many policy attempts to influence lifestyles are barely grounded in sociological grounded theories of social change. The report shortly introduces the problem, summarizes the workshop presentations, and outlines central discussion points.

In this conceptual paper, I discuss the lifestyle approach as a possible sociological contribution to the interdisciplinary discourse on climate change mitigation. The lifestyle approach could integrate sometimes contradicting results from micro-economics, social-psychology, cultural anthropology, as well as from social geography, and relate them to resource consumption. Even if the word “lifestyle” is very popular within environmental discourse, it has rarely been used in a sociological sense. Lifestyles are bundles of meaningful routines (not only consumption) embedded in everyday practices that have a cultural-symbolic as well as a material dimension. To assess the potential of behavioral change, it seems not to be sufficient to study the effects of values and attitudes on environmental behavior as separated from other social activities. Con-flicting goals and individual priorities have to be taken into account as well. Lifestyle changes are dependant on individual opportunities to choose between different options. People need financial, cultural, or social resources to realize their values in everyday life. I suggest an integrative life-style model, which reflects these levels. In the second part of the paper, I sketch its potential value in the case of car use. The system of automobility affects the chances of many people to create a meaningful life. It allows new lifestyles but it also limits the feasibility of other lifestyles at the same time. Environmental policy could support the creation of new, more sustainable life-styles by reducing the lock-in effect of automobility and reopening this socio-technological sys-tem. In this paper, lifestyles are treated as an interpretative scheme, but I also like to encourage further operationalization efforts.

Professional management is increasingly important for successful research at universities as well as other organizations. This exploratory review draws on different bodies of literature in order to reformulate the complex challenges of research management by applying newer organizational theory. Research management can be described as boundary work that produces couplings between science and the wider society. Because of the complexity of organized science, management is increasingly indispensable to ensure the social, cognitive, and material preconditions of research. This paper discusses different means of research management on the research group level and within university departments. Research organizations are characterized by their relative diffuse distribution of management functions over organizational levels as well as by little direct determination between organizational elements. Charismatic scientific leaders can enhance the efficiency of research organizations and projects. More recently, universities have started to create new management positions within projects and centers. Scientifically trained people are hired as specialists in research management, constituting a new professional role. In contrast to pure administration, the new research managers make decisions with reference to scientific knowledge and the societal environment of research.

The overall project goal is improved understanding of the physical and biological controls on nearshore (0-15 m water depth) patchiness of nutrients, fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) and chlorophyll (chl) near the Tijuana River.