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Death, mourning and legacy: What changes through digitality?

Death poses great challenges to each and every individual. Whether it is to understand and accept one’s own mortality or to integrate the death of an important, perhaps beloved person into one’s own continued life. Just as digitalisation is changing our lives, it adds new dimensions to the end of our life. On a practical level, tasks arise in the care of estates, which raise their own technical, legal and also ethical questions through online accounts, identities on the net and digital communication traces. But mourning and remembrance are also seeking and finding new – also more individual – ways of expression in digital spaces by expanding the physical places, temporal boundaries and established patterns of our rituals.

Stephan Neuser is Secretary General of the Bundesverband Deutscher Bestatter e. V. and a lawyer. He experiences on a daily basis the changes that digitality brings to the way people deal with death. In this episode of Digitalgespräch, the expert provides insights into new possibilities, requirements and needs that are leading to a change in funeral culture and answers questions about the digital estate. With hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, he discusses digital forms of mourning and remembrance culture, how they tie in with existing practices and motifs – complementing or reinterpreting them – and what significance the “analogue” retains in the process or also: acquires anew.

Episode 25 of Digitalgespräch, feat. Stephan Neuser of Bundesverband Deutscher Bestatter e. V. , 16 August 2022
Further informationen:

Webseite of Deutscher Bestatter e. V.

all episodes of Digitalgespräch

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The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.

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What is the Darknet and what happens there?

The term “darknet” is usually directly associated with crime in the public mind. However, very few people know what exactly this word means, what functions and structures it denotes – and even if a different impression can easily arise: according to our jurisdiction, neither surfing nor operating sites on the darknet are illegal per se. On the contrary, the infrastructure of the darknet is also used for purposes that are not only in line with democratic law, but can even prove to be important instruments for strengthening democracy, preserving individual freedom and protecting privacy. Corresponding arguments come up again and again in debates about possible interventions or even a de facto ban of the “anonymous internet”. So does the darknet simply have “bad” and “good” sides? And do we have to live with the fact that this technology, as long as it serves whistleblowing, political opposition or good journalism, also fosters serious and most serious crime?

Dr. Kai Denker is a philosopher, computer scientist and historian. He researches and teaches at the Institute of Philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt and has also dealt intensively with the Darknet. In this episode of “Digitalgespräch”, the expert on net cultures explains technical basics and gives an impression of possibilities the Darknet offers for different users with different intentions. He discusses with hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring why many net activists defend the darknet in its current form despite its bad reputation, which basic values play a role in this context, which technical aspects of the darknet are crucial for its democracy-promoting functions – and which others could possibly be dispensed with in favour of fighting crime, at least in theory.

Episode 24 of Digitalgespräch, feat. Kai Denker of the Technical University of Darmstadt, 5 July 2022
Further informationen:

Link to the Website of the Tor Project:
https://www.torproject.org/

Link to an article on the Website of the BKA (from 2017):
https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/vogtArtikelDarknet.html

all episodes of Digitalgespräch

Creative Commons Lizenzvertrag

The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.

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podcast-DG-en podcast-en

High-performance computing on issues of the future: The German Climate Computing Centre

If we want to keep climate change within tolerable limits and foresee the changes we will face, then we must make climate as calculable as possible. Climate research has therefore become increasingly significant in recent decades, for policy makers as well public discourse. How do scientists arrive at the results that we perceive as scenarios, forecasts and warnings? Part of the answer is: on the basis of simulations, for which mathematical climate models have to be combined with large amounts of data. In Germany, researchers have had access to the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) in Hamburg since the late 1980s – a high-performance computing centre that is maintained by the public sector specifically for the purpose of climate research and which, in addition to computing time on optimised supercomputers, also offers broad support and services for its users. What exactly happens at DKRZ and how does it differ from other high-performance computing centres? What contribution does it make – to science in Germany and in international cooperation? Could modern technologies such as quantum computers or machine learning help us to understand the climate better and more quickly in the future? And: What does the climate impact of climate computing look like?

Prof. Thomas Ludwig is a computer scientist and heads the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ). As a scientist, he also researches and teaches at the University of Hamburg. In this episode of Digitalgespräch, the expert for scientific computing presents the mission of this special computing centre. In the process, Ludwig also explains how high-performance computing has developed since the 1990s and how the interaction between scientific modelling and the possibilities offered by state-of-the-art supercomputers leads to breakthroughs in climate research. With hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, Ludwig discusses what concrete benefits the results of climate research and data collected in the process can bring to other scientific communities and the public, whether research infrastructure receives too little attention – and why it’s not such a big deal if incorrect weather forecasts become a little more incorrect through machine learning.

Episode 23 of Digitalgespräch, feat. Thomas Ludwig of the German Climate Computing Centre, 14 June 2022
Further informationen:

Link to the Website of the German Climate Computing Centre: https://dkrz.de/en

all episodes of Digitalgespräch

Creative Commons Lizenzvertrag

The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.