Suchergebnisse

From being a smallholder-based, food-producing country covering its basic needs, Iraq and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI) have become major importers of food. The sustainability of the agricultural sector has been systematically undermined by conflict, neglect, and mismanagement, as a result of which the capacity of its farmers to feed the population declined. Even though local policymakers, the international community, and the international organisations emphasise the potential of agriculture for food production, job creation, and income generation, they also tend to consider the current food system problematic because of an alleged low productivity that they relate to the existing smallholder system. For them, such system poses a lack of competences and skills of farmers, and a subsistence production orientation. This approach culminated in a policy-making process that offered land and water for capital investments, and thus neglecting the potentials and competencies of (small-scale) farmers. The concomitant neglect of the human dimension of agriculture, namely the family farm, is essentially the continuation of an economically and ecologically high-risk approach that may lead to a further decline of the sector&rsquo ; s ability to produce food for the local market.

As a purposive sustainability transition requires environmental innovation and innovation policy, we discuss potentials and limitations of three dominant strands of literature in this field, namely the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (MLP), the innovation systems approach (IS), and the long-wave theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts (LWT). All three are epistemologically rooted in an evolutionary understanding of socio-technical change. While these approaches are appropriate to understand market-driven processes of change, they may be deficient as analytical tools for exploring and designing processes of purposive societal transformation. In particular, we argue that the evolutionary mechanism of selection is the key to introducing the strong directionality required for purposive transformative change. In all three innovation theories, we find that the prime selection environment is constituted by the market and, thus, normative societal goals like sustainability are sidelined. Consequently, selection is depoliticised and neither strong directionality nor incumbent regime destabilisation are societally steered. Finally, we offer an analytical framework that builds upon a more political conception of selection and retention and calls for new political institutions to make normatively guided selections. Institutions for transformative innovation need to improve the capacities of complex societies to make binding decisions in politically contested fields.

International audience ; Using a simple decision-theoretic approach, we formalize how agents with different kinds of intrinsic motivations react to the introduction of monetary incentives. We contend that empirical results supporting the existence of a crowding-out effect under various legal procedures hide a more complex reality, where some individuals contribute thanks to these additional monetary incentives while others reduce their contributions. Our approach allows us to study the theoretical ability of the self selection mechanism (Mellström and Johannesson in J Eur Econ Assoc 6:845–863, 2008; Beretti et al. in Kyklos 66(1):63–77, 2013) to reduce the likelihood to backfire against the cause it is meant to promote. This mechanism consists of a monetary payment for the pro-social behavior and it offers agents the choice to either keep the money for themselves or to direct it to a charity. We show that this legal procedure dominates others more classical procedures because it taps wisely into the motivational heterogeneity of individuals. It uses a self-selection mechanism to match adequate monetary incentives with individuals' types regarding intrinsic motivations. It may even turn a situation subject to crowding-out into a crowding-in outcome.

Smart cities (SC) promote economic development, improve the welfare of their citizens, and help in the ability of people to use technologies to build sustainable services. However, computational methods are necessary to assist in the process of creating smart cities because they are fundamental to the decision-making process, assist in policy making, and offer improved services to citizens. As such, the aim of this research is to present a systematic review regarding data mining (DM) and machine learning (ML) approaches adopted in the promotion of smart cities. The Methodi Ordinatio was used to find relevant articles and the VOSviewer software was performed for a network analysis. Thirty-nine significant articles were identified for analysis from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, in which we analyzed the DM and ML techniques used, as well as the areas that are most engaged in promoting smart cities. Predictive analytics was the most common technique and the studies focused primarily on the areas of smart mobility and smart environment. This study seeks to encourage approaches that can be used by governmental agencies and companies to develop smart cities, being essential to assist in the Sustainable Development Goals.

World Heritage Sites (WHSs) play an important role in sustaining community identity and enhancing local economic development through tourism. Although the Li River was designated as a WHS in 2014, severe damage to its ecosystem and environmental problems have been reported in recent years. Thus, the purpose of this study is to estimate residents&rsquo ; willingness to pay (WTP) for the preservation of the Li River using a contingent valuation method. Moreover, a two-stage approach using hypothetical and real setting scenarios was utilized to reduce a hypothetical bias and overvaluation. Logit models were used to estimate the preservation value and compare factors influencing WTP between the hypothetical and real scenarios. The results of this study support the usefulness of a two-stage approach to avoid hypothetical bias and estimate a realistic preservation value. In the real setting scenario, WTP was 144.66&ndash ; 163.90 Yuan (USD 20.83&ndash ; 23.60) per capita per year, and the aggregate value was 721&ndash ; 818 million Yuan (USD 104&ndash ; 118 million) depending on mean WTP and truncated WTP. The study findings provide useful implication to support government&rsquo ; s fund and sustainable efforts to preserve the Li River.

The European Partnership for Alternative Approaches to Animal Testing (EPAA) convened a Partners' Forum on repeated dose toxicity (RDT) testing to identify synergies between industrial sectors and stakeholders along with opportunities to progress these in existing research frameworks. Although RTD testing is not performed across all industrial sectors, the OECD accepted tests can provide a rich source of information and play a pivotal role for safety decisions relating to the use of chemicals. Currently there are no validated alternatives to repeated dose testing and a direct one-to-one replacement is not appropriate. However, there are many projects and initiatives at the international level which aim to implement various aspects of replacement, reduction and refinement (the 3Rs) in RDT testing. Improved definition of use, through better problem formulation, aligned to harmonisation of regulations is a key area, as is the more rapid implementation of alternatives into the legislative framework. Existing test designs can be optimised to reduce animal use and increase information content. Greater use of exposure-led decisions and improvements in dose selection will be beneficial. In addition, EPAA facilitates sharing of case studies demonstrating the use of Next Generation Risk Assessment applying various New Approach Methodologies to assess RDT.

In a decision of 21 November 2018, the Conseil d'E (Council of State) accepts, for the time when only a potential competitor of a company with local public capital has sufficient cause to act to challenge its application. Although it points out that the administrative court has always adopted a consistent approach to action, it interferes in that it weakens (again) the legal regime of the SPL. ; International audience ; In a decision of 21 November 2018, the Conseil d'E (Council of State) accepts, for the time when only a potential competitor of a company with local public capital has sufficient cause to act to challenge its application. Although it points out that the administrative court has always adopted a consistent approach to action, it interferes in that it weakens (again) the legal regime of the SPL. ; Dans une décision du 21 novembre 2018, le Conseil d'État admet pour la première fois qu'un concurrent seulement potentiel d'une société à capital public locale a un intérêt à agir suffisant pour en contester la création. Cette décision, si elle rappelle que le juge administratif a toujours retenu une approche libérale de l'intérêt à agir, interpelle en ce qu'elle fragilise (à nouveau) le régime juridique de la SPL.

Here we authenticated single-varietal peach purees and pear juices on the basis of primary metabolite and phenolic compound analysis by Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H-NMR) and Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled to Photodiode Array and Tandem Mass Spectrometry (UPLC-PDA-MS/MS), respectively. After suitable preprocessing, the 1H-NMR and chromatographic data were evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA). The PCA combining data from primary metabolites and phenolic compounds allowed the separation of the clusters in all cases, allowing discrimination of processed and unprocessed peach purees, both separately and pooled. The PCA of primary metabolites allowed the cluster separation of purees of distinct peach varieties but not between processed and non-processed purees. The PCA of phenolic compounds allowed better cluster separation than of primary metabolites. For pear juices, both PCA approaches allowed satisfactory discrimination of Alejandrina, Conference, and Blanquilla cultivars. These approaches may help to better control cultivar authenticity in fruit products. It could therefore contribute to the development of a process to achieve products characterized by a quality characteristic of a given cultivar. ; This research was funded by the Catalan Government, grant number [2017 SGR 828].

Malware Outbreaks are pervasive in today's digital world. However, there is a lack of awareness on part of general public on how to safeguard against such attacks and a need for increased cooperation between various national and international research as well as governmental organizations to combat the threat. On the positive side, cyber security websites, blogs and newsletters post articles outlining the working and spread of a malware outbreak and steps to recover from the same as well. In this project, an effective approach to predicting the spread of malware outbreaks is presented. The scope of the project is 15 Malware Outbreaks and the approach involves collecting these cyber aware articles from the web, assigning them to the 15 Malware Outbreaks using Topic Modeling and Similarity Analysis and along with Spread information of the Malware Outbreaks, this is input to auto encoder neural network for learning latent space representations which are further used to predict the spread of malware outbreak as either high or low spread outbreak, achieving a prediction accuracy of 75.56. This work can be used to process large amount of cyber aware content for effective and accurate prediction in the era of much-needed cyber security.

Modern domestic society is fundamentally different from previous epochs, because it recognizes the main value of the Person. In the current context of reforming all, without exception, law enforcement agencies on the basis generally recognized in the EU Member States, effective administrative and legal regulation of human rights and freedoms needs new approaches. There is a complex of problematic issues regarding the use of administrative detention by police officers in general and special means during its implementation in particular. Unfortunately, today there are occasional cases of violations of the right to liberty by police officers during administrative detention and the use of special means. Administrative detention is closely linked to the restriction of a person's freedom of liberty and therefore requires police to abide by the legal rules governing this measure of coercion. However, such a need is ripe and requires a well-considered and high-quality approach to the development and implementation of a separate normative act of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine on outlined issues. As we can see, there is a complex of problematic issues regarding the use of police administrative detention in general and special means during its implementation in particular.

Documentation plays a quiet, but critical, role in our field. Sooner or later, all of us have to write docs, whether we want to or not, and whether we have formal training or not. Docs always seem to take longer to make, and are harder to maintain, than we expect. In this talk, I will walk through several case studies of how we approach documentation production at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope from my perspective as the documentation engineer for the Data Management subsystem. I'll show how we democratized information sharing with our Developer Guide and technical notes platform; how a Slack bot and templates make everyone on the team work like professional documentarians; how implementing continuous delivery for documentation stopped endless email chains of PDF and Word files; and even how we're helping the commissioning team communicate their investigations through Jupyter notebooks. I'll talk candidly about both the benefits and costs of our engineering-forward approach to LSST documentation and hopefully, will inspire you to take a fresh look at writing the docs for your own projects. ; For the Space Telescope Science Institute Engineering & Technology Colloquium, Baltimore MD.

The availability and precision of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) permit the repeated collection of very-high quality three-dimensional (3D) data to monitor high-interest areas, such as dams, urban areas, or erosion-prone coastlines. However, challenges exist in the temporal analysis of this data, specifically in conducting change-detection analysis on the high-quality point cloud data. These files are very large in size and contain points in varying locations that do not align between scenes. These large file sizes also limit the use of this data for individuals with low computational resources, such as first responders or forward-deployed soldiers. In response, this manuscript presents an approach that aggregates data spatially into voxels to provide the user with a lightweight, web-based exploitation system coupled with a flexible backend database. The system creates a robust set of tools to analyze large temporal stacks of 3D data and reduces data size by 78%, all while being able to query the original point cloud data. This approach offers a solution for organizations analyzing high-resolution, temporal point-clouds, as well as a possible solution for operations in areas with poor computational and connectivity resources requiring high-quality, 3D data for decision support and planning.

Summary box African countries are not on track to achieve global targets for non-communicable disease (NCD) prevention, driven by an insufficient focus on ecological drivers of NCD risk factors, including poor urban development and the unbridled proliferation of the commercial determinants of health. As the risk factors for NCDs are largely shaped outside the healthcare sector, an emphasis on downstream healthcare service provision to the exclusion of upstream population-level prevention limits the goals of universal health coverage (UHC) and its potential for optimal improvements in (achieving) health and well-being outcomes in Africa. The political will for UHC in Africa will miss the opportunity to turn the tide of this emerging NCD epidemic in Africa, if not oriented to a systems for health rather than a solely healthcare-centric approach. A successful approach needs to proactively incorporate wider health determinants (sectors)—housing, planning, waste management, education, governance and finance, among others—in strategies to improve health. This includes aligning governance and accountability mechanisms and strategic objectives of all 'health determinant' sectors for health creation and long-term cost savings. Researchers have a vital role to play, collaborating with policy makers to provide evidence to support implementation and to facilitate knowledge sharing between African countries and globally.

This article focuses on the importance of play as a necessary and developmental tool for creating democratic spaces in rural South African Primary schools through examples in the Kickstarter Creative Arts pilot project case study (The KS project). The KS project is an Educational teacher empowerment and artist in residency programme, designed as a case study to assess the impact of the Creative Arts at the Intermediate level (Grade 4, 5 and 6). The project illustrates how play, as supported by Winnicott and Vygotsky, is developmental and can be a mechanism for greater humanization in the classroom. The metaphor of a stocking is employed to advocate for experience, as per the work of John Dewey. As the methodology of the Kickstarter project is experiential, it encourages personal artistic growth for teachers, allowing play and creating shifts in the power dynamics and relationship between teachers and pupils within the classroom. As teachers engage with a democratic approach, they find learners more willing, more empathetic and more engaged. It is proposed that the KS project become aligned with the Basic Department of Education and rolled out nationwide in South Africa for the "Arts as method" approach to all subjects.

We consider the transmission of packets across a lossy end-to-end network path so as to achieve low in-order delivery delay. This can be formulated as a decision problem, namely deciding whether the next packet to send should be an information packet or a coded packet. Importantly, this decision is made based on delayed feedback from the receiver. While an exact solution to this decision problem is challenging, we exploit ideas from queueing theory to derive scheduling policies based on prediction of a receiver queue length that, while suboptimal, can be efficiently implemented and offer substantially better performance than state of the art approaches. We obtain a number of useful analytic bounds that help characterise design trade-offs and our analysis highlights that the use of prediction plays a key role in achieving good performance in the presence of significant feedback delay. Our approach readily generalises to networks of paths and we illustrate this by application to multipath trans port scheduler design. ; This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R).