Instruments for the promotion of a sustainability oriented management of waste by inter-industrial coordination within an industrial region

The raise of material efficiency is of special importance in the provision of solutions for a more sustainable path of development. One of the main approaches in this direction is the resource saving closure of material circulations among industrial actors. This means at least: maximum rate of recycling combined with a minimum in downgrading processes and spatially close output-input relations - or, in other words: a substantial reduction of social, entropic and spatial distance within the circle-closing process. How can these distances be reduced in order to promote the further spreading of an industrial closed circle economy? What are the present obstacles in the industrial reality and how can they be removed on the level of a firm, an industrial district or an industrial region? These were important questions at the beginning of a research process funded by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF) in order to encourage eco-industrial development in the of Rhine-Neckar region. Taking the results of our close cooperation especially with SME, the problem solving capacity of this industrial region is high enough to close the circles for industrial residues regionally. The dimension of an industrial agglomeration with more than 1,5 million inhabitants could thus already be regarded as a potential output-input system for industrial waste. Nevertheless this capacity is far from being exploited. Taken the fact, that the largest deficiencies were found in the informational situation of SME, two kinds of instruments were developed to facilitate the acquisition and the advantageous usage of waste information by inter-industrial coordination on the level of the industrial region. As informational basis the project coordinators developed a comprehensive, clear and systematic informational structure. A socalled 'AGUM waste manager' was developed as a software tool, that meets all the needs not only for internal information and communication but also for exchanges with potentially fitting output-input partners outside the border of the enterprise. As information on the composition of a certain waste is relatively scarce, the transfer of materials goes together with substantial costs for control, that can only be diminished or substituted by mutual confidence between the two actors. And even a pure informational exchange of waste manager-data between different enterprises would hardly work without a face-to-face contact. Our transparency-guided approach to promote regional sustainability did thus include the development and institutionalisation of an inter-industrial network, that first of all incorporates industrial producers (especially SME) but also other actors, that stand for the problem solving capacity of the region (i.e. universities, political administrations and other institutions) and can thus contribute to the identification and implementation of sustainable-oriented solutions in a regional context.

Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation

"Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation" provides a groundbreaking overview of Web-based efforts to increase youth civic engagement. Beginning with a close-up examination of website content, the report also examines the organizations and institutions creating that content, and the larger environment in which civic sites function. The full report offers:Case studies of high-profile sites' strategies for launch, visibility and funding; the online response to 9/11; and online youth activism.Discussion of the potential that websites offer to build lasting habits of civic involvement. Current developments in technology, regulation and law that raise urgent questions about the viability of the civic Web.In addition, the project has created an online showcase of top youth civic websites. To see how they use the Internet to facilitate civic involvement and learning, take the Online Tour (http://centerforsocialmedia.org/ecitizens/index.htm)!"Youth as E-Citizens" was initiated by the Center for Media Education. With the closing of the Center in the fall of 2003, the project joined the Center for Social Media. Initial funding for this multi-year research project was provided by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). The Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Packard Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation also provided critical support

Circle-based Eye Center Localization (CECL)

We propose an improved eye center localization method based on the Hough transform, called Circle-based Eye Center Localization (CECL) that is simple, robust, and achieves accuracy on a par with typically more complex state-of-the-art methods. The CECL method relies on color and shape cues that distinguish the iris from other facial structures. The accuracy of the CECL method is demonstrated through a comparison with 15 state-of-the-art eye center localization methods against five error thresholds, as reported in the literature. The CECL method achieved an accuracy of 80.8% to 99.4% and ranked first for 2 of the 5 thresholds. It is concluded that the CECL method offers an attractive alternative to existing methods for automatic eye center localization.Comment: Published and presented at The 14th IAPR International Conference on Machine Vision Applications, 2015. http://www.mva-org.jp/mva2015

Safety and maintenance engineering: A compilation

A compilation is presented for the dissemination of information on technological developments which have potential utility outside the aerospace and nuclear communities. Safety of personnel engaged in the handling of hazardous materials and equipment, protection of equipment from fire, high wind, or careless handling by personnel, and techniques for the maintenance of operating equipment are reported

Towards a Philosophy of the Mobile Information Society

This introductory section of my present paper is a kind of report on the ongoing social science research programme I am directing: the project “Communications in the 21st Century”, launched in January 2001, conducted jointly by T-Mobile Hungary (until 2004 Westel Mobile) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In the framework of the project a number of international conferences were held, on the basis of which altogether eleven volumes—four Hungarian, one German, and six English—have been published. I will first give a very brief summary of these volumes, and then provide a more detailed description of some of the main results we arrived at. The eleven volumes are witness to the history of the mobile phone between 2001 and 2007, no doubt the most dynamic aspect of the recent history of technological and social transformation. But most of all they amount to a first laying of the foundations for, and at the same time the awakening to consciousness and self-reflection of, a young discipline: the social science of mobile communication. Initially, research on problems pertaining to the mobile arose as an interdisciplinary task. From the interdisciplinary research, each of the participating disciplines pro?ted, being forced to take account, on the level of theory, of the new medium which by now has come to constitute their main communicational environment. As a consequence of this taking account of the new realities, by 2005 a transformation was occurring which today has clearly become irreversible: the internal adaptation of the social sciences to the world of mobile communications. At the same time, an autonomous line of research emerged, based on a set of wellestablished paradigms of its own: the social science of mobile communication, Mobile Studies. Both aspects of this juncture in the history of science are represented in Nyíri (2007a, 2007b), which on the one hand takes stock of the paradigmatic results of mobile studies, and on the other hand highlights some new perspectives of the social sciences becoming aware of their mobile environment

The role of initial geometry in experimental models of wound closing

Wound healing assays are commonly used to study how populations of cells, initialised on a two-dimensional surface, act to close an artificial wound space. While real wounds have different shapes, standard wound healing assays often deal with just one simple wound shape, and it is unclear whether varying the wound shape might impact how we interpret results from these experiments. In this work, we describe a new kind of wound healing assay, called a sticker assay, that allows us to examine the role of wound shape in a series of wound healing assays performed with fibroblast cells. In particular, we show how to use the sticker assay to examine wound healing with square, circular and triangular shaped wounds. We take a standard approach and report measurements of the size of the wound as a function of time. This shows that the rate of wound closure depends on the initial wound shape. This result is interesting because the only aspect of the assay that we change is the initial wound shape, and the reason for the different rate of wound closure is unclear. To provide more insight into the experimental observations we describe our results quantitatively by calibrating a mathematical model, describing the relevant transport phenomena, to match our experimental data. Overall, our results suggest that the rates of cell motility and cell proliferation from different initial wound shapes are approximately the same, implying that the differences we observe in the wound closure rate are consistent with a fairly typical mathematical model of wound healing. Our results imply that parameter estimates obtained from an experiment performed with one particular wound shape could be used to describe an experiment performed with a different shape. This fundamental result is important because this assumption is often invoked, but never tested

Women's Economic Empowerment: Issues Paper

This paper was prepared by the DAC Network on Gender Equality (GENDERNET), as an input to the DAC Network on Poverty Reduction's Task Team on Empowerment. It reviews why WEE matters, where donor money is going, specific challenges, suggestions for improving donor practice, and working in partnership for women's economic empowerment