Materializing policies for sustainable use and economy-wide management of resources: biophysical perspectives, socio-economic options and a dual approach for the European Union

Policies for Sustainable Use and economy-wide Management of natural Resources (SUMR) throughout the production and consumption system are faced with environmental and socio-economic requirements and regulatory constraints. Based on empirical findings of ongoing trends of resource use, decoupling from economic growth, and transregional problem shifting, the paper outlines a potentially sustainable biophysical basis for production and consumption in the EU. It discusses the main challenges for the major resource groups, describing the specific and the common tasks with regard to biomass, fossil fuels, metals, non-metallic minerals. Adopting a medical metaphor, it suggests that policies for SUMR should follow a dual approach reflecting the long-term need for a main cure of the socio-industrial metabolism in form of a conditioning towards a more mature, resource efficient, and renewables based constitution on the one hand, and a fine tuning of selected material flows (e.g. for optimized recycling and control of hazardous compounds) on the othe hand. Both strategies are deemed complementary and necessary to reduce environmental impact and increase the utility of material use. Action required is exemplified with regard to the three pillars of SUMR, i.e. improved orientation, information and incentives. --Material efficiency,dematerialization,renewables,socio-industrial metabolism,resource use,environmental impacts,sustainable production & consumption,bioeconomy

Does religion promote environmental sustainability? : exploring the role of religion in local energy transitions

This article explores the role of religion in local energy transition processes. By combining insights from (a) sustainability studies and (b) academic contributions on religion and sustainability, a theoretical approach for describing the role of religion in local energy transitions is developed. Religion is conceived of as a subsystem among other local subsystems that potentially contribute via their competences to energy transition processes. Three potential functions of religion are identified: (1) Campaigning and intermediation in the public sphere; (2) “Materialization” of transitions in the form of participation in projects related to sustainable transitions; and (3) Dissemination of values and worldviews that empower environmental attitudes and action. These functions are studied in the case of the energy transition in Emden, a city in North-Western Germany. Although religion attends, to some degree, each of the three functions, it does not assume a dominant role relative to other local subsystems. Actors from other social subsystems appear to overtake these functions in a more efficient way. As such, in a highly environmentally active region, there are few indications for a specific function of religion. These results shed a critical light on the previously held assumption that religion has a crucial impact on sustainability transitions

Speculative Machines and Technical Mentalities. A philosophical approach to designing the future

‘Beyond their instrumental functions,’ writes Rivka Oxman in an article about design, creativity and innovation (2013), ‘advanced digital and computational environments are also becoming tools for thinking design’. At the leading edge of creativity and innovation design does not only speculate the plausible, possible or potential, but pragmatically inserts such futures into the present (as Whitehead says any ‘immediate existence’ (1962) must). Using concepts mainly from Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza and Simondon, I will position such design speculation as pragmatic, divergent, complex and emergent. That is, as manifesting the technical mentalities (Simondon) that provide the milieu in which we can show what we ‘might be capable of’ (Stengers)

dReDBox: Materializing a full-stack rack-scale system prototype of a next-generation disaggregated datacenter

Current datacenters are based on server machines, whose mainboard and hardware components form the baseline, monolithic building block that the rest of the system software, middleware and application stack are built upon. This leads to the following limitations: (a) resource proportionality of a multi-tray system is bounded by the basic building block (mainboard), (b) resource allocation to processes or virtual machines (VMs) is bounded by the available resources within the boundary of the mainboard, leading to spare resource fragmentation and inefficiencies, and (c) upgrades must be applied to each and every server even when only a specific component needs to be upgraded. The dRedBox project (Disaggregated Recursive Datacentre-in-a-Box) addresses the above limitations, and proposes the next generation, low-power, across form-factor datacenters, departing from the paradigm of the mainboard-as-a-unit and enabling the creation of function-block-as-a-unit. Hardware-level disaggregation and software-defined wiring of resources is supported by a full-fledged Type-1 hypervisor that can execute commodity virtual machines, which communicate over a low-latency and high-throughput software-defined optical network. To evaluate its novel approach, dRedBox will demonstrate application execution in the domains of network functions virtualization, infrastructure analytics, and real-time video surveillance.This work has been supported in part by EU H2020 ICTproject dRedBox, contract #687632.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Physical Simulation of Inarticulate Robots

In this note we study the structure and the behavior of inarticulate robots. We introduce a robot that moves by successive revolvings. The robot's structure is analyzed, simulated and discussed in detail

ArrayBridge: Interweaving declarative array processing with high-performance computing

Scientists are increasingly turning to datacenter-scale computers to produce and analyze massive arrays. Despite decades of database research that extols the virtues of declarative query processing, scientists still write, debug and parallelize imperative HPC kernels even for the most mundane queries. This impedance mismatch has been partly attributed to the cumbersome data loading process; in response, the database community has proposed in situ mechanisms to access data in scientific file formats. Scientists, however, desire more than a passive access method that reads arrays from files. This paper describes ArrayBridge, a bi-directional array view mechanism for scientific file formats, that aims to make declarative array manipulations interoperable with imperative file-centric analyses. Our prototype implementation of ArrayBridge uses HDF5 as the underlying array storage library and seamlessly integrates into the SciDB open-source array database system. In addition to fast querying over external array objects, ArrayBridge produces arrays in the HDF5 file format just as easily as it can read from it. ArrayBridge also supports time travel queries from imperative kernels through the unmodified HDF5 API, and automatically deduplicates between array versions for space efficiency. Our extensive performance evaluation in NERSC, a large-scale scientific computing facility, shows that ArrayBridge exhibits statistically indistinguishable performance and I/O scalability to the native SciDB storage engine.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure