Ecosystem properties and principles of living systems as foundation for sustainable agriculture – Critical reviews of environmental assessment tools, key findings and questions from a course process

With increasing demands on limited resources worldwide, there is a growing interest in sustainable patterns of utilisation and production. Ecological agriculture is a response to these concerns. To assess progress and compliance, standard and comprehensive measures of resource requirements, impacts and agro-ecological health are needed. Assessment tools should also be rapid, standardized, userfriendly, meaningful to public policy and applicable to management. Fully considering these requirements confounds the development of integrated methods. Currently, there are many methodologies for monitoring performance, each with its own foundations, assumptions, goals, and outcomes, dependent upon agency agenda or academic orientation. Clearly, a concept of sustainability must address biophysical, ecological, economic, and sociocultural foundations. Assessment indicators and criteria, however, are generally limited, lacking integration, and at times in conflict with one another. A result is that certification criteria, indicators, and assessment methods are not based on a consistent, underlying conceptual framework and often lack a management focus. Ecosystem properties and principles of living systems, including self-organisation, renewal, embeddedness, emergence and commensurate response provide foundation for sustainability assessments and may be appropriate focal points for critical thinking in an evaluation of current methods and standards. A systems framework may also help facilitate a comprehensive approach and promote a context for meaningful discourse. Without holistic accounts, sustainable progress remains an illdefined concept and an elusive goal. Our intent, in the work with this report, was to use systems ecology as a pedagogic basis for learning and discussion to: - Articulate general and common characteristics of living systems. - Identify principles, properties and patterns inherent in natural ecosystems. - Use these findings as foci in a dialogue about attributes of sustainability to: a. develop a model for communicating scientific rationale. b. critically evaluate environmental assessment tools for application in land-use. c. propose appropriate criteria for a comprehensive assessment and expanded definition of ecological land use

Regional supply of Eco-tourism and collective learning: An institutional perspective

Against the background of increasing knowledge on environmental damages by tourism, environmental-friendly tourism became a remarkable niche in the international market for tourism, in particular high-price segments for advanced tourism. Two aspects primarily impede the supply of environmental-friendly tourism: (1) the spatial dimension of environmental effects, making it necessary to implement a regional strategy on preserving environmental functions and coping with competing demands, (2) the characteristics of environmental-friendly tourism as credence good causing the necessity of signalling or screening strategies to overcome adverse selection. Institutions have been developed on a regional level to come to collective agreements on environmental standards and common labels as tourist regions. But still uncertainty remains on (long-term) cause-effect-relationships between tourism and the regional environment and ways to reconcile demanders’ interest and prerequisites of functioning ecosystems. Thus, learning is needed to reduce uncertainty, which means that institutions not only serve to cope with problems of asymmetric distribution of information and strategic uncertainty between individual actors (reallocating knowledge between individuals) but also to increase the knowledge base of the individuals as a whole. The proposed paper will investigate different institutional strategies to create incentives for learning on a regional level by sharing and processing knowledge between single suppliers and demanders of tourism as well as other demanders for environmental functions. Special focus will be directed to the relevance of learning for developing regions often faced with difficulties to obtain the net value of advanced tourism within the region. The methodology is based on an evolutionary institutional model integrating approaches from learning psychology and brain sciences into economic analysis. Although the paper refers to an abstract line of argumentation, the results are illustrated by several examples from developing regions.

An experimental Study using ACSL and Frama-C to formulate and verify Low-Level Requirements from a DO-178C compliant Avionics Project

Safety critical avionics software is a natural application area for formal verification. This is reflected in the formal method's inclusion into the certification guideline DO-178C and its formal methods supplement DO-333. Airbus and Dassault-Aviation, for example, have conducted studies in using formal verification. A large German national research project, Verisoft XT, also examined the application of formal methods in the avionics domain. However, formal methods are not yet mainstream, and it is questionable if formal verification, especially formal deduction, can be integrated into the software development processes of a resource constrained small or medium enterprise (SME). ESG, a Munich based medium sized company, has conducted a small experimental study on the application of formal verification on a small portion of a real avionics project. The low level specification of a software function was formalized with ACSL, and the corresponding source code was partially verified using Frama-C and the WP plugin, with Alt-Ergo as automated prover. We established a couple of criteria which a method should meet to be fit for purpose for industrial use in SME, and evaluated these criteria with the experience gathered by using ACSL with Frama-C on a real world example. The paper reports on the results of this study but also highlights some issues regarding the method in general which, in our view, will typically arise when using the method in the domain of embedded real-time programming.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Identity Trust Framework for iGaming

The online gambling community, or the iGaming industry in the United States has individual solutions and a mix of classic processes to manage universal customer identity but it lacks a standard identity management framework in which to enroll new iGaming users, monitor those users and ensure secure transactions, which leaves it open to identity theft and financial fraud. The iGaming industry offers online poker, sports betting and casino table games. iGaming providers (provider/providers) include companies such as PartyPoker.com, Pokerstars.com, Bovada.com, BetOnline.com among others. An iGaming player (player/players) is anyone who plays to gamble on games through the Internet. This report focuses on the requirements and specification for an Identity Trust Framework to enhance security and privacy in the United States iGaming industry and players.Informatio

Late-successional and old-growth forests in the northeastern United States: Structure, dynamics, and prospects for restoration.

Abstract Restoration of old-growth forest structure is an emerging silvicultural goal, especially in those regions where old-growth abundance falls below the historic range of variability. However, longitudinal studies of old-growth dynamics that can inform silvicultural and policy options are few. We analyzed the change in structure, including stand density, diameter distribution, and the abundance of large live, standing dead, and downed dead trees on 58 late-successional and old-growth plots in Maine, USA, and compared these to regional data from the U.S. Forest Inventory and Analysis program. Structural dynamics on the late-successional plots reflected orderly change associated with density-dependent growth and mortality, but dynamics on the old-growth plots were more variable. Some plots experienced heavy mortality associated with beech bark disease. Diameter distributions conformed poorly to a classic exponential distribution, and did not converge toward such a distribution at the plot scale. Although large live trees showed a broad trend of increasing density in regional forests, recent harvesting patterns offset a considerable fraction of those gains, while mean diameter was static and the number of large dead trees was weakly declining. Even though forests of the northeast are aging, changes in silviculture and forest policy are necessary to accelerate restoration of old-growth structure

An architecture for certification-aware service discovery

Service-orientation is an emerging paradigm for building complex systems based on loosely coupled components, deployed and consumed over the network. Despite the original intent of the paradigm, its current instantiations are limited to a single trust domain (e.g., a single organization). Also, some of the key promises of service-orientation - such as the dynamic orchestration of externally provided software services, using runtime service discovery and deployment - are still unachieved. One of the main reasons for this is the trust gap that normally arises when software services, offered by previously unknown providers, are to be selected at run-time, without any human intervention. To close this gap, the concept of machine-readable security certificates (called asserts) has been recently introduced, which paves the way to automated processing about security properties of services. Similarly to current security certification schemes, the assessment of the security properties of a service is delegated to an independent third party (certification authority), who issues a corresponding assert, bound to the service. In this paper, we propose an architecture, which exploits the assert concept to realise a certification-aware service discovery framework. The architecture supports the discovery of single services based on certified security properties (in additional to the usual functional properties), as well as the dynamic synthesis of service compositions, that satisfy the given security properties. The architecture is extensible, thus allowing for a range of domain specific matchmaking components, to cover dimensions related to, e.g., performance, cost and other non-functional characteristics

Paving the Roadway for Safety of Automated Vehicles: An Empirical Study on Testing Challenges

The technology in the area of automated vehicles is gaining speed and promises many advantages. However, with the recent introduction of conditionally automated driving, we have also seen accidents. Test protocols for both, conditionally automated (e.g., on highways) and automated vehicles do not exist yet and leave researchers and practitioners with different challenges. For instance, current test procedures do not suffice for fully automated vehicles, which are supposed to be completely in charge for the driving task and have no driver as a back up. This paper presents current challenges of testing the functionality and safety of automated vehicles derived from conducting focus groups and interviews with 26 participants from five countries having a background related to testing automotive safety-related topics.We provide an overview of the state-of-practice of testing active safety features as well as challenges that needs to be addressed in the future to ensure safety for automated vehicles. The major challenges identified through the interviews and focus groups, enriched by literature on this topic are related to 1) virtual testing and simulation, 2) safety, reliability, and quality, 3) sensors and sensor models, 4) required scenario complexity and amount of test cases, and 5) handover of responsibility between the driver and the vehicle.Comment: 8 page

Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed. There are indications that the scientific community seeks and needs better certification of journal procedures to improve the quality of published science. Comprehensive certification of editorial and review procedures could help ensure adequate procedures to detect duplicate and fraudulent submissions.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 6 table

Conventionalisation? Organic farming bites back!

This is a summary of the discussion during the workshop 2.6 on conventionalisation of organic farming and how farmers or farmers' associations avoid conventionalisation. It also includes the abstracts of the papers that were presented during the workshop