The closure of ERT: public service broadcasting and austerity politics in Greece

Opinion piece on the closure of the Greek Public Service Broadcaster (PSB

The Greek small farms paradigm: between decline and persistence

Although Greece is one of the older Member States of the European Union, its agricultural structures have not followed the same evolution compared to those of other Western European countries. In the majority of the latter, the number of farms and farmers has declined subsequently to the modernisation movement, while Greek agriculture has maintained a high number of farms and farmers. The Greek case can be considered as a paradigm between two EU country groups: the old and the new Member States. This paper deals with the reasons leading to this phenomenon: how do Greek farms manage to resist to an increasingly liberalised environment and to the reduction of EU and State financial support? Why do young people go on dealing with agriculture? This is a curious fact given the hostile natural environment, the low productivity and intensification of these farms. Moreover, this paper deals with some other questions relevant to the ways small farms function and contribute to landscape planning, environmental management and sustainable development of rural areas in general. Finally, some scenarios are developed about the future of European agriculture in the context of forthcoming changes that result from the CAP reform and liberalisation.Farm reproduction, Agricultural model, Greece, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Quasi-radial modes of pulsating neutron stars: numerical results for general-relativistic rigidly rotating polytropic models

In this paper we compute general-relativistic polytropic models simulating rigidly rotating, pulsating neutron stars. These relativistic compact objects, with a radius of $\sim 10 \, \mathrm{km}$ and mass between $\sim 1.4$ and $3.2$ solar masses, are closely related to pulsars. We emphasize on computing the change in the pulsation eigenfrequencies owing to a rigid rotation, which, in turn, is a decisive issue for studying stability of such objects. In our computations, we keep rotational perturbation terms of up to second order in the angular velocity.Comment: v1 has been submitted to the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics and accepted after revision; v2, i.e. the present version, is the revised E-print; 16 page

Sustainable Urban Future in Southern Europe - What About the Heat Island Effect?

In general cities, and especially cities in hot zones, as the Mediterranean, suffer from raised temperatures in the city core, generally known as the heat island effect. Raised temperatures, especially in summer, may turn city centres into unwelcome hot areas, with direct effects on energy consumption for cooling buildings and morbidity and mortality risks for the population. These raised temperatures in the city centre derive from the altered thermal balances in urban spaces, mainly due to the materials and activities taking place in cities, by far different to those in rural areas. The notably raised thermal capacity of urban materials, their low albedo and their lack of porosity are of the main characteristics of urban materials, responsible for the formation of raised urban temperatures. The general lack of vegetation is a strong characteristic of the formation of the heat island effect. If building surfaces, which are greatly responsible for the formation of raised urban temperatures are covered with vegetation (roofs with grasses and walls with ivies), it is expected that urban temperatures could lower significantly. With the case study of the city of Athens, this paper explores quantitatively how raised urban temperatures could reduce in the hot and dry Mediterranean summer, when the building envelope is covered with vegetation. With the use of a prognostic, two-dimensional, micro-scale heat and mass transfer model, the effect of vegetation in urban canyons with different geometries and orientations is explored and how this could be applied at an urban scale. The effect of vegetation on the building envelope is examined on the outdoors thermal comfort and the energy consumption for cooling. Conclusions are drawn about the relationship of the effect of diverse amounts of vegetation with the urban geometry and orientation and whether such a proposal could prove beneficial for cities in the South of Europe.

Real options in corporate valuation

Imperial Users onl

The shape of online meetings

Live videoconferencing has become an integral part of international virtual learning and working with professionals, educators and students using online meetings to enhance their collaboration from different parts of the world. This paper explores the visualization of a set of different online meetings produced by the FlashMeeting' videoconferencing system. Our polar area visualization analysis reveals interesting patterns in participant dominance in online meetings: seminars, interviews, moderated project meetings, peer-to-peer meetings, web-casts and video lectures. Visualizing patterns in the use of foreground and background communication channels is a promising way to help us to start to explore individual user roles in different communities and in different meeting types