Agriculture’s contribution to rural viability: An approach to estimate regional economic impacts of agricultural policy in Swiss case study regions

This paper develops a thorough yet easily implementable approach to measuring agriculture’s contribution to rural viability. The approach is based on input-output modelling. It adopts a number of concepts from input-output modelling such as determining the explicit geographical origin of input requirements and the geographical destination of farm household expenditures without formerly developing an input-output table. The approach is applied to four case studies in the Swiss mountain regions and tested for three scenarios. Our results clarify the role that agriculture still plays in the context of rural viability. They demonstrate that agriculture’s contribution to rural viability differs considerably between the case study regions and that future developments lead to a marked decline in this contribution. Rural development strategies have to take these specific regional characteristics and development perspectives into account. Keywords: This paper develops a thorough yet easily implementable approach to measuring agriculture’s contribution to rural viability. The approach is based on input-output modelling. It adopts a number of concepts from input-output modelling such as determining the explicit geographical origin of input requirements and the geographical destination of farm household expenditures without formerly developing an input-output table. The approach is applied to four case studies in the Swiss mountain regions and tested for three scenarios. Our results clarify the role that agriculture still plays in the context of rural viability. They demonstrate that agriculture’s contribution to rural viability differs considerably between the case study regions and that future developments lead to a marked decline in this contribution. Rural development strategies have to take these specific regional characteristics and development perspectives into account.rural viability, employment, added value, agricultural production, input requirements, farm household expenditures, agricultural and rural policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Crossing velocities for an annealed random walk in a random potential

We consider a random walk in an i.i.d. non-negative potential on the d-dimensional integer lattice. The walk starts at the origin and is conditioned to hit a remote location y on the lattice. We prove that the expected time under the annealed path measure needed by the random walk to reach y grows only linearly in the distance from y to the origin. In dimension one we show the existence of the asymptotic positive speed.Comment: 29 page

Large Deviations and Phase Transition for Random Walks in Random Nonnegative Potentials

We establish large deviation principles and phase transition results for both quenched and annealed settings of nearest-neighbor random walks with constant drift in random nonnegative potentials on $\mathbb Z^d$. We complement the analysis of \cite{Zer}, where a shape theorem on the Lyapunov functions and a large deviation principle in absence of the drift are achieved for the quenched setting

Joining Forces: The Promotion of Public-Private Partnerships to Bring Computers into West German Schools in the 1980s

This chapter focuses on the dynamics and conflicts of interest that have emerged in the process of involving new actors in education policymaking to prepare West German schools for the digital age. In the 1980s, the federal government of West Germany saw the involvement of the private sector as a way to reduce the financial burden on the state in equipping schools with computers. Moreover, it considered the establishment of a public-private partnership under its auspices as a means to strengthen centralized state power within Germany’s federal system in order to reduce regional disparities and differences in the efforts to integrate computers into schools. An intermediary actor in the form of the support association “Computers and Education” was brought into play to mediate between the interests of the private and the public sector. However, the association’s efforts to reconcile the different vested interests of the involved parties in its mission to kickstart and boost the introduction of computers into public education eventually failed.+repphzhbib2023

Relativistic geodesy

Quantum metrology enables new applications in geodesy, including relativistic geodesy. The recent progress in optical atomic clocks and in long-distance frequency transfer by optical fiber together pave the way for using measurements of the gravitational frequency redshift for geodesy. The remote comparison of frequencies generated by calibrated clocks will allow for a purely relativistic determination of differences in gravitational potential and height between stations on Earth surface (chronometric leveling). The long-term perspective is to tie potential and height differences to atomic standards in order to overcome the weaknesses and inhomogeneity of height systems determined by classical spirit leveling. Complementarily, gravity measurements with atom interferometric setups, and satellite gravimetry with space borne laser interferometers allow for new sensitivities in the measurement of the Earth's gravity field.DFG/SFB/112

Coincidence of Lyapunov exponents for random walks in weak random potentials

We investigate the free energy of nearest-neighbor random walks on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, endowed with a drift along the first axis and evolving in a nonnegative random potential given by i.i.d. random variables. Our main result concerns the ballistic regime in dimensions $d\geq4$, at which we show that quenched and annealed Lyapunov exponents are equal as soon as the strength of the potential is small enough.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/00-AOP368 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Evolution and genetic basis of pelvic-brooding, a derived reproductive strategy in Sulawesi ricefishes (Beloniformes: Adrianichthyidae)

In Sulawesi ricefishes (Adrianichthyidae, Beloniformes) a derived reproductive strategy evolved. It is unique in the way that females of pelvic brooding species carry the eggs for up to 18 days until the fry hatches outside of their body, connected by attaching filaments which originate from the egg surface and are anchored within the females gonoduct. Several other morphological adaptations are related to pelvic brooding, like elongated pelvic fins and shortened ribs to form a ventral concavity. These traits are missing in transfer brooding, the more common and ancestral brooding strategy of the ricefishes. The most astonishing about the trait is that it appears in two distantly related lineages of Sulawesi ricefishes that are over 15 million years divergent and in between, several transfer brooding lineages evolved. Hence, various questions about its evolution might be asked. For example, did pelvic brooding evolve twice or is it an ancient trait that was lost several times? Is the genetic basis independent in the two lineages or were the same mechanisms involved? In this thesis I give a general introduction in chapter 1 about adaptation and how speciation can be fueled by hybridization. I introduce convergent evolution and connect it to introgression and I state why Sulawesi ricefishes are a suitable model to address fundamental questions of Evolutionary Biology. In chapter 2 I aim to investigate the genetic basis of pelvic brooding in the more recent lineage including Oryzias eversi. In chapter 3 I want to find out if gene flow into the stem lineage of Oryzias pelvic brooders could have fueled its evolution and in chapter 4, I compare the sex determination of the pelvic brooding O. eversi and its close relative, a transfer brooder O. nigrimas, to determine differences or similarities that might connect the sex determination with the sexually dimorphic traits related to the derived brooding strategy

Stretched Polymers in Random Environment

We survey recent results and open questions on the ballistic phase of stretched polymers in both annealed and quenched random environments.Comment: Dedicated to Erwin Bolthausen on the occasion of his 65th birthda