The evolution of institutions in transition

"This paper aims at explaining the role and importance of the evolution of institutions for sustainable agri-environments during the transition process by referring to examples of agri-environmental problems faced in Central and Eastern European countries. It is often stated that the replacement of institutional structures in post socialist countries would bring a unique opportunity to implement new policies and institutions needed to ensure that economic growth is environmentally sustainable. This idea stems from the assumption that the breakdown of the socialist system resembles that (of the Schumpeterian type) of creative destruction - a process that incessantly revolutionizes economic structures from within. However, not all kinds of institutions, especially at local level, can simply be implemented, and even more, not incessantly. Instead, they evolve as a response to ecosystem and social system characteristics, and this is a rather slow process. A central question therefore is whether the required institutional arrangements for achieving sustainability in the area of agri-environmental resource management can be built more easily in periods of transition as they fill institutional gaps, or whether processes of transition make institution building a more difficult and far more time consuming task than previously thought. Above all, we want to find out, how these two processes of institution building at different scales affect the sustainable management of resources such as water and biodiversity in agriculture? It will become clear that the agri-environmental problem areas faced during transition are complex and dynamic and require adequate institutions both by political design and from the grassroots, to be developed by the respective actors involved. Transition from centrally planned to pluralistic systems has to be considered as a particular and in some respect non-typical process of institutional change. Popular theories of institutional change do not necessarily apply. The privatisation experience from many CEE countries will serve as an example. Finally, we will provide some examples of missing or insufficient interaction between political actors or agencies and people in CEE countries. Substantial investments into social and human capital, particularly regarding informal institutions are needed for institutions of sustainability to evolve." (author's abstract)Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Rolle und Bedeutung von Institutionen zur Unterstützung nachhaltiger umweltschonender Landwirtschaft während des Transformationsprozess in den zentral- und osteuropäischen Ländern unter Einbeziehung beispielhafter Probleme aus dem landwirtschaftlichen umweltbezogenen Bereich. Es wird häufig behauptet, dass die Ersetzung institutioneller Strukturen in den ehemaligen sozialistischen Ländern eine einzigartige Gelegenheit bieten würde, eine neue Politik und neue Institutionen zu implementieren, die benötigt werden, um das Wirtschaftswachstum umweltgerecht abzusichern. Diese Idee basiert auf der Annahme, dass der Zusammenbruch des sozialistischen Systems einer kreativen Zerstörung ähnelt, einem Prozess, der unaufhörlich Wirtschaftsstrukturen von innen revolutioniert. Tatsache ist jedoch, dass nicht alle Arten von Institutionen implementiert werden können, vor allem nicht auf lokaler Ebene. Stattdessen entwickeln sie sich als Antwort auf das Ökosystem und das soziale System, und zwar ziemlich langsam. Eine zentrale Frage ist folglich, ob die Herausbildung von Institutionen zur Erreichung von Nachhaltigkeit im landwirtschaftlich-umweltbezogenen Bereich in Zeiten der Transformation leichter vonstatten gehen kann, oder ob es sich dabei um einen Prozess handelt, der viel schwieriger und zeitraubender ist, als bisher angenommen. Die Autoren gehen der Frage nach, wie diese beiden Prozesse des 'institution building' das nachhaltige Ressourcenmanagement beeinflussen. Es wird deutlich, dass die landwirtschaftlich-umweltbezogenen Probleme während der Transformation komplex und dynamisch sind und adäquate Institutionen erfordern. (ICDÜbers

Farming for Health: Aspects from Germany

Until now, the term ‘Farming for Health’ is unknown in Germany but it would cover a wide spectrum of different kinds of social agriculture already existing in Germany, such as farms that integrate disabled people or drug therapy into their farming system, or farms that integrate children, pupils or older people. Relevant work in Germany is done in ‘Sheltered Workshops’, where supporting and healing powers of farming and gardening are used for disabled people with a diversity of work possibilities. Relevant activities also take place in work-therapy departments using horticultural therapy and in animalassisted therapy. There are an estimated number of 1000 different projects for mentally ill, disabled and elderly people in hospitals, Sheltered Workshops, on farms and other projects in Germany with a multitude of individual work places. The upcoming idea of Farming for Health may be met by the term ‘multifunctionality’ as one of the future goals of agriculture: to combine the production of cash crops with social functions, like providing space for recreation, care for landscapes and care for disabled people. Research showed that farms that work together with clients in their farming system have more time and financial support to integrate aims like caring for biotopes and landscape measures into their work schedule

Headless Relative Clauses in Japanese: An Historical Study.

The present thesis examines the syntax and semantics of headless relative clauses ("B pattern") and a type of headed relative clauses ("A pattern") from which they are likely to have developed. Based on a systematic survey of representative sources of Japanese from the Nara to Muromachi periods, it traces the historical development of the various types of A and B pattern observed. Both simple and stacked patterns are dealt with, while some similar patterns are also discussed. Chapter I provides most of the general framework and objectives of the thesis. It also presents an overview of research into headless relative clauses and some related phenomena published to date in Japanese, English and German. Chapter II examines the A pattern formed by the particle no in the Nara period and thereafter and traces its historical development. Chapter III deals with the A pattern formed by particles other than no (zero etc.) during the same periods. Chapter IV discusses the B pattern formed by the particle no for each period of Japanese language history covered in this thesis, while Chapter V focusses on the B pattern formed by other particles (zero, case particles such as emphatic particles such as wa, and some others). Chapter VI examines the relationship between the A and B patterns and compares the various types of B pattern. Results are discussed and contrasted with earlier research

Global and local expression of chirality in serine on the Cu{110} surface

Establishing a molecular-level understanding of enantioselectivity and chiral resolution at the organic−inorganic interfaces is a key challenge in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. As a model system, we investigate the adsorption geometry of serine on Cu{110} using a combination of low-energy electron diffraction (LEED), scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy. The chirality of enantiopure chemisorbed layers, where serine is in its deprotonated (anionic) state, is expressed at three levels: (i) the molecules form dimers whose orientation with respect to the substrate depends on the molecular chirality, (ii) dimers of l- and d-enantiomers aggregate into superstructures with chiral (−1 2; 4 0) lattices, respectively, which are mirror images of each other, and (iii) small islands have elongated shapes with the dominant direction depending on the chirality of the molecules. Dimer and superlattice formation can be explained in terms of intra- and interdimer bonds involving carboxylate, amino, and β−OH groups. The stability of the layers increases with the size of ordered islands. In racemic mixtures, we observe chiral resolution into small ordered enantiopure islands, which appears to be driven by the formation of homochiral dimer subunits and the directionality of interdimer hydrogen bonds. These islands show the same enantiospecific elongated shapes those as in low-coverage enantiopure layers

Oxidation of polycrystalline Ni studied by spectromicroscopy: Phase separation in the early stages of crystallite growth

Low-energy and photoemission electron microscopy enables the determination of facet planes of polycrystalline surfaces and the study of their chemical composition at the sub-m scale. Using these techniques the early oxidation stages of nickel were studied. After exposing the surface to 20 L of oxygen at 373 K a uniform layer of chemisorbed oxygen was found on all facets. After oxygen exposure at 473–673 K, small NiO crystallites are formed on all facets but not in the vicinity of all grain boundaries. The crystallites are separated by areas of bare Ni without significant oxygen coverage

Datierungsversuche im Quartär Westdeutschlands mit Hilfe des Fluortestes

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KSM++: Using I/O-based hints to make memory-deduplication scanners more efficient

Memory scanning deduplication techniques, as implemented in Linux\u27 Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM), work very well for deduplicating fairly static, anonymous pages with equal content across different virtual machines. However, scanners need very aggressive scan rates when it comes to identifying sharing opportunities with a short life span of up to about 5 min. Otherwise, the scan process is not fast enough to catch those short-lived pages. Our approach generates I/O-based hints in the host to make the memory scanning process more efficient, thus enabling it to find and exploit short-lived sharing opportunities without raising the scan rate. Experiences with similar techniques for paravirtualized guests have shown that pages in a guest’s unified buffer cache are good sharing candidates. We already identify such pages in the host when carrying out I/O-operations on behalf of the guest. The target/source pages in the guest can safely be assumed to be part of the guest’s unified buffer cache. That way, we can determine good sharing hints for the memory scanner. A modification of the guest is not required. We have implemented our approach in Linux. By modifying the KSM scanning mechanism to process these hints preferentially, we move the associated sharing opportunities earlier into the merging stage. Thereby, we deduplicate more pages than the baseline system. In our evaluation, we identify sharing opportunities faster and with less overhead than the traditional linear scanning policy. KSM needs to follow about seven times as many pages as we do, to find a sharing opportunity

Recursive Definitions of Monadic Functions

Using standard domain-theoretic fixed-points, we present an approach for defining recursive functions that are formulated in monadic style. The method works both in the simple option monad and the state-exception monad of Isabelle/HOL's imperative programming extension, which results in a convenient definition principle for imperative programs, which were previously hard to define. For such monadic functions, the recursion equation can always be derived without preconditions, even if the function is partial. The construction is easy to automate, and convenient induction principles can be derived automatically.Comment: In Proceedings PAR 2010, arXiv:1012.455