Overview of International Household Panel Studies. Statement of the German Council of Science and Humanities on the Status and Future Development of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). November 13, 2009. Appendix 6

In July 2007, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) requested that the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) develop recommendations on improving Germany’s scientific infrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Before the publication of the responsible working group’s report, as a first step, the German Council of Science and Humanities called upon its evaluation committee to conduct an appraisal of the current status and future prospects of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). This Panel is an integral part of Germany’s scientific infrastructure. Accordingly, over the course of 2009, the German Council of Science and Humanities evaluated the SOEP. This assessment, which was released in November 2009 as a report containing recommendations (see http://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/texte/9503-09.pdf), was partly based on an international comparison of household panel studies. The German Council for Social and Economic Data (RatSWD) believes that the overview of these international household panel studies produced by the German Council of Science and Humanities is of such a high standard that it is deserving of being published as a document in itself. The RatSWD is thus delighted that the German Council of Science and Humanities has agreed to allow publication of this overview as part of the RatSWD Working Paper Series.

Strategic risk appraisal. Comparing expert- and literature-informed consequence assessments for environmental policy risks receiving national attention

Strategic risk appraisal (SRA) has been applied to compare diverse policy level risks to and from the environment in England and Wales. Its application has relied on expert-informed assessments of the potential consequences from residual risks that attract policy attention at the national scale. Here we compare consequence assessments, across environmental, economic and social impact categories that draw on ‘expert’- and ‘literature-based’ analyses of the evidence for 12 public risks appraised by Government. For environmental consequences there is reasonable agreement between the two sources of assessment, with expert-informed assessments providing a narrower dispersion of impact severity and with median values similar in scale to those produced by an analysis of the literature. The situation is more complex for economic consequences, with a greater spread in the median values, less consistency between the two assessment types and a shift toward higher severity values across the risk portfolio. For social consequences, the spread of severity values is greater still, with no consistent trend between the severities of impact expressed by the two types of assessment. For the latter, the findings suggest the need for a fuller representation of socioeconomic expertise in SRA and the workshops that inform SRA output

Consolidated briefing of biochemical ethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass

AbstractBioethanol production is one pathway for crude oil reduction and environmental compliance. Bioethanol can be used as fuel with significant characteristics like high octane number, low cetane number and high heat of vaporization. Its main drawbacks are the corrosiveness, low flame luminosity, lower vapor pressure, miscibility with water, and toxicity to ecosystems. One crucial problem with bioethanol fuel is the availability of raw materials. The supply of feedstocks for bioethanol production can vary season to season and depends on geographic locations. Lignocellulosic biomass, such as forest-based woody materials, agricultural residues and municipal waste, is prominent feedstock for bioethanol cause of its high availability and low cost, even though the commercial production has still not been established. In addition, the supply and the attentive use of microbes render the bioethanol production process highly peculiar. Many conversion technologies and techniques for biomass-based ethanol production are under development and expected to be demonstrated. In this work a technological analysis of the biochemical method that can be used to produce bioethanol is carried out and a review of current trends and issues is conducted

Different recipes for the same dish: Comparing policies for scientific excellence across different countries

Many countries witness the rise of ‘excellence initiatives’. These policies promote vertical differentiation in the science system by funding top research performers and expecting positive spill-over effects. However, current understanding of the functioning and (potential) effects of these instruments is limited. We compare policies aimed at promoting excellence in four countries (the UK, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland), using secondary sources and 14 expert interviews. Using the notion of coordination approaches as a heuristic tool, we characterise each policy in terms of the coordinating actor, the system addressed, the activities that are coordinated, the specific interventions taken and the types of relationships affected. We find that countries adopt very different approaches to reach similar goals and thus bring into question appealing but simplistic ideas of ‘excellence’ as an agreed concept. Remarkably, excellence policies are more prone to reveal existing but tacit diversity in the system than to generate new relational patterns