From related services to services : unchaining the CESL's substantive and personal scope with regard to related services

The article addresses the Common European Sales Law's (CESL) substantive and personal scope with regard to related services which curtails its related services law significantly. In the first and main part the author clarifies the concept of related services as envisagedby the CESL and suggests removing existing restrictions of the substantive and personal scope of the CESL with regard to related services so as to increase its attractiveness to potential users. In the second part the author considers briefly whether the CESL's restriction to related services could and should be removed and the consequences of such a move towards a general service contract law

The role of plants on methane flux out of upland soils

Soils play an important role in cycling of methane (CH4), a greenhouse gas contributing roughly 20% to the observed climate warming. While knowledge about the influence of plants on methane cycling is growing for wetland ecosystems, we are still limited in our understanding for upland soils. Thus, the objectives of this study were to investigate the influence of plants on net CH4 fluxes from forest and grassland soils depending on bedrock, temperature, and plant species, and to determine if changes in CH4 fluxes are reflected on microbial level. The present study used soils from forest and grassland sites located in Tyrol, Austria. Soil sites were chosen to represent soils from limestone and siliceous bedrock. To study grassland soils, two site-specific plants, Plantago lanceolata and Poa pratensis, were grown from seeds in pots. In case of forest soils, two site-specific trees, Picea abies and Larix decidua, were chosen and grown from seedlings. Besides profound soil microbiological analyses, lab-scale gas measurements were conducted at different temperatures. To characterize the microbial community structure of bulk and rhizosphere soil, NGS (next-generation sequencing) was performed. Further microbiological and molecular analyses aimed to determine if changes in CH4 fluxes are reflected in the activity and abundance of microorganisms in rhizosphere soil compared with bulk soil. Results showed that forest and grassland soils had a high potential to consume methane under ambient conditions, thus serving as methane sinks. Distinct differences depending on bedrock, plant species, and temperature were established. The studied site-specific grassland plants P. lanceolata and P. pratensis significantly increased methane balances to a varying extent depending on temperature. In contrast, the studied forest plants P. abies and especially L. decidua significantly boosted methane consumption. Further studies have focused on the influence of photosynthetic rates of plants on CH4 fluxes out of soils and the indirect influence of plants on soil microorganisms engaged in the methane cycle

Performance and productivity of parallel python programming: a study with a CFD test case

The programming language Python is widely used to create rapidly compact software. However, compared to low-level programming languages like C or Fortran low performance is preventing its use for HPC applications. Efficient parallel programming of multi-core systems and graphic cards is generally a complex task. Python with add-ons might provide a simple approach to program those systems. This paper evaluates the performance of Python implementations with different libraries and compares it to implementations in C or Fortran. As a test case from the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) a part of a rotor simulation code was selected. Fortran versions of this code were available for use on single-core, multi-core and graphic-card systems. For all these computer systems, multiple compact versions of the code were implemented in Python with different libraries. For performance analysis of the rotor simulation kernel, a performance model was developed. This model was then employed to assess the performance reached with the different implementations. Performance tests showed that an implementation with Python syntax is six times slower than Fortran on single-core systems. The performance on multi-core systems and graphic cards is about a tenth of the Fortran implementations. A higher performance was achieved by a hybrid implementation in C and Python using Cython. The latter reached about half of the performance of the Fortran implementation

Democratización y cambio social: una revisión de las relaciones entre élites, cooptación del estado y democratización «desde abajo»

Este artículo revisa diferentes corrientes de literatura para analizar el rol, así como la relevancia de las élites, y los actores subalternos en los procesos de democratización. La revisión inicia explorando cómo los factores estructurales, los procesos económicos que rodean el marco institucional y las élites influyen en la naturaleza del Estado y su carácter democrático. Se contrasta esta vertiente de análisis con la literatura enfocada en la democratización «desde abajo», que se centra en las categorías de clase, movimientos sociales y expresiones de acción colectiva, con el objetivo de señalar las limitaciones conceptuales y empíricas en una gran parte de la literatura que enfatiza la centralidad de las élites en los procesos de democratización. Con base en esta crítica se plantea la necesidad de comprender la acción colectiva subalterna como una condición esencial para la democracia, no solo por su capacidad para forzar cambios en el terreno institucional y jurídico, sino también por la importancia de la disputa «cultural» de significados, a partir de la cual son cuestionados los entendimientos hegemónicos de democracia, y se ponen en práctica sus intentos para reconfigurar y volver «más democráticas» las normas, las interacciones y los espacios de vida cotidiana al interior y alrededor de los procesos organizativos

Agency in the Shadow of a co-opted State: Territory, Difference and Democratisation in post-war Guatemala

This thesis examines a new form of agency for change that has surfaced in rural areas of post-war Guatemala around the defence of territory and natural resources. I argue that this new form of agency emerges in the shadow of a state co-opted by elite factions and manifests distinct qualities from previous expressions of revolutionary and democratic activism. It is localised and characterised by varied aspects of what I call ‘difference’, an antagonistic stance based on locally embedded political, economic and cultural meanings which challenges the elite-promoted reordering of relationships and spaces. This ‘difference’ is enacted through the ‘defence of territory’, which expresses a socio-political and cultural attachment to particular physical spaces and has instigated collective resistances to the implementation of projects linked to the exploitation of natural resources. The thesis analyses this form of agency through two case studies, one among indigenous communities in the Northern Quiché, the second among primarily non-indigenous communities in the municipalities of San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc. As this research demonstrates, given the firm integration of conventional channels of democratic participation into the patterns of state co-option, the primary aim of these struggles is the re-appropriation of decision-making processes and the carving out of spaces, in which their ‘difference’ can evolve. In the context of a co-opted state, these local expressions of agency create spaces in which fragile, embryonic forms of collective interaction and deliberation that represent a condition for democratic processes, are kept alive. However, their non-linear articulations and specific local character are also a testament to the complexity of the construction of democratic processes in countries like Guatemala

Development of use of an Operational Procedure Information System (OPIS) for future space missions

A MS-Windows based electronic procedure system, called OPIS (Operational Procedure Information System), was developed. The system consists of two parts, the editor, for 'writing' the procedure and the notepad application, for the usage of the procedures by the crew during training and flight. The system is based on standardized, structured procedure format and language. It allows the embedding of sketches, photos, animated graphics and video sequences and the access to off-nominal procedures by linkage to an appropriate database. The system facilitates the work with procedures of different degrees of detail, depending on the training status of the crew. The development of a 'language module' for the automatic translation of the procedures, for example into Russian, is planned

Mock community as an in situ positive control for amplicon sequencing of microbiotas from the same ecosystem

Metataxonomy has become the standard for characterizing the diversity and composition of microbial communities associated with multicellular organisms and their environment. Currently available protocols for metataxonomy assume a uniform DNA extraction, amplification and sequencing efficiency for all sample types and taxa. It has been suggested that the addition of a mock community (MC) to biological samples before the DNA extraction step could aid identification of technical biases during processing and support direct comparisons of microbiota composition, but the impact of MC on diversity estimates of samples is unknown. Here, large and small aliquots of pulverized bovine fecal samples were extracted with no, low or high doses of MC, characterized using standard Illumina technology for metataxonomics, and analysed with custom bioinformatic pipelines. We demonstrated that sample diversity estimates were distorted only if MC dose was high compared to sample mass (i.e. when MC >10% of sample reads). We also showed that MC was an informative in situ positive control, permitting an estimation of the sample 16S copy number, and detecting sample outliers. We tested this approach on a range of sample types from a terrestrial ecosystem, including rhizosphere soil, whole invertebrates, and wild vertebrate fecal samples, and discuss possible clinical applications