Opportunities and Obstacles Facing Organic Farmers in the Czech Republic

Farm Management,

On Error Decoding of Locally Repairable and Partial MDS Codes

We consider error decoding of locally repairable codes (LRC) and partial MDS (PMDS) codes through interleaved decoding. For a specific class of LRCs we investigate the success probability of interleaved decoding. For PMDS codes we show that there is a wide range of parameters for which interleaved decoding can increase their decoding radius beyond the minimum distance with the probability of successful decoding approaching $1$, when the code length goes to infinity

Partial MDS Codes with Local Regeneration

Partial MDS (PMDS) and sector-disk (SD) codes are classes of erasure codes that combine locality with strong erasure correction capabilities. We construct PMDS and SD codes where each local code is a bandwidth-optimal regenerating MDS code. The constructions require significantly smaller field size than the only other construction known in literature

City of the Future Constance: “Future City” – Quality instead of Square Meter

Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities, which generate 80 % of greenhouse gas emissions and consume 75 % of the energy used worldwide. By 2050, more than 70 % of the world's population will live in cities. This usually goes hand in hand with the increasing use of space and the simultaneous growth of per-capita residential space. However, the growth of cities must not necessarily signify a problematic development. To quote the architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner „City is not a problem, city is solution“. Therefore, the "future city" implies a change of perspectives, away from the problem of growth, towards the challenge of growing smart and sustainable, for which suitable solutions within the respective city must be found. This paper is based on the project “City of the Future Constance” which is supported by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) as part of the “Flagship Initiative City of the Future”. Within the City of the Future initiative, local communities, businesses, civil society representatives and the scientific community cooperate with each other in order to implement processes and recommendations for action for the cities of the future in germany. As part of the three-phase tendering, the first phase in the city of Constance focused on the question "How will we live and reside in the year 2030?”. The foundations for the vision were laid during the workshops of the participatory symposium. Through the change of perspectives on fictitious persons from the year 2030 and with the help of prepared personal profiles, the - presumed - living and housing needs of different age groups and milieus were described very concretely. The concrete needs related to four fields of action City.Living, City.Mixed, City.Mobile and City.Intelligent. Building on the vision developed jointly in the first phase, the focus in phase two is on reducing the per-capita residential space. This question will first scientifically elaborated and, finally, also structurally implemented in a model district in phase 3. The goal is to develop a superior planning toolkit, which provides orientation for the sustainable development of all areas of the action program with regard to housing, focusing in particular on the topic of space efficiency and the resulting topics in the planning focus. Within a multi-day workshop the planning toolkit is going to be used by stakeholders, citinzenry and planners to work out a comprehensive concept of development for the model district

A Younger Dryas plateau icefield in the Monadhliath, Scotland, and implications for regional palaeoclimate

A record of Younger Dryas glaciation in Scotland is well established. However, the role of the Monadhliath, a significant plateau area extending over 840 km2 in central Scotland, has never been investigated systematically. We present the first systematic glacial geomorphological mapping across the whole region, which has led to the identification of hitherto-unrecorded glacial and associated landforms. The spatial distribution of these landforms indicates that the last phase of glaciation in the area was that of a local plateau icefield. In addition, a clear morphostratigraphical signature provides a strong indication that the icefield dates to the Younger Dryas (12.9–11.7 ka), which is supported by numerical ages in the southeast of the study area. Based on the geomorphological evidence and 2D glacier surface profile modelling, a 280 km2 icefield is reconstructed. A novel approach is introduced to quantify plateau icefield thickness for equilibrium line altitude (ELA) and palaeoprecipitation calculations, resulting in greater overall data confidence compared to traditional reconstruction methods. The ELA for the whole icefield is calculated to be 714 ± 25 m, whilst the ELAs of individual outlet glaciers range from 560 m in the west to 816 m in the east, demonstrating a significant W–E precipitation gradient across the region during the Younger Dryas. These ELAs compare well with those calculated for Younger Dryas ice masses reconstructed in neighbouring regions and are in good agreement with overall precipitation patterns suggested for Scotland during this time. Whilst the total amount of precipitation calculated from these ELAs is highly dependent on the method used, irrespective of this, the study suggests a more arid Younger Dryas climate in the region compared to the present day

Rethinking how we describe product models in engineering design research

Product models are an important part of a designer’s daily practice, and as such, they require the continuous attention of design researchers for further progress. However, there is no common vocabulary or structure to describe product models in engineering design. This weakens the discourse by preventing a common understanding and fostering ambiguity. To address this problem, this research note formulates three stances on product models that incorporate a vocabulary within a contextual structure as a contribution towards a shared understanding when describing product models and their underlying concepts. These stances are classification-oriented, functionality-oriented, and message-oriented. By discussing the implications of using these stances, it is illustrated how they facilitate comparability, avoid misunderstandings, and reveal links to the state of research