Food security and sustainability - chances and limitations of agriculture

The increasing population of the world may induce various problems. There are two major fields; food security and adequate fresh water supply, which are predominant for all Global economic structures. On the other hand all activities implemented in favour of meeting the demand of the population, increase the ecological footprint and may risk sustainability of both mankind and its environment. The present study deals with an assessment of future trends on the basis of the present state of alimentation. Agriculture has a basic role in providing food for the human race. All sort of activities of that are in relation with the environment and at the same time they are driven by economic and social aspects. Sustainable agriculture can only be implemented if agricultural production can be run in an environment which is socially bearable, and economically viable. The scheme has to take into consideration that the society has to be equitable economically continuously. Whenever any of these interrelations cannot be manifested, the whole system may turn to be non-sustainable, or inefficient regarding food security

Food security and sustainability - chances and limitations of agriculture

The increasing population of the world may induce various problems. There are two major fields; food security and adequate fresh water supply, which are predominant for all Global economic structures. On the other hand all activities implemented in favour of meeting the demand of the population, increase the ecological footprint and may risk sustainability of both mankind and its environment. The present study deals with an assessment of future trends on the basis of the present state of alimentation. Agriculture has a basic role in providing food for the human race. All sort of activities of that are in relation with the environment and at the same time they are driven by economic and social aspects. Sustainable agriculture can only be implemented if agricultural production can be run in an environment which is socially bearable, and economically viable. The scheme has to take into consideration that the society has to be equitable economically continuously. Whenever any of these interrelations cannot be manifested, the whole system may turn to be non-sustainable, or inefficient regarding food security

A Knowledge-Based Approach to Raster-Vector Conversion of Large Scale Topographic Maps

Paper-based raster maps are primarily for human consumption, and their interpretation always requires some level of human expertese. Todays computer services in geoinformatics usually require vectorized topographic maps. The usual method of the conversion has been an error-prone, manual process. In this article, the possibilities, methods and difficulties of the conversion are discussed. The results described here are partially implemented in the IRIS project, but further work remains. This emphasizes the tools of digital image processing and knowledge-based approach. The system in development separates the recognition of point-like, line-like and surface-like objects, and the most successful approach appears to be the recognition of these objects in a reversed order with respect to their printing. During the recongition of surfaces, homogeneous and textured surfaces must be distinguished. The most diverse and complicated group constitute the line-like objects. The IRIS project realises a moderate, but significant step towards the automatization of map recognition process, bearing in mind that full automatization is unlikely. It is reasonable to assume that human experts will always be required for high quality interpretation, but it is an exciting challenge to decrease the burden of manual work

Defect flows in minimal models

In this paper we study a simple example of a two-parameter space of renormalisation group flows of defects in Virasoro minimal models. We use a combination of exact results, perturbation theory and the truncated conformal space approach to search for fixed points and investigate their nature. For the Ising model, we confirm the recent results of Fendley et al. In the case of central charge close to one, we find six fixed points, five of which we can identify in terms of known defects and one of which we conjecture is a new non-trivial conformal defect. We also include several new results on exact properties of perturbed defects and on the renormalisation group in the truncated conformal space approach.Comment: 35 pages, 21 figures. 1 reference adde

Rigid ball-polyhedra in Euclidean 3-space

A ball-polyhedron is the intersection with non-empty interior of finitely many (closed) unit balls in Euclidean 3-space. One can represent the boundary of a ball-polyhedron as the union of vertices, edges, and faces defined in a rather natural way. A ball-polyhedron is called a simple ball-polyhedron if at every vertex exactly three edges meet. Moreover, a ball-polyhedron is called a standard ball-polyhedron if its vertex-edge-face structure is a lattice (with respect to containment). To each edge of a ball-polyhedron one can assign an inner dihedral angle and say that the given ball-polyhedron is locally rigid with respect to its inner dihedral angles if the vertex-edge-face structure of the ball-polyhedron and its inner dihedral angles determine the ball-polyhedron up to congruence locally. The main result of this paper is a Cauchy-type rigidity theorem for ball-polyhedra stating that any simple and standard ball-polyhedron is locally rigid with respect to its inner dihedral angles.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Variation for carbon isotope ratio in a set of emmer (Triticum dicoccum Schrank) and bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) accessions

A high level of drought tolerance is an important objective in breeding new generation wheat varieties. A group of six landraces of the emmer wheat (Triticum diccocum Schrank), as well as two landraces, two old cultivars and two modern varieties of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) were evaluated for their ability to discriminate 13C, a trait related to stomatal closure and consequently, an important component tolerance to drought. Three emmer wheat landraces and one of the bread wheat landraces has the lowest. Therefore, emmer wheat may play the role of a donor of the tolerance to drought in wheat breeding programs targetting drought prone conditions.Key words: Emmer wheat, bread wheat, drought tolerance, carbon isotope ratio, discrimination