Flood damage, vulnerability and risk perception - challenges for flood damage research

The current state-of-the-art in flood damage analysis mainly focuses on the economic evaluation of tangible flood effects. It is contended in this discussion paper that important economic, social and ecological aspects of flood-related vulnerabilities are neglected. It is a challenge for flood research to develop a wider perspective for flood damage evaluation. --Flood damage analysis,flood vulnerability,risk perception,cost-benefit analysis,integrated assessment

System for generating timing and control signals

A system capable of generating every possible data frame subperiod and delayed subperiod of a data frame of length of M clock pulse intervals (CPIs) comprised of parallel modulo-m sub i counters is presented. Each m sub i is a prime power divisor of M and a cascade of alpha sub i identical modulo-p sub i counters. The modulo-p sub i counters are feedback shift registers which cycle through p sub i distinct states. Every possible nontrivial data frame subperiod and delayed subperiod is derived and a specific CPI in the data frame is detected. The number of clock pulses required to bring every modulo-p sub i counter to a respective designated state or count is determined by the Chinese remainder theorem. This corresponds to the solution of simultaneous congruences over relatively prime moduli

Supporting decisions on conflicting land-uses: An integrated ecological-economic approach

An integrated ecological-economic decision-making approach is developed to help local stakeholders decide on land use in rural areas where the conflict between natural resource protection and economic development is pressing. It consists of four methodological steps. In the first step the political options and alternatives for action regarding changes in the land-use pattern are specified in order to derive politically relevant land-use strategies (scenarios). In the second step economic, ecological and social indicators are derived. The third step includes economic modelling (economic input-output model), environmental modelling (modelling of landscape water balance) and the qualitative and quantitative estimation of ecological and environmental effects. These efforts result in the production of a multi-indicator matrix. Finally, the fourth step deals with a combined monetary and multi-criteria evaluation resulting in a ranking of the land-use strategies. The discussion of the decision-making approach concentrates on the necessity of preliminary decisions and the possibility and necessity of stakeholders participation in the decisionmaking process. --evaluation,decision-making,multi-criteria analysis,land-use management,scenarios,benefit-cost analysis

Towards a sustainable copper industry? Trends in resource use, environmental impacts and substitution in the global copper industry

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Relationships between investments costs for infrastructure and for sport stadia: The case of the World Cup 2006 in Germany

This study uses the example of the 2006 soccer World Cup in Germany to examine whether any systematic relationships exist between infrastructure investments on the one hand and investments in the respective stadium on the other. Particular attention is paid to an examination of whether the relative infrastructure costs in the case of newly-built stadia differ from those relating to stadia that have been reconstructed or extended. Such systematic relationships, or “rules of thumb”, could be used in the future to simplify the prediction of the expected volume of necessary infrastructure measures for major sporting events (other soccer World Cups, the Olympic Games, etc.) on the basis of the investment required for the sports venues. Our study makes use of a cluster and discriminance analysis and concludes that such general rules cannot be derived from the 2006 World Cup in Germany.Infrastructure investments, sport stadia costs, cluster analysis, discriminance analysis.

Participation in multicriteria decision support - the case of conflicting water allocation in the Spree River basin

This discussion paper presents the Integrated Methodological Approach for participatory multi-criteria decision support under uncertainty (IMA), which emerged from the debates about participation, multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and benefit-cost analysis (BCA). It provides a framework for participatory and science-based evaluation processes with combined use of BCA and MCA to support large-scale public decisions. While IMA does not claim to realize an all-inclusive participation scheme, it offers the advantage to improve the quality of decision making through advances in competence and fairness. Its practical application with emphasis on its participatory elements is demonstrated by the case study on the water allocation conflict of the German Spree River, which involves the German capital of Berlin, an important wetland, and the needs to remediate a post-mining landscape. --Participation,Multi-criteria analysis,Cost-benefit analysis,River basin management,Integrated Assesment

Los diccionarios bilingües español-portugués desde el principio hasta el siglo XIX

Enumeración y descripción de los diccionarios bilingües de las lenguas española y portuguesa

Nicht-erneuerbare Massenressourcen zwischen Dematerialisierung, Transmaterialisierung und globaler Umweltbelastung: Eine empirische Analyse

Gegenstand dieses Beitrages ist die empirische Analyse von globalen Trends in der Nutzung von nicht-erneuerbaren Massenressourcen. Es werden im wesentlichen fünf Ergebnisse herausgearbeitet. 1. Die globale Nutzung von Massenressourcen im 20. Jahrhundert war durch enorme Zuwachsraten in der Ressourceninanspruchnahme in der zweiten Hälfte des Jahrhunderts und durch eine Stagnation im absoluten Ressourcenverbrauch in der Endphase des Jahrhunderts gekennzeichnet. 2. Bei vielen Ressourcen sind zeitlich differenzierte Prozesse einer Dematerialisierung nachweisbar, die sich im Gesamtzusammenhang eines Transmaterialisierungsprozesses konjunkturtheoretisch erklären lassen. 3. Zwischen 1960 und 1995 kann bei bedeutsamen nicht-erneuerbaren Massenressourcen ein globaler aggregierter Dematerialisierungseffekt in Höhe von mindestens 20% nachgewiesen werden. 4. Trotz der Effekte der Dematerialisierung in den Ressourcennutzungstrends und der Erfolge durch neue Umwelttechnologien im 20. Jahrhundert kann nicht ausgeschlossen werden, daß diese Prozesse mit einer erhöhten Umweltbelastung einher gingen. 5. Eine nachhaltige Transformation in der globalen Ressourcennutzung wird sich durch freie Marktprozesse nicht einstellen. Weitere Politikmaßnahmen sind dafür notwendig

Pipelining the Fast Multipole Method over a Runtime System

Fast Multipole Methods (FMM) are a fundamental operation for the simulation of many physical problems. The high performance design of such methods usually requires to carefully tune the algorithm for both the targeted physics and the hardware. In this paper, we propose a new approach that achieves high performance across architectures. Our method consists of expressing the FMM algorithm as a task flow and employing a state-of-the-art runtime system, StarPU, in order to process the tasks on the different processing units. We carefully design the task flow, the mathematical operators, their Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) implementations, as well as scheduling schemes. We compute potentials and forces of 200 million particles in 48.7 seconds on a homogeneous 160 cores SGI Altix UV 100 and of 38 million particles in 13.34 seconds on a heterogeneous 12 cores Intel Nehalem processor enhanced with 3 Nvidia M2090 Fermi GPUs.Comment: No. RR-7981 (2012