Wiedervereinigung, Aufholprozess Ost und Nachhaltigkeit

Zwölf Jahre nach der Wiedervereinigung muss für Ostdeutschland eine ernüchternde Bilanz gezogen werden. Der Osten ist durch geringe privatwirtschaftliche Investitionen, eine hohe Arbeitslosigkeit und einen ungünstigen Altersaufbau gekennzeichnet. Wie wirkt sich die Anpassungsgeschwindigkeit Ostdeutschlands auf die fiskalische Nachhaltigkeit aus? --

Wie viel Gesundheit wollen wir uns eigentlich leisten?

Der Gesetzlichen Gesundheitsversorgung in Deutschland stehen einschneidende Reformen bevor. Können das Konzept der Bürgerversicherung, der Vorschlag einer Gesundheitsprämie oder kapitalgedeckte Prämien eine Lösung bieten?

Was bringen Bürgerversicherung und Gesundheitsprämie wirklich?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Raffelhüschen, Stefan Fetzer und Christian Hagist, Universität Freiburg, untersuchen mit Hilfe der Generationenbilanzierung, welche Auswirkungen die aktuellen Vorschläge (nämlich Bürgerversicherung oder Gesundheitsprämien) zur Reform der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung, auf die "Nachhaltigkeit in der Finanzierung der Sozialen Sicherungssysteme" hat.Gesundheitspolitik, Krankenversicherung, Gesundheitsreform, Gesundheitsfinanzierung, Deutschland, Bürgerversicherung

Hysteresis of tropical forests in the 21st century

Tropical forests modify the conditions they depend on through feedbacks at different spatial scales. These feedbacks shape the hysteresis (history-dependence) of tropical forests, thus controlling their resilience to deforestation and response to climate change. Here, we determine the emergent hysteresis from local-scale tipping points and regional-scale forest-rainfall feedbacks across the tropics under the recent climate and a severe climate-change scenario. By integrating remote sensing, a global hydrological model, and detailed atmospheric moisture tracking simulations, we find that forest-rainfall feedback expands the geographic range of possible forest distributions, especially in the Amazon. The Amazon forest could partially recover from complete deforestation, but may lose that resilience later this century. The Congo forest currently lacks resilience, but is predicted to gain it under climate change, whereas forests in Australasia are resilient under both current and future climates. Our results show how tropical forests shape their own distributions and create the climatic conditions that enable them

LEGaTO: first steps towards energy-efficient toolset for heterogeneous computing

LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The smartphone-based offline indoor location competition at IPIN 2016: analysis and future work

This paper presents the analysis and discussion of the off-site localization competition track, which took place during the Seventh International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN 2016). Five international teams proposed different strategies for smartphone-based indoor positioning using the same reference data. The competitors were provided with several smartphone-collected signal datasets, some of which were used for training (known trajectories), and others for evaluating (unknown trajectories). The competition permits a coherent evaluation method of the competitors' estimations, where inside information to fine-tune their systems is not offered, and thus provides, in our opinion, a good starting point to introduce a fair comparison between the smartphone-based systems found in the literature. The methodology, experience, feedback from competitors and future working lines are described.We would like to thank Tecnalia Research & Innovation Foundation for sponsoring the competition track with an award for the winning team. We are also grateful to Francesco Potortì, Sangjoon Park, Jesús Ureña and Kyle O’Keefe for their invaluable help in promoting the IPIN competition and conference. Parts of this work was carried out with the financial support received from projects and grants: LORIS (TIN2012-38080-C04-04), TARSIUS (TIN2015-71564-C4-2-R (MINECO/FEDER)), SmartLoc (CSIC-PIE Ref.201450E011), “Metodologías avanzadas para el diseño, desarrollo, evaluación e integración de algoritmos de localización en interiores” (TIN2015-70202-P), REPNIN network (TEC2015-71426-REDT) and the José Castillejo mobility grant (CAS16/00072). The HFTS team has been supported in the frame of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research programme “FHprofUnt2013” under contract 03FH035PB3 (Project SPIRIT). The UMinho team has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio