Hochschulfinanzierung: Schluss mit dem Verbot von Studienentgelten

Die Hochschulausbildung in Deutschland gerät immer wieder in die Kritik. Die Ausbildungsleistung der Hochschulen erreicht im Vergleich mit anderen Ländern nur ein mittelmäßiges Niveau. Welche Rolle spielt dabei die Hochschulfinanzierung? Führen Studienentgelte zu besseren Ergebnissen? --

How Text Mining Algorithms for Crowdsourcing Can Help Us to Identify Today's Pressing Societal Issues

Crowdsourcing is increasingly applied in the area of open development with the goal to find solutions for today’s pressing societal issues. To solve such wicked problems, manifold solutions need to be found and applied. In contrast to this, most recent research in crowdsourcing focuses on the few winning ideas, ignoring the sheer amount of content created by the community. In this study we address this issue by applying an automated text mining technique to analyze the ideas contributed by the crowd in an initiative tackling plastic pollution. We show that automated text mining approaches reveal numerous possibilities to make use of the so far unused content of IT enabled collaboration projects. We further add insights into how our findings can help researchers and practitioners to accelerate the solution process for today’s pressing societal issues

Urban agriculture: boon or bust?

Agriculture needs a revolution to be able to feed 9 billion people by 2050 within planetary boundaries. Urban agriculture (UA) is heralded as a solution, but can it deliver? To answer this question, different types of UA need to be discussed with their distinct advantages and limitations, particularly differentiating conventional open-air extensive farming from high-yielding Controlled Environment Farming (CEF). The former is too low yielding to support food production in a meaningful way but can enhance community, provide education services, psychological value and improve local environmental conditions – particularly if applied on urban rooftops. This kind of farming is rarely commercially viable but offers significant societal value. Business models could range from being offered as public services to being cross-subsidized through attached commercial operations. Distinct from this, some forms of CEF may provide substantial contributions to food outputs in years to come, as CEF can be expected to grow significantly, driven by inherent efficiency advantages over current food value chains. However, it tends to be highly capital- and knowledge-intensive and will likely develop at the fringes of cities due to economic considerations. As such, it is a form of peri-urban agriculture (PUA) and could become part of a peri-urban circular economy for food

Die neue „Cambridge World History“

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.Peer Reviewe

Project STOP: city partnerships to prevent ocean plastics in Indonesia

An estimated 80% of marine plastic litter comes from land-based sources, with 50% originating from just five Asian economies: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand*. As economic growth has increased in these countries, so has plastic consumption, which has outpaced the development of effective solid waste management systems. That is why the first STOP city partnership was launched in 2018 in Muncar, a city of 130,000 residents in Banyuwangi Regency, East Java, Indonesia. The goal of Project STOP is to create an economically viable “zero leakage” system that involves state-based systems, communities and the informal sector, and that can be sustained through secure government revenues, household and business collection fees and valorization of waste. Project STOP has three objectives: zero leakage of waste into the environment; increased resource efficiency and recycling of plastics; and benefits for the local community by creating new jobs in the waste management system and reducing the impacts of mismanaged waste on public health, tourism and fisheries.Early insights from Project STOP’s scoping activities, system design and first six months of system change implementation are presented in three areas: 1) An integrated “value chain engineering” approach is key to system change, 2) Institutions, governance and community factors are critical, 3) Economic incentives are a great tool to develop recycling initiatives. Action-innovation partnerships at the city level – Project STOP and many others – can provide much-needed insight into the challenges and potential solutions that could accelerate change toward a plastic system that works, and an environment free from plastic waste.* Jenna R. Jambeck et al., “Plastic Waste Inputs from Land into the Ocean,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 768–71, doi:10.1126/science.1260352

Collaboration and knowledge exchange between scholars in Britain and the empire, 1830–1914

In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians in the British Empire as a space of knowledge production and circulation. Much of this work assumes that scholarly cooperation and collaboration between individuals and institutions within the Empire had the effect (and often also the aim) of strengthening both imperial ties and the idea of empire. This chapter argues, however, that many examples of scholarly travel, exchange, and collaboration were undertaken with very different goals in mind. In particular, it highlights the continuing importance of an ideal of scientific internationalism, which stressed the benefits of scholarship for the whole of humanity and prioritized the needs and goals of individual academic and scientific disciplines. As the chapter shows, some scholars even went on to develop nuanced critiques of the imperial project while using the very structures of empire to further their own individual, disciplinary and institutional goals

Planet-compatible pathways for transitioning the chemical industry

Chemical products, such as plastics, solvents, and fertilizers, are essential for supporting modern lifestyles. Yet, producing, using, and disposing of chemicals creates adverse environmental impacts which threaten the industry’s license to operate. This study presents seven planet-compatible pathways toward 2050 employing demand-side and supply-side interventions with cumulative total investment costs of US$1.2–3.7 trillion. Resource efficiency and circularity interventions reduce global chemicals demand by 23 to 33% and are critical for mitigating risks associated with using fossil feedstocks and carbon capture and sequestration, and constraints on available biogenic and recyclate feedstocks. Replacing fossil feedstocks with biogenic/air-capture sources, shifting carbon destinations from the atmosphere to ground, and electrifying/decarbonizing energy supply for production technologies could enable net negative emissions of 0.5 GtCO2eq y−1 across non-ammonia chemicals, while still delivering essential chemical-based services to society

Ueber eine handelsorientierte Technologiepolitik zur internationalen Wettbewerbsfaehigkeit?

Summary in EnglishAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, D-21400 Kiel W 66 (1997.11) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman