Socio-economic explanation of urban sprawl: Evidence from Switzerland, 1970-2010

The term urban sprawl is often used to describe apparent inefficiencies of spatial development, including disproportionate growth of urban areas and excessive leapfrog development. In Switzerland, where open space is a scare resource, sprawl takes place all over the country. It goes at the expense of high quality soil which is perceived as the most prominent negative effect. Proceeding from the monocentric city-model, urban economists confirm that urban sprawl is driven by fundamental economic forces such as rising incomes, population growth and low commuting costs. In Switzerland, all these factors have been quite pronounced over the last decades indeed and they should have a high explanatory value. Still, there is the question whether these forces are sufficient to explain suburbanisation also in recent decades. We build on traditional models regressing sprawl on mobility behaviour, rising income and population growth as explanatory variables, and extend the model with other explanatory factors such as change in life-styles (e.g. preference for single-family housing), demographic structures, employment distribution/structure, and commuting. We expect e.g. that a growing number of single households accelerates urban sprawl. Most of the urban economic studies on the drivers of urban sprawl focus on the periphery of great metropolitan areas and do not cover more than one period. Furthermore, they usually use simple measures to capture the development of the settlement structure such as total or per capita soil consumption. Yet, spatial patterns of soil consumption such as the density and spatial distribution of settlements and its development are not taken into account. We will fill this gap by using the recently developed metrics of urban sprawl (Jaeger et al. 2010) that incorporate density and spread of settlement structures and thus allows us to measure sprawl more comprehensively. Our analysis is based on an exceptional, temporally and spatially consistent dataset (including the newly developed comprehensive metrics for urban sprawl), encompassing all Swiss municipalities and covering a time-span of 1970 to 2010 with one observation per decade. This allows us to examine, whether and how the determinants of growth change across time and whether the conventional monocentric city model has more or less explanatory power in earlier or later decades. Such insights will provide a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon of sprawl. We propose to present first results of our analysis at the ERSA conference in St. Petersburg

Application and Quality Assessment of an Instantaneous Vehicle Emission Model at Fleet Level

A developed instantaneous emission model is applied to predict emission factors for small vehicle fleets for quality assessment. Extensive vehicle measurements of pre-Euro-1 gasoline, Euro-3 gasoline, and Euro-2 diesel vehicles are available. The data were used to develop individual vehicle emission models for each car. The prediction quality for each vehicle category was determined by averaging the results obtained from the individual vehicle models. The results show that the prediction quality is improved in comparison with the individual vehicles, even with a small number of vehicles in a specific category. This indicates that the errors in the individual models are mainly random and that prediction quality, when applied to fleets of cars, is exceptionally hig

Non-Shannon inequalities in the entropy vector approach to causal structures

A causal structure is a relationship between observed variables that in general restricts the possible correlations between them. This relationship can be mediated by unobserved systems, modelled by random variables in the classical case or joint quantum systems in the quantum case. One way to differentiate between the correlations realisable by two different causal structures is to use entropy vectors, i.e., vectors whose components correspond to the entropies of each subset of the observed variables. To date, the starting point for deriving entropic constraints within causal structures are the so-called Shannon inequalities (positivity of entropy, conditional entropy and conditional mutual information). In the present work we investigate what happens when non-Shannon entropic inequalities are included as well. We show that in general these lead to tighter outer approximations of the set of realisable entropy vectors and hence enable a sharper distinction of different causal structures. Since non-Shannon inequalities can only be applied amongst classical variables, it might be expected that their use enables an entropic distinction between classical and quantum causal structures. However, this remains an open question. We also introduce techniques for deriving inner approximations to the allowed sets of entropy vectors for a given causal structure. These are useful for proving tightness of outer approximations or for finding interesting regions of entropy space. We illustrate these techniques in several scenarios, including the triangle causal structure.Comment: 23 pages + appendix; v2: minor changes to Section IV A; v3: paper has been significantly shortened, an expanded version of the removed review section can be found in arXiv:1709.08988; v4: version to be published, supplementary information available as ancillary file

The Swiss City Canton: A POlitical Invention

All major Swiss cities are located north of the Alps. Their development can be understood best as part of the development of the North European cities—those of Germany, Flanders and France—and as part of the communal movement as it developed in those areas. Yet the cities that eventually became Swiss are those that accepted more of the characteristic institutions of Italian city-states than did the rest, and it is this acceptance of certain Italian practices—particularly the creation of a rural territory and thus eventually of a territorial city-state—that made those cities into city Cantons, able to take part in the formation of Switzerlan

Bedeutung und Entwicklung des Biologischen Landbaus in der Schweiz

Organic farming has rapidly grown in Switzerland in the past years. It is now well established in agriculture and accepted by consumers. However, recent developments show declining growth rates. This raises the question of the future that can be expected for organic farming in Switzerland. Future trends and potentials of organic farming in Switzerland made subject of two diploma theses in which prospects of the dairy and livestock sector and the fruit and vegetable sector were analysed. With a linear optimization model (farm level), taking into account probable future conditions, the development of supply was estimated. The future evolution of consumer demand was assessed by the means of a qualitative analysis. The analysis of supply and demand showed that there will be structural changes and that a future growth of the organic market is questionable. The problem does not mainly lie in the expected trend of consumer demand but rather in the development of the supply of organic products in Switzerland. In contrast to alternative production systems, organic farming is more labour-intensive, which results in higher per unit production costs. Due to the increasing abolishing of protective measures in the agricultural sector, product prices will continue to decrease. Therefore it is questionable if domestic demand for organic products can be fully met by local production.Agribusiness,

Potential and limitations of cross-domain sentiment classification

In this paper we investigate the cross-domain performance of sentiment analysis systems. For this purpose we train a convolutional neural network (CNN) on data from different domains and evaluate its performance on other domains. Furthermore, we evaluate the usefulness of combining a large amount of different smaller annotated corpora to a large corpus. Our results show that more sophisticated approaches are required to train a system that works equally well on various domains

Individualised PPI prescription in patients on combination antiplatelet therapy and upper gastrointestinal events after percutaneous coronary intervention: a cohort study

Zusammenfassung: GRUNDLAGEN: In einer Patientenkohorte, welche nach perkutaner koronarer Intervention (PCI) kombinierte Thrombozytenaggregationshemmung (Aspirin und Clopidogrel) erhielt, wurde die Wirksamkeit einer individualisierten PPI-Gabe zur Reduktion unerwünschter gastrointestinaler Ereignisse untersucht. METHODIK: Das gastrointestinale Risikofaktorprofil und andere Parameter wurden aus einer speziell angelegten elektronischen Datenbank extrahiert. Die Patienten wurden via standardisierten Fragebogen kontaktiert und bei Patienten mit unerwünschten gastrointestinalen Ereignissen wurde zusätzlich ein strukturiertes Telefoninterview durchgeführt. ERGEBNISSE: In einer Kohorte von 718 Patienten erhielten 87 (12,1 %) eine prophylaktische PPI-Therapie. Bei insgesamt 12 % wurden unerwünschte gastrointestinale Ereignisse gefunden, wobei 18,4 % eine PPI-Prophylaxe und 11,1 % kein PPI hatten (OR 1,80, P = 0,054). Eine Komedikation mit Steroiden war der hauptsächliche Risikofaktor für unerwünschte gastrointestinale Ereignissen (adjusted OR 5,45, P = 0,014). SCHLUSSFOLGERUNGEN: Die individualisierte PPI-Therapie basierend auf einer Risikoabschätzung für gastrointestinale Blutungsereignisse scheint ein effizientes Instrument zu sein, um gastrointestinale Ereignisse nach PCI zu minimiere

The behavioural profile of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and of their siblings

The behavioural profiles in N=69 index children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), N=32 siblings with ADHD, N=35 siblings without ADHD, and N=36 normal controls were compared by the use of standardized parent and teacher rating scales. The four groups were matched by age and IQ. The behavioural profiles of the two ADHD groups were very similar not only in the behavioural domains of ADHD, but also in scales measuring emotional and conduct problems. Siblings without ADHD shared more similarities with normal controls except for more emotional problems. These general trends were stronger in the parent compared to the teacher ratings. These findings indicate that not only ADHD-related but also other behaviours show a strong family aggregation. The informant differences may reflect context dependent differences in child behaviour and contrast effects particularly in parental rating

Inability of the entropy vector method to certify nonclassicality in linelike causal structures

Bell's theorem shows that our intuitive understanding of causation must be overturned in light of quantum correlations. Nevertheless, quantum mechanics does not permit signalling and hence a notion of cause remains. Understanding this notion is not only important at a fundamental level, but also for technological applications such as key distribution and randomness expansion. It has recently been shown that a useful way to decide which classical causal structures could give rise to a given set of correlations is to use entropy vectors. These are vectors whose components are the entropies of all subsets of the observed variables in the causal structure. The entropy vector method employs causal relationships among the variables to restrict the set of possible entropy vectors. Here, we consider whether the same approach can lead to useful certificates of non-classicality within a given causal structure. Surprisingly, we find that for a family of causal structures that include the usual bipartite Bell structure they do not. For all members of this family, no function of the entropies of the observed variables gives such a certificate, in spite of the existence of nonclassical correlations. It is therefore necessary to look beyond entropy vectors to understand cause from a quantum perspective.Comment: 5 pages + appendix, v2: added references, v3: new title, added journal referenc