Designing Sustainable Urban Futures : Concepts and Practices from Different Countries

Many 21st century cities have the potential to be sustainable and resource-saving living spaces when multifunctional structures, well-integrated transportation infrastructure, and democratic governance processes are present. Sustainable urban futures require a focus on the needs of humans and environmental best practices, as well as on the creative scope for community-driven sustainability innovations. This book is based on contributions from science and practice to the international symposium on “Sustainable Urban Development at Different Scales” organized by the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, in May 2014. The symposium used the global urbanization and reurbanization trend as an opportunity to examine cities as sustainable living spaces. This book identifi es concepts, analytic approaches, and practical applications for the design of sustainable urban futures among multiple disciplines and cultural backgrounds

Medina: Improving cloud services trustworthiness through continuous audit-based certification

One of the reasons of the still limited adoption of Cloud Computing in the EU is the EU customers' perceived lack of security and transparency in this technology. Cloud service providers (CSPs) usually rely on security certifications as a mean to improve transparency and trustworthiness, however European CSPs still face multiple challenges for certifying their services (e.g., fragmentation in the certification market, and lack of mutual recognition). In this context, the EU Cybersecurity Act (EU CSA) proposes improving customer's trust in the European ICT market through a European certification scheme (EUCS). The proposed cloud security certification scheme conveys new technological challenges including the notion of automated monitoring for the whole supply chain, which needs to be solved in order to bring all the expected benefits to EU cloud providers and customers. In this context, MEDINA proposes a framework for supporting a continuous audit-based certification for CSPs based on EU CSA's scheme for cloud security certification. MEDINA will tackle challenges in areas like security validation/ testing, machine-readable certification language, cloud security performance, and audit evidence management. MEDINA will provide and empirically validate sustainable outcomes in order to benefit EU adopters.This work has been partially funded by the European project MEDINA (Horizon 2020 research and innovation Programme, under grant agreement no 952633)

Designing Sustainable Urban Futures : Concepts and Practices from Different Countries

This book is based on contributions from science and practice to the international symposium on “Sustainable Urban Development at Different Scales”. The symposium used the global urbanization and reurbanization trend as an opportunity to examine cities as sustainable living spaces. This book identifies concepts, analytic approaches, and practical applications for the design of sustainable urban futures among multiple disciplines and cultural backgrounds

The impacts of EU accession on the agriculture of the Visegrad Countries

The Visegrad Countries (VC)2 joined the European Union in 2004, which has offered several possibilities and challenges for their agriculture. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the status of the sector in the light of latest available data as well as to identify the factors lying behind different country performances. Results suggest that EU accession has had a diverse impact on the Visegrad Countries’ agriculture and member states capitalised their possibilities in a different manner, due to initial conditions and pre- and post-accession policies

Netzöffentlichkeit und digitale Demokratie : Tendenzen politischer Kommunikation im Internet

Nach der Interneteuphorie um das Jahr 2000 und der anschließenden Phase der Ernüchterung wächst derzeit wieder das Interesse an den Chancen und Herausforderungen, die sich aus der politischen Nutzung des Internets für die Demokratie ergeben. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit verdienen hier viele neue und dynamische Entwicklungen im Bereich der politischen Netzöffentlichkeit. Der Wandel politischer Öffentlichkeit durch das Netz mit seinen zahlreichen Aspekten und Facetten steht daher im Zentrum dieses Buchs. Aufbauend auf einer komprimierten Darstellung technischer und kultureller Eigenheiten netzbasierter Kommunikation sowie des Forschungsstandes thematisieren die Autoren vor allem zwei Anwendungsbereiche des Internets: Zum einen widmen sie sich den Programmen zur digitalen Demokratie und den Onlineangeboten zentraler politischer Akteure auf nationaler und internationaler Ebene, vor allem den institutionellen Diskussionsangeboten nationaler Parlamente. Zum anderen untersuchen sie aktuelle Tendenzen im Bereich nicht-staatlicher politischer Netzöffentlichkeit. Dabei werden auch Ergebnisse empirischer Analysen ausgesuchter Themenöffentlichkeiten im Netz vorgestellt, die eigens für diese Publikation durchgeführt wurden

The HELLAS2XMM survey: IV. Optical identifications and the evolution of the accretion luminosity in the Universe

We present results from the photometric and spectroscopic identification of 122 X-ray sources recently discovered by XMM-Newton in the 2-10 keV band (the HELLAS2XMM 1dF sample). Their flux cover the range 8E-15-4E-13 cgs and the total area surveyed is 0.9 deg2. About 20% of the hard X-ray selected sources have an X-ray to optical flux ratio (X/O) ten times or more higher than that of optically selected AGN. Unlike the faint sources found in the ultra-deep Chandra and XMM-Newton surveys, which reach X-ray (and optical) fluxes more than one order of magnitude lower than the HELLAS2XMM survey sources, many of the extreme X/O sources in our sample have R<=25 and are therefore accessible to optical spectroscopy. We report the identification of 13 sources with X/O>10: 8 are narrow line QSO (i.e. QSO2), four are broad line QSO. We use a combined sample of 317 hard X-ray selected sources (HELLAS2XMM 1dF, CDFN 1Msec, SSA13 and Lockman Hole flux limited samples), 221 with measured z, to evaluate the cosmological evolution of the hard X-ray source's number and luminosity densities. Looking backward in time, the low luminosity sources (logL(2-10keV) = 43-44 erg/s) increase in number at a rate different than the high luminosity sources (logL(2-10keV)>44.5 erg/s), reaching a maximum around z=1 and then levelling off beyond z=2. This translates into an accretion driven luminosity density which is dominated by sources with logL(2-10keV) < 44.5 erg/s up to at least z=1, while the contribution of the same sources and of those with logL(2-10keV)>44.5 erg/s appear to be comparable between z=2 and 4.Comment: v2, minor changes, A&A in pres

Deep U band and R imaging of GOODS-South: Observations,data reduction and first results

We present deep imaging in the {\em U} band covering an area of 630 arcmin$^{2}$ centered on the southern field of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). The data were obtained with the VIMOS instrument at the ESO Very Large Telescope. The final images reach a magnitude limit $U_{lim} \approx 29.8$ (AB, 1$\sigma$, in a 1\arcsec radius aperture), and have good image quality, with full width at half maximum \approx 0.8\arcsec. They are significantly deeper than previous U--band images available for the GOODS fields, and better match the sensitivity of other multi--wavelength GOODS photometry. The deeper U--band data yield significantly improved photometric redshifts, especially in key redshift ranges such as $2<z<4$, and deeper color--selected galaxy samples, e.g., Lyman--break galaxies at $z\approx 3$. We also present the coaddition of archival ESO VIMOS R band data, with $R_{lim} \approx 29$ (AB, 1$\sigma$, 1\arcsec radius aperture), and image quality \approx 0.75 \arcsec. We discuss the strategies for the observations and data reduction, and present the first results from the analysis of the coadded images.Comment: Accepted for publication ApJS, 54 pages, 27 figures. Released data and full-quality paper version available at http://archive.eso.org/cms/eso-data/data-packages/goods-vimos-imaging-data-release-version-1.

Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language

Expressions of basic emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) can be recognized pan-culturally from the face and it is assumed that these emotions can be recognized from a speaker's voice, regardless of an individual's culture or linguistic ability. Here, we compared how monolingual speakers of Argentine Spanish recognize basic emotions from pseudo-utterances ("nonsense speech") produced in their native language and in three foreign languages (English, German, Arabic). Results indicated that vocal expressions of basic emotions could be decoded in each language condition at accuracy levels exceeding chance, although Spanish listeners performed significantly better overall in their native language ("in-group advantage"). Our findings argue that the ability to understand vocally-expressed emotions in speech is partly independent of linguistic ability and involves universal principles, although this ability is also shaped by linguistic and cultural variables