Cultural and Ethnic Determinants of Land Use and Inheritance in Romania

This paper aims to demonstrate some ethno-cultural specificity in land use and land inheritance by the data of the field survey carried out in four different municipalities in Romania, representing different historical regions where the ethnical composition of the regions is very different. The understanding of land management and agriculture is very different between the groups. The paper presents the data of a project which is the collaboration of a Swiss and a Romanian team in a three-year programme (SCOPES programme of Swiss National Science Foundation), in which a survey was carried out with the help of questionnaires. This was applied in a sample of 612 rural households in four municipalities. The main questions focused on land use and land inheritance as well as agriculture. The sample included two generations: the parents and their children (362), men and women. The research team looked for an answer to the question: "who are the next generation farmers in Romania and are there cultural and ethnic and also gender-based differences between rural families?" As the data show there are four different strategies applied in the four regions. In one, traditional sustainable agriculture was preserved, combined with a high rate of international migration. In another village there is a good perspective for farming, but a lot of young people are going to other sectors of activities. In the third location the former socialist cooperative was transformed into a new type of agricultural cooperative. This region has the best developmental perspectives. In the fourth region agricultural activity is maintained and the local economy also includes other types of activities which are complementary to agriculture (trade, industry and other services)

Jövedelemtérképek a precíziós növénytermelésben

A mezÅ‘gazdaságban egy-egy tevékenységnél magas tÅ‘keigényű beruházások szükségesek a termeléshez. Ezek fényében érthetÅ‘, hogy a gazdálkodó a piac változékonyságát csak lassan képes követni, ezért több idÅ‘be telik a piaci hatásokra történÅ‘ reagálás. Napjaink vezetÅ‘inek ma már nem elég kifogástalanul ismerni a növénytermelés rejtelmeit, megfelelÅ‘ ökonómiai látásmód is szükséges. Ehhez nyújthat segítséget a szemléletes jövedelemtérkép, amely a gazdálkodónak egyértelmű információkkal szolgál a jövedelmezÅ‘ségrÅ‘l, és amit hazánkban eddigi ismereteink szerint még nem készítettek. Jelen publikációnk a jövedelemtérképezés gyakorlati alkalmazhatóságát hivatott bemutatni. A jövedelemtérképek hasznosítható többletinformációkat nyújtanak a hozamtérképekhez képest. Hosszabb idÅ‘szakot felölelÅ‘ adatsorok esetén vitathatatlan elÅ‘nyük, hogy szemléletesen képesek mutatni a jövedelmet, ezáltal megerÅ‘síthetik a döntéshozókat munkájukban. ----------------------------------- Certain agricultural products require large investments to be made. This makes it difficult to adapt to changes in the market and makes it longer until farmers respond to market influences. Today’s decision-makers need not only be aware of all details of crop growing – they must also have a good economical vision. They may be assisted in this by the detailed revenue map, which provide farmers clear information on profitability. As far as we are aware, no such map has yet been created in Hungary. This publication is intended to demonstrate the practical application of revenue mapping. Revenue maps offer practically usable additional information over yield maps. Their advantage is that they offer a visual representation of revenues based on data for longer periods, which may confirm decision-makers in their work.tápanyag-visszapótlás, hozam-, jövedelemtérkép, precíziós növénytermelés, nutrient supplementation, yield and revenue maps, precision farming, Crop Production/Industries, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

What is an internet? Norbert Wiener and the society of control

By means of a philosophical reading of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, this thesis attempts to derive anew the concepts of internet and control. It develops upon Wiener’s position that every age is reflected by a certain machine, arguing that the internet is that which does so today. Grounded by a critical historiography of the relation between the Cold War and the internet’s invention in 1969 by the ‘network’ of J. C. R. Licklider, it argues for an agonistic concept of internet derived from Wiener’s disjunctive reading of figures including Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon, Benoît Mandelbrot, John von Neumann and above all, his Neo-Kantian inflected reading of Leibniz. It offers a counter-theory of the society of control to those grounded by Spinoza’s ethology, notably that of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and attempts to establish a single conceptual vocabulary for depicting the possible modes of conflict through which an internet is determined

Price adjustment in the London housing market

Recent research into the dynamic adjustment of prices within the London housing market is extended via the application of a novel two-step procedure. Combining the non-parametric analysis of the ranking distributions of the levels and changes in house prices with the application of a cross-sectional convergence technique, the analysis results in the detection of a three-tier system in which highly significant convergence clubs are identified within borough-level data. These findings contrast with both the divergence apparent when considering all boroughs and the failure of previous research to identify convergent groupings. The novelty of the empirical methods is supplemented by a discussion of various theoretical factors such as gentrification, displaced demand, immigration, foreign investment and criminal activity in relation to the findings obtained

Evaluating the Effect of Timeline Shape on Visualization Task Performance

Timelines are commonly represented on a horizontal line, which is not necessarily the most effective way to visualize temporal event sequences. However, few experiments have evaluated how timeline shape influences task performance. We present the design and results of a controlled experiment run on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=192) in which we evaluate how timeline shape affects task completion time, correctness, and user preference. We tested 12 combinations of 4 shapes -- horizontal line, vertical line, circle, and spiral -- and 3 data types -- recurrent, non-recurrent, and mixed event sequences. We found good evidence that timeline shape meaningfully affects user task completion time but not correctness and that users have a strong shape preference. Building on our results, we present design guidelines for creating effective timeline visualizations based on user task and data types. A free copy of this paper, the evaluation stimuli and data, and code are available at https://osf.io/qr5yu/Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Meta-heuristic algorithms for optimized network flow wavelet-based image coding

Optimal multipath selection to maximize the received multiple description coding (MDCs) in a lossy network model is proposed. Multiple description scalar quantization (MDSQ) has been applied to the wavelet coefficients of a color image to generate the MDCs which are combating transmission loss over lossy networks. In the networks, each received description raises the reconstruction quality of an MDC-coded signal (image, audio or video). In terms of maximizing the received descriptions, a greater number of optimal routings between source and destination must be obtained. The rainbow network flow (RNF) collaborated with effective meta-heuristic algorithms is a good approach to resolve it. Two meta-heuristic algorithms which are genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) have been utilized to solve the multi-objective optimization routing problem for finding optimal routings each of which is assigned as a distinct color by RNF to maximize the coded descriptions in a network model. By employing a local search based priority encoding method, each individual in GA and particle in PSO is represented as a potential solution. The proposed algorithms are compared with the multipath Dijkstra algorithm (MDA) for both finding optimal paths and providing reliable multimedia communication. The simulations run over various random network topologies and the results show that the PSO algorithm finds optimal routings effectively and maximizes the received MDCs with assistance of RNF, leading to reduce packet loss and increase throughput