Flächenerträge von Schweizer Rapsöl und Palmöl im Vergleich

Hintergrund In den letzten dreissig Jahren hat sich der Anbau von Palmöl primär auf Kosten von Urwaldrodungen drastisch ausgedehnt, auf heute rund 20’000’000 Hektaren weltweit, wobei Indonesien und Malaysia 84% der Weltproduktion ausmachen. Um einer weiteren Ausdehnung der Ölpalme (Elaeis guineensis) entgegenzuwirken, stellt sich die Frage, inwiefern das nur in den Tropen produzierbare Palmöl durch andere Öle ersetzt werden kann, welche eine geringere respektive eine bessere Umweltwirkung haben. Für den Schweizer Kontext ist Rapsöl wegen der relativ hohen Flächenerträgen die interessanteste Alternative. Als Beitrag zu dieser Diskussion vergleicht dieser Bericht gängige jährliche Hektarerträge von Rohpalmöl mit Schweizer Rapsöl und errechnet durchschnittliche Ertragskoeffizienten pro Hektar für diese beiden Öle

Strengthening the voices of human rights defenders in the media: A case study on addressing sorcery accusation related violence in Papua New Guinea

Civil society and human rights defenders in Papua New Guinea have played an important role in bringing about legislative changes with regard to domestic and sorcery accusation related violence in recent years. Their insights in understanding how to address complex issues at the community level when accusations occur have also proven crucial to keeping people safe and providing processes to hold perpetrators accountable. However, the mainstream media has rarely reported on their stories and included their voices in the reporting of sorcery accusation related violence. They have focused on exposing the problem, often by showcasing the horrific nature of some of the crimes related to accusations, instead of further investigating possible solutions. In this paper we explore our work with human rights defenders to capture their experiences around sorcery accusations and violence and provide ways to bring their stories into the mainstream media. In particular, we explore questions around the ethics of representation when it comes to reporting human rights abuses and violence and suggest alternative ways of reporting

Der Beitrag ökologisch wirtschaftender Höfe im Eichsfeld (Thüringen)zur Natur- und Landschaftsentwicklung

In the Eichsfeld region (Thuringia) 8 farms have converted to organic farming. Their impact on nature and landscape development has been investigated in order to integrate the farms in a proposed project within the contest “active regions rural areas develop future”. The analysis shows that each of the farms already has contributed to nature conservation and that the farmers are interested in further improvement

Linking Sheet Music and Audio - Challenges and New Approaches

Score and audio files are the two most important ways to represent, convey, record, store, and experience music. While score describes a piece of music on an abstract level using symbols such as notes, keys, and measures, audio files allow for reproducing a specific acoustic realization of the piece. Each of these representations reflects different facets of music yielding insights into aspects ranging from structural elements (e.g., motives, themes, musical form) to specific performance aspects (e.g., artistic shaping, sound). Therefore, the simultaneous access to score and audio representations is of great importance. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically generating musically relevant linking structures between the various data sources that are available for a given piece of music. In particular, we discuss the task of sheet music-audio synchronization with the aim to link regions in images of scanned scores to musically corresponding sections in an audio recording of the same piece. Such linking structures form the basis for novel interfaces that allow users to access and explore multimodal sources of music within a single framework. As our main contributions, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art for this kind of synchronization task, we present some novel approaches, and indicate future research directions. In particular, we address problems that arise in the presence of structural differences and discuss challenges when applying optical music recognition to complex orchestral scores. Finally, potential applications of the synchronization results are presented

Fostering a growth mindset in physics

Students hold different beliefs about the nature of intelligence. While some believe in intelligence as a fixed trait (fixed mindset), others believe in a more malleable nature of intelligence that can be actively developed (growth mindset). These often unconsciously held beliefs can influence students’ engagement in learning and (therefore) their academic performance. Especially when facing difficulties and/or overcoming setbacks, a growth mindset is more supportive for students’ engagement. Students with a growth mindset focus on the learning process, while students holding fixed beliefs feel like they won’t ever be able to master the difficult tasks and tend to give up. Since mindsets are beliefs, they can be changed, for example, by targeted interventions to foster a growth mindset (Dweck, 1999; Yeager et al., 2019). While most of the mindset research targets students’ general academic mindset, we focus on their physics specific beliefs. Physics is described as “challenging” and “difficult” and in Germany, a majority of students choose to drop physics as soon as possible. We designed and evaluated a physics specific mindset questionnaire, asking students not only about their beliefs about intelligence, but also about their beliefs about learning physics and a (potential) giftedness in physics. The results of this survey show: students’ physics specific mindsets change over time, without targeted interventions. While in the beginning of physics classes in middle school, a majority of students hold a growth mindset in physics, this percentage decreases drastically during the years of learning physics. The biggest mindset change is observable during the first year of physics classes: the growth mindset decreases to from 69.1% to 43.5% and the fixed beliefs about an innate giftedness in physics extend from 4.3% to 13.4% (Goldhorn et al., 2022). Aiming to support a growth mindset in physics, we designed a subject-specific intervention based on the work/research of Yeager et al. (2016). Working on tasks about learning strategies in physics, middle school students learn implicitly about the growth mindset. Based on the knowledge of neuroplasticity, the metaphor of the brain as a muscle that builds strength through (hard) learning is used to teach the malleability of intelligence (Blackwell et al., 2007). Connecting this knowledge directly with a physics topic should support the domain-specific growth mindset. The talk focuses on a first pilot study with eight graders. REFERENCES Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246–263. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x  Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. (S. xiii, 195). Psychology Press. Goldhorn, L., Wilhelm, T., & Spatz, V. (2022). Domain-Specific Theories Of Intelligence: How Students’ Mindsets In Physics Change Without Interventions. Proceedings of ESERA 2021, accepted. Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., Murray, J. S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Tipton, E., Schneider, B., Hulleman, C. S., Hinojosa, C. P., Paunesku, D., Romero, C., Flint, K., Roberts, A., Trott, J., Iachan, R., Buontempo, J., Yang, S. M., Carvalho, C. M., … Dweck, C. S. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573(7774), 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y Yeager, D. S., Romero, C., Paunesku, D., Hulleman, C. S., Schneider, B., Hinojosa, C., Lee, H. Y., O’Brien, J., Flint, K., Roberts, A., Trott, J., Greene, D., Walton, G. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Using design thinking to improve psychological interventions: The case of the growth mindset during the transition to high school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 374–391. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu000009

Making Sense of Digital Innovations: The Role of the Material Artefact

Users’ perceptions of a material artefact hold important implications of how they make sense of a digital innovation, expressed in their technological frames about the innovation. Yet, research on sensemaking offers little insights on the role of the material artefact for shaping users’ technological frames. This paper proposes a 2x2 experiment to investigate how newness as a crucial aspect of the material artefact influences users’ frames. Based on theories of resonance, we assume that this effect is mediated by cognitive and emotional resonance. We manipulate the technical and design newness of smart speakers to investigate our research model. Our findings contribute to research on technology sensemaking by illuminating the role of the newness of the material artefact. For developers, our results indicate how users’ understanding can be shaped by embodying familiar and non-familiar cues in digital innovations

Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Interventions in Mountain Areas-Lessons Learned From a 5-Country Project to Upscale Best Practices

Many people living in mountain regions in lowand middle-income countries are vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity, which contributes to poor nutritional status. Food and nutrition security require stability of access to affordable, safe, diverse, and nutritious foods. In mountainous areas, affordability and access to diverse foods are challenged by climatic factors constraining agricultural production, poor infrastructure, and geographic isolation. This article describes a nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) project focusing on 5 countries—Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Peru— where 132 microinterventions were implemented by rural service providers (RSPs) who received training and technical support from the project. These microinterventions serve as learning cases for advocacy work to promote the NSA approach at the local, national, and global levels. They are also documented on an Internet platform allowing RSPs and other stakeholders to share best practices and lessons learned at the national and global levels. Preliminary results indicate that this approach is highly effective in addressing nutrition and livelihood issues in remote mountain areas. To scale up the approach and boost its integration into policies at the local, national, and global levels, 2 aspects will be critical. First, more systemic and integrated NSA initiatives need to be implemented that functionally combine production- and consumption-related aspects to effectively change nutrition behavior and serve as learning cases for scaling up. Second, effective capacity development of RSPs and encouragement of interaction among them is key to empowering them as change agents