Oil pest in the rainforest? The oil palm boom in indonesia and malaysia

ABSTRACT During the last decades no other tropical crop has been similarly successful as the oil palm. This is particularly true for Indonesia and Malaysia, that contribute about 85% to the total palm oil production of the world. Palm oil and palm kernel oil are important ingredients for the various foodstuffs and also play a leading role in the oleochemical industry. The main reasons for this success are the manifold usability, the high productivity and the reasonable price. Economists and politicians praise the enormous potential of the palm oil industry for economic growth and food security, as well as for rural employment and poverty alleviation in developing countries. There are, however, also critical voices: the oil palm boom is made responsible for the destruction of rainforests, the decrease of biodiversity, the pollution of rivers, the rise of forest fires and the displacement of local communities. The present article aims at discussing and evaluating these two positions. Keywords: Oil palms, palm oil, nucleus estates, rain forest destruction, rural employmen

Divide and Conquer - Organizing Component-based Adaptation

This paper introduces a divide and conquer approach for organizing the adaptation of distributed applications in a potentially large number of interacting middleware instances. In such an environment, a centralistic and static adaptation reasoning i) is inadequate and ii) gives the same priority to all applications. The divide and conquer method aims at minimizing the interference between running applications, allowing users to weight the priority of applications, and organizing the adaptation and the reasoning about the adaptation in a decentralized and flexible way

"InstantSocial" – Implementing a Distributed Mobile Multi-user Application with Adaptation Middleware

In this position paper we explore how new capabilites of mobile devices could be used to setup distributed multi-user mobile applications with potentially high interest for end users. We describe an example of such an application by transposing Internet social network trends and principles to a mobile ad hoc environment. Then we present a tentative design and implentation sketch of this application in terms of the MUSIC context-aware adaptation middleware we are currently developing

Gallensäuren als wohlfeile Bausteine für die Synthese von Cephalostatinanaloga

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Permeability of porous materials determined from the Euler characteristic

We study the permeability of quasi two-dimensional porous structures of randomly placed overlapping monodisperse circular and elliptical grains. Measurements in microfluidic devices and lattice Boltzmann simulations demonstrate that the permeability is determined by the Euler characteristic of the conducting phase. We obtain an expression for the permeability that is independent of the percolation threshold and shows agreement with experimental and simulated data over a wide range of porosities. Our approach suggests that the permeability explicitly depends on the overlapping probability of grains rather than their shape

Direct and dynamic detection of HIV-1 in living cells.

In basic and applied HIV research, reliable detection of viral components is crucial to monitor progression of infection. While it is routine to detect structural viral proteins in vitro for diagnostic purposes, it previously remained impossible to directly and dynamically visualize HIV in living cells without genetic modification of the virus. Here, we describe a novel fluorescent biosensor to dynamically trace HIV-1 morphogenesis in living cells. We generated a camelid single domain antibody that specifically binds the HIV-1 capsid protein (CA) at subnanomolar affinity and fused it to fluorescent proteins. The resulting fluorescent chromobody specifically recognizes the CA-harbouring HIV-1 Gag precursor protein in living cells and is applicable in various advanced light microscopy systems. Confocal live cell microscopy and super-resolution microscopy allowed detection and dynamic tracing of individual virion assemblies at the plasma membrane. The analysis of subcellular binding kinetics showed cytoplasmic antigen recognition and incorporation into virion assembly sites. Finally, we demonstrate the use of this new reporter in automated image analysis, providing a robust tool for cell-based HIV research

Proceedings of the First International DisCoTec Workshop on Context-aware Adaptation Mechanisms for Pervasive and Ubiquitous Services (CAMPUS 2008) Divide and Conquer -Organizing Component-based Adaptation in Distributed Environments Divide and Conquer -O

Abstract: This paper introduces a divide and conquer approach for organizing the adaptation of distributed applications in a potentially large number of interacting middleware instances. In such an environment, a centralistic and static adaptation reasoning i) is inadequate and ii) gives the same priority to all applications. The divide and conquer method aims at minimizing the interference between running applications, allowing users to weight the priority of applications, and organizing the adaptation and the reasoning about the adaptation in a decentralized and flexible way