High-resolution economic evaluation of black walnut alley cropping against the maize-soybean rotation in the Midwest, USA

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Institutional change of the agricultural administration and rural associations in East Germany before and after unification

With the collapse of the socialist regime in East Germany in late 1989 and the rising political call for unification in early 1990, a radical and abrupt change of the institutional structure became necessary. Among others, the (agricultural) administration had to be totally restructured. This referred not only to substance, functions and tasks which had to be adjusted, similar to most other transition economies, to the market-economic and pluralistic democratic system, but also the whole administrative set-up had to be re-established in line with the West German system (territorial re-organisation). Hence, a new administrative system had to be built up in the East, while simultaneously the socialist one had to be dismantled. This transformation process implied the recruitment of new staff and had to be carried out in a very short period. However, different to the other transition economies, there had been strong support from the West in re-organising the administration. Overall, this institutional change seems to have been accomplished successfully as billions of Deutsch Mark could be processed by the agricultural administration in 1990 in order to avoid an imminent collapse of the agricultural sector. In addition, the new administration also comprised the set-up of a specialised agency in charge of state property. This office while originally anticipated to last for a short period only, still operates today. Similarly, the organisations representing the agricultural population had to be re-organised. The re-organisation of the German Farmers' Union is of special prominence as both German parts were representing completely different agricultural models. Nevertheless, this is the only important organisation at national level where East Germans could stay in decision-making positions after unification. This had severe repercussions when shaping transformation policies affecting the agricultural sector in East Germany during the 1990s. -- Der Zusammenbruch des sozialistischen Regimes Ende 1989 sowie der immer lauter werdenden Ruf nach politischer Einheit seit Beginn 1990 bedingte einen schnellen und radikalen Bruch der ostdeutschen Institutionen. Dieser Bruch umfasste auch eine komplette Neuausrichtung der (landwirtschaftlichen) Verwaltung. Ähnlich wie in den anderen Transformationsländern Mittel- und Osteuropas mussten die Inhalte, Funktionen und Aufgaben entsprechend den Anforderungen einer demokratischen Gesellschaft sowie der Marktwirtschaft angepasst werden. Darüber hinaus musste jedoch die Verwaltungsstruktur Ostdeutschland dem verwaltungsmäßigen (territorialen) Aufbau Westdeutschland angepasst werden. In der Praxis bedeutete dies, dass die sozialistische Struktur abgebaut und aufgelöst, während gleichzeitig eine neue aufgebaut wurde. Dieser Prozess bedingte auch die komplett neue Einstellung von Personal, obwohl Ehemalige sich neu bewerben konnten. Der Zeitrahmen für diese Transformation war extrem begrenzt. Im Unterschied zu den anderen Transformationsländern konnte hierbei jedoch auf die massive Unterstützung durch Westdeutschland zurückgegriffen werden. Zurückblickend ist diese Transformation der Agrarverwaltung sehr erfolgreich verlaufen, da in dieser Periode ohne nennenswerte Probleme Milliarden von DM an die landwirtschaftlichen Betriebe ausgereicht wurden, um den drohenden Zusammenbruch der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion zu verhindern. Die landwirtschaftliche Verwaltung musste jedoch nicht nur transformiert werden, sondern es wurden neue Veraltungseinheiten geschaffen, besonders um das Staatseigentum an Grund und Boden mit dem Ziel einer raschen Privatisierung zu verwalten. Allerdings erhielt diese Verwaltungseinheit, die ursprünglich nur auf kurze Zeit ausgelegt war, im Laufe der Jahre einen permanenten Charakter. Neben der Verwaltung mussten sich auch die landwirtschaftlichen Verbände neu organisieren. Von besonderer Bedeutung war die Vereinigung und Neuausrichtung des Deutschen Bauernverbandes, da beide Ursprungsverbände ein völlig konträres landwirtschaftliches Leitbild vertraten. Dies ist jedoch der einzig bedeutende Verband Deutschlands, in dem ostdeutsche Personen nach der Vereinigung an der Verbandsspitze verblieben sind. Diese Konstellation hatte tiefgreifende Auswirkungen auf die Ausgestaltung der Agrarstrukturpolitik in Ostdeutschland während der ersten Jahre nach der Vereinigung.Transition,agricultural administration,rural associations,farmers' union,unification,Germany.,Transformation,Agrarverwaltung,ländliche Verbände,Bauernverband,Vereinigung,Deutschland.

The Transformation of the Agricultural Administration in East Germany Before and After Unification

With the collapse of the socialist regime in East Germany in late 1989 and the rising political call for unification in early 1990, a deep change of the institutional structure became necessary. The (agricultural) administration had to be totally restructured. This referred not only to substance, functions and tasks which had to be adjusted – similar to all other transition economies - to the market-economic and pluralistic democratic system, but also the whole administrative set-up had to be re-established in line with the West German system. Hence, a new administrative system had to be built up from scratch in the East, while the socialist one had to be dismantled in a short period. Overall, this institutional change seems to have been accomplished successfully as billions of Deutsch Mark could be processed by the agricultural administration in 1990 in order to avoid an imminent collapse of the agricultural sector. This administrative transformation was characterised by few rules, but a “pioneer spirit” among the staff involved which allowed a large degree of liberty in decision-making. The staff had to improvise and act pragmatically in order to get the tasks accomplishedtransition, agricultural administration, unification, Germany, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Automated Extraction of Biomarkers for Alzheimer's Disease from Brain Magnetic Resonance Images

In this work, different techniques for the automated extraction of biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease (AD) from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are proposed. The described work forms part of PredictAD (www.predictad.eu), a joined European research project aiming at the identification of a unified biomarker for AD combining different clinical and imaging measurements. Two different approaches are followed in this thesis towards the extraction of MRI-based biomarkers: (I) the extraction of traditional morphological biomarkers based on neuronatomical structures and (II) the extraction of data-driven biomarkers applying machine-learning techniques. A novel method for a unified and automated estimation of structural volumes and volume changes is proposed. Furthermore, a new technique that allows the low-dimensional representation of a high-dimensional image population for data analysis and visualization is described. All presented methods are evaluated on images from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), providing a large and diverse clinical database. A rigorous evaluation of the power of all identified biomarkers to discriminate between clinical subject groups is presented. In addition, the agreement of automatically derived volumes with reference labels as well as the power of the proposed method to measure changes in a subject's atrophy rate are assessed. The proposed methods compare favorably to state-of-the art techniques in neuroimaging in terms of accuracy, robustness and run-time

Determining the HI content of galaxies via intensity mapping cross-correlations

We propose an innovative method for measuring the neutral hydrogen (HI) content of an optically-selected spectroscopic sample of galaxies through cross-correlation with HI intensity mapping measurements. We show that the HI-galaxy cross-power spectrum contains an additive shot noise term which scales with the average HI brightness temperature of the optically-selected galaxies, allowing constraints to be placed on the average HI mass per galaxy. This approach can estimate the HI content of populations too faint to directly observe through their 21cm emission over a wide range of redshifts. This cross-correlation, as a function of optical luminosity or colour, can be used to derive HI-scaling relations. We demonstrate that this signal will be detectable by cross-correlating upcoming Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) observations with existing optically-selected samples. We also use semi-analytic simulations to verify that the HI mass can be successfully recovered by our technique in the range M_HI > 10^8 M_solar, in a manner independent of the underlying power spectrum shape. We conclude that this method is a powerful tool to study galaxy evolution, which only requires a single intensity mapping dataset to infer complementary HI gas information from existing optical and infra-red observations.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, submitted to MNRA

Renewable energy and its impact on agricultural and rural development: Findings of a comparative study in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe

Rising energy prices for fossil fuels, the unreliable supply of energy imports during the last winters and - concerning the 12 new members states (NMS) - the demand by the European Union (EU) for developing National Renewable Energy Action Plans have stimulated the national discussion and political action on renewable energy (RE) among all European countries. Particularly among the 12 NMS the share of RE has increased during the last years. Among the candidate and potential candidate countries (CC and PCC) the discussion on RE has just started. When looking at the impact of RE on agricultural and rural development the effects are relatively small. An expansion of rape seed cultivation and, to a smaller extent, of the production of wood pellets could be observed. But overall the impact of RE on agricultural and rural income and employment seems to be marginal up to now. Whether it will be so in the future, depends on national policies and support programme as none of the various types of RE is competitive to fossil fuels for the time being. -- Die öffentliche Diskussion sowie die politischen Maßnahmen im Hinblick auf erneuerbare Energien haben im Laufe der vergangenen Jahre bei allen europäischen Staaten erheblich zugenommen. Die Gründe liegen bei den stetig steigenden Preisen für fossile Energieträger, den unzuverlässigen Lieferungen in den vergangenen Wintern sowie - besonders bei den 12 Neuen Mitgliedsstaaten (NMS) der Europäischen Union (EU) - die verbindliche Maßgabe, einen Nationalen Aktionsplan für Erneuerbare Energien zu entwickeln. Besonders innerhalb der 12 NMS hat der Anteil der erneuerbaren Energie am Gesamtenergieverbrauch zugenommen. Allerdings sind die Auswirkungen der erweiterten Nutzung von erneuerbaren Energien auf die landwirtschaftliche und ländliche Entwicklung bis dato relativ gering. Lediglich eine Ausweitung des Rapsanbau sowie in einem geringerem Maße von Holzpellets war zu beobachten. Die Auswirkungen auf Einkommen und Beschäftigung sind jedoch (noch) marginal. Inwieweit sich dies in der Zukunft ändern wird, hängt von den nationalen Politiken und Unterstützungsprogrammen ab, da bis jetzt keine Art der erneuerbaren Energien gegenüber den fossilen Brennstoffen konkurrenzfähig ist.Renewable energy,comparative survey,agricultural and rural development,New members states of the EU,candidate and potential candidate countries,Erneuerbare Energien,vergleichende Analyse,landwirtschaftliche und ländliche Entwicklung,Neue Mitgliedsstaaten sowie (potenzielle) Beitrittsländer der EU.

STRUCTURAL SOCIAL CAPITAL AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE: FINDINGS OF EMPIRICAL FARM DATA IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

With the change of the political regime in Central and Eastern Europe, both managers of corporate farms and newly established private farmers had to adjust to the rules of the market economy. Among both groups, some are economically more successful than others. In general, a varying adoption of production factors is identified as being of influence. Whether their ability to collaborate with other farms is an additional factor which has been discussed under the concept of social capital since quite some time will be analyzed in this paper. Based on the findings of a survey among a sample of 62 farms in the Czech Republic it can be shown by adopting factor and multiple regression analysis that social capital is indeed a significant factor determining the level of agricultural income.corporate farms, private farms, social capital, cross sectional models, Czech Republic, Farm Management,

Social capital among agricultural producers in the Czech Republic: its impact on economic performance

The change of the political regime from the socialist central planning system to a market economy and pluralistic society required the reorganisation not only of agricultural production, but also of the organisations in their support. In the Czech Republic, agricultural production is characterised by a dualistic structure in these days, i.e. private farmers on the one side and corporate farms on the other. However, among both groups some had been economically more successful than others. In general, a varying adoption of production factors, i.e. land, labour and capital is identified as being of influence. Whether their ability to collaborate with other farms is an additional factor, which has been discussed under the concept of social capital since quite some time, will be analysed in this paper. Based on the findings of a survey among a sample of 62 farms by adopting factor and multiple regression analysis it can be deduced that social capital is indeed a significant factor determining the level of farm income. -- G E R M A N V E R S I O N: Der Systemwechsel von 1989 erforderte auch in der Tschechischen Republik eine Neuorganisation nicht nur der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion, sondern auch der Organisationen zur Unterstützung der landwirtschaftlichen Produzenten. In diesen Tagen ist die landwirtschaftliche Produktion durch eine ausgeprägte Zweiteilung charakterisiert: Große juristische Personen auf der einen Seite sowie relativ kleine Privatbetriebe auf der anderen. Allerdings sind innerhalb dieser beiden Gruppen große Unterschiede in Hinblick auf den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg zu beobachten. Gewöhnlich wird dies mit einem unterschiedlichen Einsatz der traditionellen Produktionsfaktoren Boden, Arbeit und Kapital erklärt. Ob die Fähigkeit, sich mit anderen Betrieben auszutauschen und zusammenzuarbeiten, einen zusätzlichen Erklärungsfaktor darstellt, wird seit einiger Zeit unter dem Konzept des Sozialkapitals diskutiert. Dies wird hier analysiert. An Hand einer Befragung von 62 tschechischen Betriebsleitern kann mit Hilfe einer Faktoren- und Regressionsanalyse nachgewiesen werden, dass Sozialkapital einen wichtigen Einflussfaktor auf das landwirtschaftliche Einkommen darstellt.Corporate farms,private farms,social capital,cross sectional models,Czech Republic,Landwirtschaftliche Großbetriebe,Familienbetriebe,Sozialkapital,Tschechische Republik.

Finding a Better Way: Choosing and Explaining Alternative Plans

Many users of interactive computing environments have been confronted with the dilemma: "I know there must be a better way to do what I'm doing, but 1 don't know what it is." This paper describes a solution to this problem and several related ones through an automated consultant called GENIE, a system that answers users' questions about how to accomplish tasks. Our approach is based on the principle that the best plan to tell a user is not always computationally optimal, but is the plan most suitable to what the user already knows in the current context. To find a best plan, GENIE explores a declarative representation of goals that explicitly encodes alternative plans for goals, and the semantic relationships between alternatives. Both an Expert and a User model are represented in this manner, which allows us to abandon stereotypes of user expertise and functional difficulty of the domain constructs. The criteria for each choice of sub-step of a plan is based on two sets of heuristics applied to the semantic relationships encoded between plans. The first set is dependent upon what the user is currently doing, the second on what the user has done in the past