Organic Agriculture and Fair Trade – Two Sides of One and the Same Coin

Worldwide about 46.000 farmers cultivate an area of more than 275.000 hectares in accordance with Naturland standards for organic agricultures. The call for the social sustainability of organic products is nothing new and for Naturland it has been part and parcel from the very first

Does using the ecosystem services concept provoke the risk of assigning virtual prices instead of real values to nature? Some reflections on the benefit of ecosystem services for planning and policy consulting.

This forum article intends to discuss the question if using the ecosystem services concept in planning, management and decision-making can impair nature conservation objectives by hiding the intrinsic values of nature through overemphasizing monetary aspects in environmental assessments. The conclusion is drawn that using ecosystem services in a holistic social-ecological system understanding would help to overcome justified criticisms of a too narrow perspective on the real values of nature. The article is referring to and reflecting some thoughts and criticism of “Concerns about the use of ES as a tool for nature conservation: From misleading concepts to providing a price for nature, but not a value” by Morelli and Moller (2015)

A Dualist Account of Phenomenal Concepts

The phenomenal concept strategy is considered a powerful response to anti-physicalist arguments. This physicalist strategy aims to provide a satisfactory account of dualist intuitions without being committed to ontological dualist conclusions. In this paper I first argue that physicalist accounts of phenomenal concepts fail to explain their cognitive role. Second, I develop an encapsulation account of phenomenal concepts that best explains their particularities. Finally, I argue that the encapsulation account, which features self-representing experiences, implies non-physical referents. Therefore, the account of phenomenal concepts that has strong explanatory power does not explain away dualist intuitions—rather, it reinforces dualism

A Cooperative Development System for an Interactive Introductory Programming Course

We present a system for a cooperative development of computer programs that was created for the lab sessions of an introductory programming course at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The system relieved the students from the tedious task of retyping programs developed by the teaching assistant and enabled them to cooperate with the teaching assistant in solving programming problems. We thus made the lab sessions more efficient and interactive and brought them closer to the spirit of active learning approaches

Cavity-enhanced second harmonic generation via nonlinear-overlap optimization

We describe an approach based on topology optimization that enables automatic discovery of wavelength-scale photonic structures for achieving high-efficiency second-harmonic generation (SHG). A key distinction from previous formulation and designs that seek to maximize Purcell factors at individual frequencies is that our method not only aims to achieve frequency matching (across an entire octave) and large radiative lifetimes, but also optimizes the equally important nonlinear--coupling figure of merit $\bar{\beta}$, involving a complicated spatial overlap-integral between modes. We apply this method to the particular problem of optimizing micropost and grating-slab cavities (one-dimensional multilayered structures) and demonstrate that a variety of material platforms can support modes with the requisite frequencies, large lifetimes $Q > 10^4$, small modal volumes $\sim (\lambda/n)^3$, and extremely large $\bar{\beta} \gtrsim 10^{-2}$, leading to orders of magnitude enhancements in SHG efficiency compared to state of the art photonic designs. Such giant $\bar{\beta}$ alleviate the need for ultra-narrow linewidths and thus pave the way for wavelength-scale SHG devices with faster operating timescales and higher tolerance to fabrication imperfections