Economic Valuation of Environmental and Resource Costs - The Case of Germany

In the implementation of the EC Water Framework Directive, the concept of environmental and resource costs applies above all to the cost recovery of water services. Article 9 of the Directive stipulates that „Member States shall take account of the principle of recovery of the costs of water services, including environmental and resource costs.“ However, environmental and resource costs were not sufficiently defined in the Directive. In order to further clarify the concept of environmental and resource costs, and in order to discuss their assessment in practice, a European working group (DG Eco 2) was set up in September 2003. The paper “Economic Valuation of Environmental and Resource Costs: The Case of Germany” first summarises some of some main results of the DG Eco 2 working group. It then moves on to describe how environmental and resource costs are currently dealt with in Germany, and examines how the results of the DG Eco 2 can be put to use in the German context. A further point is the link between the assessment of environmental and resource costs and the selection of cost-effective combinations of measures. Two options are discussed here: first, addressing the question whether and how information obtained through the selection of measures can be used to assess environmental and resources costs; and secondly, discussing how the selected measures themselves can help to achieve cost recovery for environmental and resource costs. In this way, the results of the DG Eco 2 are linked to a previous research project, in which Ecologic developed a handbook for the cost-effective selection of measures under the WFD.

The Usage Dictionary of Anglicisms in Selected European Languages : a report on progress, problems and prospects

This is a short report on the UDASEL project, its field of study, objectives, methodology, and the structure and internal organization of information in the dictionary entries. Some specimens are included

Varieties of English world-wide : where we stand

The paper summarizes the state of scholarly research in one of the most recent and most stimulating branches of sociolinguistics. Criteria which help to show whether a variety (or an utterance) is English are discussed in detail before the distinctiveness of individual Englishes is focused on. Regular developments of New Englishes -innovation, retention and rejection of linguistic features- are treated with data from the U.S., Canada, Australia and South Africa, with particular attention given to pronunciation and lexis. Forms and functions of English are then treated with regard to second- and foreign-language countries. Finally, there is a critical look at what we have achieved and what remains to be done

The 33 kDa Protein of the Oxygen-Evolving Complex: a Multi-Gene Family in Tomato

A cDNA was isolated by chance from tomato which had a high similarity to a cDNA clone from potato known to code for the 33 kDa protein of the oxygen-evolving complex [van Spanje et al. (1991) Plant Mol. Biol. 17: 157]. The sequence of a previously described partial cDNA clone from tomato [Ko et al. (1990) Plant Mol. Biol. 14: 217] which has also a high similarity but is not identical to the sequence described here indicates that tomato contains at least two genes coding for 33 kDa proteins per haploid genome. This conclusion is supported by Southern blot analysis. The tissue specific expression of the corresponding genes is describe

Coordinate-wise Powers of Algebraic Varieties

We introduce and study coordinate-wise powers of subvarieties of $\mathbb{P}^n$, i.e. varieties arising from raising all points in a given subvariety of $\mathbb{P}^n$ to the $r$-th power, coordinate by coordinate. This corresponds to studying the image of a subvariety of $\mathbb{P}^n$ under the quotient of $\mathbb{P}^n$ by the action of the finite group $\mathbb{Z}_r^{n+1}$. We determine the degree of coordinate-wise powers and study their defining equations, particularly for hypersurfaces and linear spaces. Applying these results, we compute the degree of the variety of orthostochastic matrices and determine iterated dual and reciprocal varieties of power sum hypersurfaces. We also establish a link between coordinate-wise squares of linear spaces and the study of real symmetric matrices with a degenerate eigenspectrum.Comment: 26 page