Citizens contributing in landscape in the Netherlands

With the continuing loss of landscape elements and open space, landscape management is gaining importance in tandem with the design of acceptable private and voluntary financing arrangements. Here, we analyze the awareness, involvement, socio-demographic characteristics and the contribution of citizens regarding the landscape. The contribution of citizens has been classified into three fields of activities. Data analysis is based on a survey among 1.060 inhabitants in and around three designated peri-urban areas in the Netherlands. The results show that these areas are well known, albeit on a limited scale. Most of the stated willingness of the inhabitants to contribute to the landscape has been related with their socio-demographic characteristics and to a less extent with their involvement with the landscape. To increase the willingness of citizens to contribute to the landscape the communication strategy may be improved

RESILIENCE OF SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS IN EUROPEAN RURAL AREAS: THEORY AND PROSPECTS

In today’s world, rural areas are confronted with a spectrum of changes. These changes have multiple characters, varying from changes in ecosystem conditions to socioeconomic impacts, such as food- and financial crises. They present serious problems to rural management and largely affect future perspectives of rural areas. Rural resilience refers to the capacity of a rural region to adapt to changing external circumstances in such a way that a satisfactory standard of living is maintained, while coping with its inherent ecological, economic and social vulnerability. Rural resilience describes how rural areas are affected by external shocks and how it influences system dynamics. This paper further eradicates on this concept, by exploring in detail what the importance is of resilience theory within rural areas. An answer is tried to be given to the question how to detect resilience in rural areas, by reviewing the existing literature and to the question how to enhance resilient rural development. Finally questions are formulated for further research within the field of rural resilience.Resilience, social-ecological systems, rural development, complex adaptive systems, system dynamics, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Pion form factor with twisted mass QCD

The pion form factor is calculated using quenched twisted mass QCD with beta=6.0 and maximal twisting angle omega=pi/2. Two pion masses and several values of momentum transfer are considered. The momentum averaging procedure of Frezzotti and Rossi is used to reduce lattice spacing errors, and numerical results are consistent with the expected O(a) improvement.Comment: Talk presented at Lattice2004(spectrum), 3 pages, one reference added and one typo fixe

Current driven switching of magnetic layers

The switching of magnetic layers is studied under the action of a spin current in a ferromagnetic metal/non-magnetic metal/ferromagnetic metal spin valve. We find that the main contribution to the switching comes from the non-equilibrium exchange interaction between the ferromagnetic layers. This interaction defines the magnetic configuration of the layers with minimum energy and establishes the threshold for a critical switching current. Depending on the direction of the critical current, the interaction changes sign and a given magnetic configuration becomes unstable. To model the time dependence of the switching process, we derive a set of coupled Landau-Lifshitz equations for the ferromagnetic layers. Higher order terms in the non-equilibrium exchange coupling allow the system to evolve to its steady-state configuration.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

The state space for two qutrits has a phase space structure in its core

We investigate the state space of bipartite qutrits. For states which are locally maximally mixed we obtain an analog of the ``magic'' tetrahedron for bipartite qubits--a magic simplex W. This is obtained via the Weyl group which is a kind of ``quantization'' of classical phase space. We analyze how this simplex W is embedded in the whole state space of two qutrits and discuss symmetries and equivalences inside the simplex W. Because we are explicitly able to construct optimal entanglement witnesses we obtain the border between separable and entangled states. With our method we find also the total area of bound entangled states of the parameter subspace under intervestigation. Our considerations can also be applied to higher dimensions.Comment: 3 figure

Deep Burst Denoising

Noise is an inherent issue of low-light image capture, one which is exacerbated on mobile devices due to their narrow apertures and small sensors. One strategy for mitigating noise in a low-light situation is to increase the shutter time of the camera, thus allowing each photosite to integrate more light and decrease noise variance. However, there are two downsides of long exposures: (a) bright regions can exceed the sensor range, and (b) camera and scene motion will result in blurred images. Another way of gathering more light is to capture multiple short (thus noisy) frames in a "burst" and intelligently integrate the content, thus avoiding the above downsides. In this paper, we use the burst-capture strategy and implement the intelligent integration via a recurrent fully convolutional deep neural net (CNN). We build our novel, multiframe architecture to be a simple addition to any single frame denoising model, and design to handle an arbitrary number of noisy input frames. We show that it achieves state of the art denoising results on our burst dataset, improving on the best published multi-frame techniques, such as VBM4D and FlexISP. Finally, we explore other applications of image enhancement by integrating content from multiple frames and demonstrate that our DNN architecture generalizes well to image super-resolution