Sustainability evaluation: diverging routes recombined? Tasks for a new Working Group on Modelling and Evaluation for Sustainability

In making practical decisions on technologies and products and related strategies and policies, all sustainability effects are involved, from global warming and income distribution to economic growth and habitat destruction. Judging the relative importance of these different effects, that is their evaluation, is unavoidable. Reality just is that complex. The only choice is if the judgement is made implicitly or explicitly. In the environment domain of sustainability there are at least four basically different approaches to evaluation and the underlying modelling, and at least one approach focussing on efficiency only, all with diverging outcomes. A working group involving different scientific societies is being set up to actively relate the different approaches and to see how at a practical level they might be reconciled.     

Sustainability Victoria: influencing resource use,towards zero waste and sustainable production and consumption

Sustainability Victoria is a State Government agency working with Victorians to use resources more sustainably and to reduce the everyday environmental impacts of communities and business. Sustainability Victoria was formed by the Victorian Government from EcoRecycle Victoria and the Sustainable Energy Authority, in October 2005.This paper discusses Victoria's past successes with recycling and cleaner production, the lessons learnt from these programs and how Sustainability Victoria is stimulating behaviour change across the production and consumption cycle through the establishment of innovative partnerships, towards the goal of high factor improvements in resource efficiency.     

Sustainability Potential Analysis (SPA) of landfills—a systemic approach: initial application towards a legal landfill assessment

Assessing landfills in terms of sustainable development (SD) is a difficult task. Landfills might, for example, remain reactive for hundreds or even thousands of years, a fact that conflicts with the fundamental SD principle of inter-generative equity. The Sustainability Potential Analysis (SPA) is a comprehensive assessment approach that aims at assessing the potential of a system to hinder or support SD from a systemic perspective. In this paper, we present an initial operationalization of this approach for a pragmatic legal landfill assessment and its application to assess two prototypic Swiss landfills as part of a pilot study. Thereby, the six generic criteria of SPA are specified using 18 Functional Key Variables (FKVs), such as “control of pollutant release” or “resilience to intended human impacts.” The first results from the pilot study indicate that SPA and its generic criteria provide a purposeful guiding framework for achieving a systemic and comprehensive SD assessment that seems (i) to be feasible for practical application, (ii) sensitive for relevant SD issues, and (iii) transparent for the addressees of the assessment results.     

高职高专教育理念和就业观念探讨

本文通过对我国目前高职高专大学生就业形势的全面分析,站在教育思想与时俱进的高度,论述了我国高职高专教育以市场为杠杆,以就业为导向的必然发展态势,阐述了目前我国高职高专教育理念和学生就业观念急需转变的必要性。     

A new look at Op art: towards a simple explanation of illusory motion

Vivid motion illusions created by some Op art paintings are at the centre of a lively scientific debate about possible mechanisms that might underlie these phenomena. Here we review emerging evidence from a new approach that combines perceptual judgements of the illusion and observations of eye movements with simulations of the induced optic flow. This work suggests that the small involuntary saccades which participants make when viewing such Op art patterns would generate an incoherent distribution of motion signals that resemble the perceptual effects experienced by the observers. The combined experimental and computational evidence supports the view that the illusion is indeed caused by involuntary image displacements picked up by low-level motion detectors, and further suggests that coherent motion signals are crucial to perceive a stable world.     

江西省高等教育的发展比较与对策研究

一个国家或地区的高等教育现状,在很大程度上决定这个国家或地区20年后的人力资源状况,进而决定它的经济社会发展状况。1999年我国等教育扩招以来,江西高校有了较快的发展,但办学层次低、优质高等教育资源稀缺、发展不足等问题没有得到根本改变。随着我国经济社会发展方式的转型,创新成为发展的主要动力,高校也逐渐从经济社会发展舞台的边缘走向中心,承担起将知识运用于发展的引擎作用。我们要以未来20年江西经济社会发展需要怎样的高等教育来谋划江西高等教育的发展,努力优化江西高校结构,提升整体办学水平。     

《全球化世界中的城市:治理、绩效与可持续发展》

世界银行于今年9月出版了《全球化世界中的城市：治理、绩效与可持续发展》（Citiesina Globalizing World Governance,Performance and Sustainability）中文版报告,该报告探讨了全球化时代城市发展的最新趋势．指明了城市政府可以采取哪些措施来吸引投资和克服面临的经济挑战。     

高职教育视角下“通识教育”的地位和作用

随着科学技术和社会经济的飞速发展,社会对人才提出了越来越高的要求。作为高等教育重要部分的高等职业院校,必须适应时代发展的需要,培养出具有合理知识结构和均衡能力结构的高素质人才。本文介绍了通识教育的概念,分析了当今中国对通识教育理解的误区,阐述了通识教育在高职教育中的地位和作用,有效地证明了通识教育是高职教育不可缺少的一部分。     

Agro-ecological engineering in China: a way towards sustainableagriculture

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Sustainability in higher education: what is happening?

This special issue focuses upon diverse facets of Education for Sustainability. The 33 documents within it are from authors in institutions of higher education from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, Central America and North America. Some authors use discipline-specific foci to foster inclusion of sustainable development (SD) within their educational programs. Many other authors report on their experiences in working within interdisciplinary teams to re-focus education, research and outreach to help accelerate the rate at which educational institutions foster and underpin the values, knowledge and actions to help their students transform society from unsustainable to sustainable patterns.The authors of these articles underscore the importance of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development that began on January 2005 to be an important framework and a catalyst for increasing SD educational, research and outreach efforts within all academic institutions, worldwide.The developers of this special issue hope that the lessons learned by the authors of these articles will help all in envisioning the way forward and in overcoming the resistance to change within and outside of academia as we work together on our joint journey toward sustainable societies.     

Panarchy and community resilience: Sustainability science and policy implications

How does the resilience concept of nested relationships (panarchy) contribute to sustainability science and policy? Resilience at a particular level of organization, the community level in our case, is influenced by internal processes at that level. But it is also impacted by actions at lower levels of organization (individuals, households), and by drivers of change originating at higher levels (national level policies, globalized market forces). We focus on community level social-ecological systems, looking upwards and downwards from there. Our objective is to explore the connections of the community to other levels, the ways in which community resilience is impacted, and the implications of this for sustainability. Conventional disciplines specialize at different levels, a barrier to investigating multi-level interactions. Use of the panarchy concept helps contribute to the interdisciplinary understanding of resilience at the community (and other levels) by drawing attention to cross-scale relationships. From the effect of individual leadership to the implication of pandemics that move swiftly across levels, examples illustrate a diversity of ways in which community resilience is shaped in a multi-level world.     

Sustainability and environmental enhancement in changing circumstances

Natural environment has endured fast economic growth and population explosion since the 20th century, which has brought a lot of problems. Global environmental change, soil erosion, land desertification, ozone layer depletion, bio-diversity reduction and persistent toxic and harmful pollutants are among the major environmental challenges.     

Sustainability and environmental enhancement in changing cirumstances

Natural environment has endured fast economic growth and population explosion sine the 20th century,which has soil erosion,land desertification,ozone layer depletion,bio-diversity reduction and persistent toxic and harmful pollutants are among the major environmental challenges.     

Biodiversity,profitability, and vegetation structure in a Mexican coffee agroecosystem

We studied the relationships of bird and small mammal species richness, composition, and abundance to vegetation structure and economic profitability across a coffee intensification gradient in central Veracruz, Mexico. We conducted 2 years of point count censuses for summer resident birds, 2 years of Sherman live trapping for small mammals, and gathered vegetation structure data at 147 sampling points distributed over 16 sites spanning a cultivation intensification gradient. We calculated net annual revenue per hectare as an index of profitability from economic and management data collected during interviews with plantation owners/managers. Both the species richness and abundance of forest-affiliated birds were significantly greater in floristically and structurally diverse ‘bajo monte’ coffee and forest compared with commercial polyculture coffee, which was, in turn, significantly richer than statistically indistinguishable specialized shade and sun coffee. Mammal capture rates were extremely low at all but two sites. Forest bird species richness and abundance were explained by multiple linear regression models that included statistically significant effects of shade cover, percent of trees with epiphytes, and canopy height. We found no clear relationship between profitability and biodiversity, with biodiverse bajo monte coffee plantations ranking among the most profitable under all price scenarios. The high profitability of biodiverse bajo monte coffee systems was not dependent on the inclusion of long-term environmental costs or premium pricing systems. Our results demonstrate that high-biodiversity coffee cultivation can be compatible with high profitability, and has significant potential for conserving biodiversity in coffee-growing regions, but only as a substitute for low-biodiversity coffee cultivation, not forest.     

Sustainability issues in sheet metal forming processes: an overview

Environmental sustainability in manufacturing is nowadays an urgent and remarkable issue and the main concerns are related to more efficient use of materials and energy.In sheet metal forming processes there is still a lack of knowledge in this field mainly due to the need of a proper modelling of sustainability issues and factors to be taken into account. The aim of this paper is mainly to underline the state of the art from a forming point of view about the sustainability contributions offered in any phase of a product life cycle. Actually, a lack in terms of comprehensive contributions is present in the technical literature, thus, the authors try to give a sort of holistic vision aimed to provide basic guidelines in order to help in identifying the possible solutions with regard to all the phases of a forming product life cycle. The main attention was paid to sheet metal forming technologies. The paper gives an overview of the main topics concerning sheet metal forming problems related to energy and resource efficiency with the aim to stress the principal contributions which may derive from such processes to environmental performances of manufacturing.     

关于高职院校学生职业道德教育的探讨

近年来,国内高等职业教育已经取得很大的发展成就,但在职业教育发展过程中,我国高职院校德育中的重要组成部分——职业道德教育,还没有得到足够的重视。为了促使教育工作者对高职院校学生职业道德教育的关注,进一步促进高职院校学生职业道德教育的发展,通过阐述高职院校学生职业道德教育的有关理念,分析目前高职院校对学生的职业道德教育的现实性意义及存在的主要问题,提出促进高职院校学生职业道德教育的相关建议。     

周宗莲关于英国高等工程教育的论述

周宗莲是近代中国著名的水利学家、教育家,早年留学英国专习水利、考察英国高等工程教育。通过其研究发现,抗战之前英国已构建灵活完善的教育制度,而高等工程教育学理短实习长,讲义教材紧密联系实际,注重学生专业基础与实践经验养成,专业考试制度严格,学校、企业与工程学会等合作共同培养人才的独特教育模式,对我国工程教育的改革与发展具有重要的启示:一、工程学理应紧密联系中国工程实际,学以致用;二、与工程学会等合作办学,以提升整体教育水平;三、工程学理方式多样化,精细化培养专业人才。     

新形势下对高等数学教学改革的思考

本文讨论了新形势下对高等数学教学提出的要求,以及原有的高等数学教学体系存在的矛盾,进而提出了对于高等数学进行教学改革的几点建议.     

库里提巴市的可持续性与规划程序

可持续性是一个关于人与自然或社会与环境平衡的概念。根据自身历史、地理或社会文化背景的不同,每个人或社会对这一概念的理解也不相同。虽然在理论上缺乏一致性,但是可持续发展概念一直存在于社会的自然与人为空间适应和变化过程中,以及以生存和发展为目的的生产过程中。当涉及到城市或城市空间时,这些过程反映了一个社会认可、支配和确定保证满足基本需求范围的方式,同时确保城市随着时间的发展而生存下来。