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"Müller, Birgit"
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Dubai : Zeit für das Beste
A high-quality travel guide dedicated to Dubai, focusing on curated experiences and the city's most significant highlights. Part of the \"Zeit für das Beste\" (Time for the Best) series, the work provides a sophisticated look at the emirate's blend of traditional souks and futuristic skyscrapers. It features 50 handpicked \"highlights,\" ranging from luxury architecture and world-class shopping to cultural heritage sites and desert adventures. The guide includes practical information on dining, lodging, and logistics, accompanied by vibrant photography and detailed maps. It is designed for travelers who prioritize quality and wish to explore the best of Dubai’s dynamic urban landscape and Emirati hospitality within a structured, time.
BOOK
The potential of models and modeling for social-ecological systems research: the reference frame ModSES
Dynamic models have long been a common tool to support management of ecological and economic systems and played a prominent role in the early days of resilience research. Model applications have largely focused on policy assessment, the development of optimal management strategies, or analysis of system stability. However, modeling can serve many other purposes such as understanding system responses that emerge from complex interactions of system components, supporting participatory processes, and analyzing consequences of human behavioral complexity. The diversity of purposes, types, and applications of models offers great potential for social-ecological systems (SESs) research, but has created much confusion because modeling approaches originate from different disciplines, are based on different assumptions, focus on different levels of analysis, and use different analytical methods. This diversity makes it difficult to identify which approach is most suitable for addressing a specific question. Here, our aims are: (1) to introduce the most common types of dynamic models used in SESs research and related fields, and (2) to align these models with SESs research aims to support the selection and communication of the most suitable approach for a given study. To this end, we organize modeling approaches into a reference scheme called “modelling for social-ecological systems research” (ModSES) along two dimensions: the degree of realism and the degree of knowledge integration. These two dimensions capture key challenges of SESs research related to the need to account for context dependence and the intertwined nature of SESs as systems of humans embedded in nature across multiple scales, as well as to acknowledge different problem framings, understandings, interests, and values. We highlight the need to be aware of the potentials, limitations, and conceptual backgrounds underlying the different approaches. Critical engagement with modeling for different aims of SESs research can contribute to developing integrative understanding and action toward enhanced resilience and sustainability.
Journal Article
Dubai, Emirate, Oman : wo fantastische Luxushotels und Shopping-Malls locken ; Kamelrennen - wo man sich zum arabischen Volkssport trifft ; extra, Merian-Quiz mit Gewinnspiel ; neu, Strassenkarte zum Herausnehmen
Baden im Arabischen Golf oder Indischen Ozean, Abenteuer im Wüstensand und spektakuläre Dubai, die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate und Oman vereinen Komfort und arabisches Flair. In den Reichen von Sultan Qaboos und Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed sind Tradition und Moderne auf faszinierende Weise miteinander vereint. MERIAN live! - Fundierte Beschreibungen aller wichtigen Orte, Sehenswürdigkeiten und Museen. Sorgfältig ausgewählte Hotel- und Restaurantempfehlungen, Ausgeh- und Shoppingadressen sowie Tipps für Familien. Empfehlungen für den umweltbewussten Urlaub im Kapitel grüner reisen. 10 MERIAN-TopTen stellen die Höhepunkte der Region vor. 10 MERIAN-Tipps führen zu den unbekannten Seiten der Region. Stadtpläne von Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Al-Ain und Maskat zur leichten Orientierung.
BOOK
Using Bayesian Belief Networks to Investigate Farmer Behavior and Policy Interventions for Improved Nitrogen Management
Increasing farmers’ adoption of sustainable nitrogen management practices is crucial for improving water quality. Yet, research to date provides ambiguous results about the most important farmer-level drivers of adoption, leaving high levels of uncertainty as to how to design policy interventions that are effective in motivating adoption. Among others, farmers’ engagement in outreach or educational events is considered a promising leverage point for policy measures. This paper applies a Bayesian belief network (BBN) approach to explore the importance of drivers thought to influence adoption, run policy experiments to test the efficacy of different engagement-related interventions on increasing adoption rates, and evaluate heterogeneity of the effect of the interventions across different practices and different types of farms. The underlying data comes from a survey carried out in 2018 among farmers in the Central Valley in California. The analyses identify farm characteristics and income consistently as the most important drivers of adoption across management practices. The effect of policy measures strongly differs according to the nitrogen management practice. Innovative farmers respond better to engagement-related policy measures than more traditional farmers. Farmers with small farms show more potential for increasing engagement through policy measures than farmers with larger farms. Bayesian belief networks, in contrast to linear analysis methods, always account for the complex structure of the farm system with interdependencies among the drivers and allow for explicit predictions in new situations and various kinds of heterogeneity analyses. A methodological development is made by introducing a new validation measure for BBNs used for prediction.
Journal Article
Informal risk-sharing between smallholders may be threatened by formal insurance: Lessons from a stylized agent-based model
Microinsurance is promoted as a valuable instrument for low-income households to buffer financial losses due to health or climate-related risks. However, apart from direct positive effects, such formal insurance schemes can have unintended side effects when insured households lower their contribution to traditional informal arrangements where risk is shared through private monetary support. Using a stylized agent-based model, we assess impacts of microinsurance on the resilience of those smallholders in a social network who cannot afford this financial instrument. We explicitly include the decision behavior regarding informal transfers. We find that the introduction of formal insurance can have negative side effects even if insured households are willing to contribute to informal risk arrangements. However, when many households are simultaneously affected by a shock, e.g. by droughts or floods, formal insurance is a valuable addition to informal risk-sharing. By explicitly taking into account long-term effects of short-term transfer decisions, our study allows to complement existing empirical research. The model results underline that new insurance programs have to be developed in close alignment with established risk-coping instruments. Only then can they be effective without weakening functioning aspects of informal risk management, which could lead to increased poverty.
Journal Article
Unravelling vicious circles of land use competition and food insecurity in agropastoral rangelands
In many regions of the world, the adoption of new livelihood strategies that compete with traditional strategies is one driver of competition over land, resulting in unforeseen impacts on the livelihoods of land users and accelerating land degradation. One example is the Borana Zone in southern Ethiopia, where the expansion of crop cultivation into communal pasturelands undermines traditional livestock‐based livelihoods. The trend of pastureland conversion may be creating a vicious circle involving forage shortages, overgrazing, land degradation and an erosion of resilience as households become more vulnerable to losing their livestock and being forced to adopt crop cultivation. The mechanisms that drive the emergence of such a vicious circle, however, are still poorly understood. In this paper, we analyse the key dynamics of land use competition and its effect on smallholder food security using an agent‐based simulation model. The model is a stylized representation of current land use trends in the Borana zone and includes dynamic interactions between pastoralist livestock production, cropland expansion and household livelihoods. We take a long‐term perspective to assess the possible unsustainable side effects of cropland expansion and rangeland fragmentation. For this, we compare different scenarios of household density, cultivation restrictions and environmental conditions. In general, we find that crop cultivation provides an immediate benefit by reducing the overall number of food insecure households. However, more households experience shorter periods of food insecurity, and in the long term, those who remain food insecure experience larger consumption deficits. This leads to greater inequality in food security between households, indicating that cropland expansion can indeed set a vicious circle in motion. These results lay the ground for identifying policy and management options that promote the coexistence of livestock grazing and crop cultivation while at the same time preventing further degradation of the rangeland ecosystem. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Journal Article
The Gloss of Harmony
The Gloss of Harmony focuses on agencies of the United Nations, examining the paradox of entrusting relatively powerless and underfunded organisations with the responsibility of tackling some of the essential problems of our time. The book shows how international organisations shape the world in often unexpected and unpredictable ways. The authors of this collection look not only at the official objectives and unintended consequences of international governance but also at how international organisations involve collective and individual actors in policy making, absorb critique, attempt to neutralise political conflict and create new political fields with local actors and national governments. The Gloss of Harmony identifies the micro-social processes and complexities within multilateral organisations which have, up to now, been largely invisible. This book will have wide appeal not only to students and academics in anthropology, business studies and sociology but also to all practitioners concerned with international governance.
eBook
Multicriteria plan optimization in the hands of physicians: a pilot study in prostate cancer and brain tumors
Background
The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility of physician driven planning in intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) with a multicriteria optimization (MCO) treatment planning system and template based plan optimization. Exploiting the full planning potential of MCO navigation, this alternative planning approach intends to improve planning efficiency and individual plan quality.
Methods
Planning was retrospectively performed on 12 brain tumor and 10 post-prostatectomy prostate patients previously treated with MCO-IMRT. For each patient, physicians were provided with a template-based generated Pareto surface of optimal plans to navigate, using the beam angles from the original clinical plans. We compared physician generated plans to clinically delivered plans (created by dosimetrists) in terms of dosimetric differences, physician preferences and planning times.
Results
Plan qualities were similar, however physician generated and clinical plans differed in the prioritization of clinical goals. Physician derived prostate plans showed significantly better sparing of the high dose rectum and bladder regions (p(D1) < 0.05; D1: dose received by 1% of the corresponding structure). Physicians’ brain tumor plans indicated higher doses for targets and brainstem (p(D1) < 0.05). Within blinded plan comparisons physicians preferred the clinical plans more often (brain: 6:3 out of 12, prostate: 2:6 out of 10) (not statistically significant). While times of physician involvement were comparable for prostate planning, the new workflow reduced the average involved time for brain cases by 30%. Planner times were reduced for all cases. Subjective benefits, such as a better understanding of planning situations, were observed by clinicians through the insight into plan optimization and experiencing dosimetric trade-offs.
Conclusions
We introduce physician driven planning with MCO for brain and prostate tumors as a feasible planning workflow. The proposed approach standardizes the planning process by utilizing site specific templates and integrates physicians more tightly into treatment planning. Physicians’ navigated plan qualities were comparable to the clinical plans. Given the reduction of planning time of the planner and the equal or lower planning time of physicians, this approach has the potential to improve departmental efficiencies.
Journal Article
The dosimetric impact of stabilizing spinal implants in radiotherapy treatment planning with protons and photons: standard titanium alloy vs. radiolucent carbon‐fiber‐reinforced PEEK systems
Background Throughout the last years, carbon‐fibre‐reinforced PEEK (CFP) pedicle screw systems were introduced to replace standard titanium alloy (Ti) implants for spinal instrumentation, promising improved radiotherapy (RT) treatment planning accuracy. We compared the dosimetric impact of both implants for intensity modulated proton (IMPT) and volumetric arc photon therapy (VMAT), with the focus on uncertainties in Hounsfield unit assignment of titanium alloy. Methods Retrospective planning was performed on CT data of five patients with Ti and five with CFP implants. Carbon‐fibre‐reinforced PEEK systems comprised radiolucent pedicle screws with thin titanium‐coated regions and titanium tulips. For each patient, one IMPT and one VMAT plan were generated with a nominal relative stopping power (SP) (IMPT) and electron density (ρ) (VMAT) and recalculated onto the identical CT with increased and decreased SP or ρ by ±6% for the titanium components. Results Recalculated VMAT dose distributions hardly deviated from the nominal plans for both screw types. IMPT plans resulted in more heterogeneous target coverage, measured by the standard deviation σ inside the target, which increased on average by 7.6 ± 2.3% (Ti) vs 3.4 ± 1.2% (CFP). Larger SPs lead to lower target minimum doses, lower SPs to higher dose maxima, with a more pronounced effect for Ti screws. Conclusions While VMAT plans showed no relevant difference in dosimetric quality between both screw types, IMPT plans demonstrated the benefit of CFP screws through a smaller dosimetric impact of CT‐value uncertainties compared to Ti. Reducing metal components in implants will therefore improve dose calculation accuracy and lower the risk for tumor underdosage.
Journal Article
The pricing of European non-performing real estate loan portfolios: evidence on stock market evaluation of complex asset sales
Recent empirical evidence raises doubt about the ability of financial market participants to generate information efficient valuations for capital market instruments whose cash flows are related to residual claims and dependent on real estate income. We contribute to this literature with the examination of value implications of non-performing loan (NPL) divestitures in the banking industry during the period 2012–2018. In a first step, we provide descriptive statistics of the European NPL market, which lacks transparency and publicly available basic information on portfolio size and components. We then analyze wealth effects of distressed loan sale announcements for a uniquely large transaction database with 317 NPL deals, which is largely driven by real estate collateral. Our results show positive stock market reactions for vendor banks following NPL divestitures that tend to be driven by real estate collateral and a size effect.
Journal Article