In Germany, cash is the only unrestricted legal tender and still the most commonly used means of payment. Compared with non-cash means of payment, cash is an important corrective in payment transactions. No other non-cash means of payment achieves a similarly high level of inclusion and provides comparable protection of privacy. Nevertheless, the use of non-cash means of payment continues to increase in Germany. Card-based payment methods are of particular importance - either directly with the plastic card (debit or credit card) or with the virtual card via which non-cash payment methods are processed in the background, as is common in mobile payment and Internet payment methods.

BigTechs - large companies with established technology platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon, and Facebook - are now established players in payments. Given the increasing presence and market power of U.S. card providers and BigTechs, as well as the likely growing influence of Chinese BigTechs in payments, the question of how to preserve the European banking industry's ability to act will arise more strongly in the future.

The TAB report provides an overview of developments in payment transactions up to and including February 2021, examining and comparing the specific characteristics of cash and selected non-cash payment solutions as well as payment behavior in Germany, Sweden, and China. The brief study is rounded off by an examination of the changing power structure in payment transactions as a result of the emergence of new players and the reactions of traditional credit institutions and central banks to this.

The TAB report and the accompanying policy brief TAB-Fokus Nr. 37 (both currently only in German) are available online. An English translation of the TAB-Fokus will follow soon.

Buildings account for around 35 % of Germany's total final energy consumption. Residential buildings account for the largest share of buildings' energy consumption for heating, hot water, lighting, and cooling. From an energy and climate policy perspective, reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector is of great importance. Economical and effective solutions contributing to the"Wärmewende", the transition to sustainable heating, can also contribute significantly to reducing energy imports.

The successful transition to sustainable heating, i.e., saving thermal energy and decarbonizing heat consumption, is highly relevant for achieving Germany's energy and climate policy goals. High savings effects for the energy raw materials natural gas and heating oil are seen not only in new buildings but above all in existing residential buildings. But what savings can be achieved with the various measures? Which investments are worthwhile for building owners? Which political decisions can support the implementation of the necessary investments?

The TAB report "Energy-saving effects in the building sector" presents concrete and practical principles and options for action. The TAB report is thus not only aimed at decision-makers in politics and housing companies but can also provide owners of multi-family and single-family houses with basic orientation.

Whether in medicine, battery research, or materials science, researchers everywhere are seeking innovative substances. In the process, they can often predict the desired chemical and physical properties in great detail, right down to atomic level. However, the range of all potential chemical compounds alone is so vast that it would take years to find the appropriate substance. An interdisciplinary research group at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD) at Technische Universität Berlin has now developed an algorithm which uses AI to implement inverse chemical design and thus generate targeted molecules based on their desired properties. The research group's publication titled "Inverse design of 3d molecular structures with conditional generative neural networks" has now been published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.

The search for suitable molecules for specific medical or industrial applications is an extremely complex and expensive process. "Hypothetically, there are an incredible number of possible structures. However, only a tiny fraction possesses the specific chemical or physical properties required for a particular application," explains Dr. Kristof Schütt, BIFOLD Junior Fellow at TU Berlin. A wealth of methods has been developed in recent years capable of predicting the chemical properties and energetic states of given substances using AI. But even using these efficient methods, the search for molecules with specific properties has proven difficult in practice, as it is still necessary to search through an overwhelming number of candidates.

Agriculture is a highly technical economic sector whose production processes are based on the use of natural resources and the keeping of animals. How the increasing demands for climate protection, sustainability and animal welfare can be reconciled with the task of food security is a highly virulent question that has also repeatedly occupied TAB. Digital innovations, which are supposed to enable highly precise, data-driven agricultural production, have raised hopes of being able to better balance this area of tension. As early as 2005, precision agriculture was the subject of a TAB study - the TAB reports and Policy Briefs no. 31 and no. 32 , which have just been published, provide an updated overview of the state of digitisation in agriculture and the associated social perspectives and challenges.

The digital applications used in livestock and crop production are extremely diverse, ranging from technical hardware such as GPS control, drones, robotics and sensors to smartphone apps and cloud-based farm management software. It is often said that agriculture is a digital pioneer, which may be true if the technology on offer alone is taken as the yardstick. But the extent to which innovative digital technology is actually already being used on farms is still unclear due to a lack of reliable surveys. A significant application hurdle for many farms is the relatively high investment costs, which, in conjunction with economies of scale, mean that the economic use of many digital processes can only be expected for larger farms. In view of the existing structural change in agriculture, an important political task is to ensure equitable access to these technologies. Another controversial issue is who should have access to agricultural data and be able to profit from its commercial use. Many farmers are concerned that the existing monopolization tendencies in the upstream and downstream stages of the value chain (and thus the dependencies of smaller farms) could be further strengthened.

The central promise of digitization is to be able to control agricultural production processes more efficiently, which in principle can lead to both environmental benefits and operational savings. However, the magnitude of these savings is not easy to determine, as local production conditions have a strong influence on the reduction effects that can be achieved in practice. An important framework condition is also the degree of networking of the individual technologies. The potential of digitization can ultimately only be exploited if agricultural production on farms is "intelligently" networked with upstream and downstream value creation processes (manufacturers of inputs such as seeds and pesticides, food retailers, etc.). However, this is based on prerequisites - such as broadband coverage, provision of open machine interfaces and free availability of geodata - that have not yet been fully realized and make Agriculture 4.0 still appear to be a vision of the future. Options for action such as improving the infrastructural framework conditions, ensuring the participation of smaller family farms and, in general, the data sovereignty of farmers or closing knowledge and research gaps are discussed in Working Report No. 194. The report concludes by stating that a forward-looking design for numerous questions is dependent on answers that point beyond agriculture and concern, for example, competition policy.



What is bias in translation programs?

Have you ever used machine translation for translating a sentence to Estonian? In some languages, like Estonian, pronouns, and nouns do not indicate gender. When translating to English, the software has to make a choice. Which word becomes male and which female? However, often it is a choice grounded in stereotypes. Is this just a coincidence?

Authors:

Freya Hewett Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin: AI & Society Lab

Sami Nenno Studentischer Mitarbeiter: AI & Society Lab

Since 1991, the DBU has funded more than 10,000 projects with € 1.84 billion. At the same time, the foundation capital (€ 1.28 billion at the beginning) was increased to around € 2.32 billion.

Funded projects should achieve sustainable effects in practice, give impulses and lead to a “multiplier effect”. It is the objective of the DBU to contribute to the solution of current environmental problems, in particular, which result from unsustainable business practices and lifestyles. The DBU sees the crucial challenges primarily in the areas of climate change, biodiversity loss, unsustainable use of natural resources, and harmful emissions. The funding topics are linked both to current scientific findings on the Planetary Boundaries and to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The Board of Trustees

The DBU is chaired by the Board of Trustees whose members are appointed by the Federal Government. It is composed of federal and state politicians as well as representatives of other socially relevant groups.

The Leopoldina champions the freedom and appreciation of science. It promotes a scientifically enlightened society and the responsible application of scientific insight for the benefit of humankind and the natural world. In its interdisciplinary discourse, the Academy transcends thematic, political, and cultural boundaries. It is also an advocate of human rights.

It is the role of the Leopoldina, in co-operation with other national and international organisations, to identify and analyse scientific issues of social importance. The Leopoldina presents its policy recommendations in a scientifically qualified, independent, transparent, and prospective manner, ever mindful of the standards and consequences of science.

On 3 March 2020, AlgorithmWatch launched a project to monitor Instagram’s newsfeed algorithm. Volunteers could install a browser add-on that scraped their Instagram newsfeeds. Data was sent to a database we used to study how Instagram prioritizes pictures and videos in a user’s timeline.

Over the last 14 months, about 1,500 volunteers installed the add-on. With their data, we were able to show that Instagram likely encouraged content creators to post pictures that fit specific representations of their body, and that politicians were likely to reach a larger audience if they abstained from using text in their publications (Facebook denied both claims). Although we could not conduct a precise audit of Instagram’s algorithm, this research is among the most advanced studies ever conducted on the platform. The project was supported by the European Data Journalism Network and by the Dutch foundation SIDN. It was done in partnership with Mediapart in France, NOS, Groene Amsterdammer and Pointer in the Netherlands, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany and was covered by dozens of news outlets over the world.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

In addition, the financial sector is still undergoing a profound transformation process. The regulatory environment remains a headwind for financial institutions, and new technologies are changing the rules of the game. Populism and political and geopolitical uncertainties create additional challenges, curtailing investment and risk-taking. Finally, the ever-increasing focus for investors and corporations alike on topics around ESG – environmental, social, and governance – and sustainability brings with it a whole new set of challenges and opportunities that need to be navigated. An important element in successfully tackling these challenges is a healthy corporate culture that allows for the necessary change to happen – including an increase in female representation and a better gender balance in corporate board rooms.

This conference will present an outlook on these developments and their implications for the financial services industry and economies at large, primarily presented by leading female exponents of the financial services industry as well as key public authorities.

The Workshop is organised by Stephanie Ettmeier and Marie Huber, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Global History at the HU Berlin. Taking our own research projects – dealing with the postcolonial economy of Francophone West Africa, and the recovery of the German economy from the Great Depression under the Nazis from 1933 onwards, respectively – as a starting point, we want to invite others working on economic experiences and expectations to discuss these questions with us. In a critical thinking and discussion focused workshop format, we want to strengthen interdisciplinary conversation and provide methodological impulses for a broad range of research topics.  

Keynote Lectures

Ute Röschenthaler, Universität Mainz, will give a keynote lecture and provide valuable input during the discussions.

In the latest issue of SWP Comment, PD Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann and Annegret Bendiek explain why the new EU cybersecurity strategy is too one-sided. The focus should not only be on deterrence and defense, but also on trust and security. They advocate for promoting cyber diplomacy in the European Union.

Bendiek, A.; Kettemann, M. C. (2021): Revisiting the EU Cybersecurity Strategy: A Call for EU Cyber Diplomacy. In: SWP Comment

This statement, coming from a man who is not exactly known for his altruism and concern for the environment, might only have anecdotal value. But even anecdotes can be indicators. Cramer, after all, is not alone: At almost exactly the same time as Cramer was making his comments, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, wrote an open letter to the CEOs of the companies in which BlackRock invests – and that’s almost every listed company. In the letter, Fink talks of no less than “a fundamental reshaping of finance.” He says that because climate risks are investment risks, there is a need for transparency for shareholders on sustainability-related issues, and all investments must become more sustainable in general (Fink, 2020).

In detail, the team of authors examined the regulation scenario "REG", the carbon pricing scenario "CPRICE" and the mixed scenario "MIX". Evaluation criteria were short-term feasibility and long-term goal achievement. As a result, the two dozen or so experts recommended that the European Union should consistently use carbon pricing as the core instrument of climate policy. According to the paper, the ambitious climate goal will be missed if policymakers choose the path of least resistance.

At first glance, the familiar mix of instruments seems to be the easiest path to take, but in the long run it may involve risks. It will only work if the instruments and enforcement mechanisms are well coordinated. Otherwise, measures can hinder each other and will not have the desired effects. According to the Ariadne report, it is better to align the instruments and measures with the carbon price, and at the same time organise a continuous adaptation process.

The Ariadne energy transition project guides through a joint learning process with politics, business, and society. It also researches options for energy transition, and provides political decision-makers with important orientation knowledge.

Further information:

The Ariadne press release on the new Ariadne Dossier can be found here (English). The Ariadne Dossier itself (in German) can be found here.

The Fraunhofer IVI’s facilities and large equipment include high-performance laboratories, innovative test platforms and vehicles as well as modern hardware and software. In 2013, the institute’s research infrastructure was expanded by a new technical center including a vehicle hall and an adjacent test track.

Our clients predominantly comprise building companies, mechanical engineering firms, plant manufacturers, contractors, developers, architects, planners and licensing authorities, as well as private and public-sector institutions engaged in construction research. The application of building science expertise to related areas of specialization has expanded our circle of partners to include companies from the automotive and aviation industries. We carry out complex building physics studies at our efficient and well-equipped laboratories and test centers and at our outdoor testing site in Holzkirchen, which to the best of our knowledge is the largest facility of its kind. Modern laboratory measuring techniques and computational methods help researchers develop and optimize building products for practical applications. We also carry out experiments in environmental test chambers, simulation facilities and existing buildings to assess components and overall systems for new buildings and renovation projects based on the principles of building physics.

The Fraunhofer IBP has been approved by the German building inspection authorities as a testing, monitoring and certification center for building materials and building techniques in Germany and the rest of Europe. Four of the institute’s test laboratories have been granted flexible accreditation by the German accreditation body Deutsche Akkreditierungsstelle GmbH (DAkkS) in accordance with DIN EN ISO/IEC 17025. This entitles them to develop new test methods and to modify existing methods.

That makes DESY not only a magnet for more than 3000 guest researchers from over 40 countries every year, but also a coveted partner for national and international cooperations. Committed young researchers find an exciting interdisciplinary setting at DESY. The research centre offers specialized training for a large number of professions. DESY cooperates with industry and business to promote new technologies that will benefit society and encourage innovations. This also benefits the metropolitan regions of the two DESY locations, Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin.

In response to increasing public pressure to tackle hate speech and other challenging content, platform companies have turned to algorithmic content moderation systems. These automated tools promise to be more effective and efficient in identifying potentially illegal or unwanted material. But algorithmic content moderation also raises many questions – all of which eschew simple answers. Where is the line between hate speech and freedom of expression – and how to automate this on a global scale? Should platforms scale the use of AI tools for illegal online speech, like terrorism promotion, or also for regular content governance? Are platforms’ algorithms over-enforcing against legitimate speech, or are they rather failing to limit hateful content on their sites? And how can policymakers ensure an adequate level of transparency and accountability in platforms’ algorithmic content moderation processes?

The Mainz-based biotech company BioNTech, which recently presented the first promising results for a coronavirus vaccine together with the US company Pfizer, is already conducting research on the next generation of RNA drugs at DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III. Using the P12 beamline, operated by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory EMBL, BioNTech has been investigating, together with the Universities of Mainz, Tel Aviv and Leiden as well as the Research Centre Jülich and EMBL, how so-called messenger RNA (mRNA) can be packaged better so as to be more effective in the target organism. The researchers are reporting a number of results in three papers, published in the journals Applied Nano Materials, Cells and Langmuir. The papers also illustrate the potential of analytical research carried out with the help of the research infrastructure available on the DESY campus.

The lowest CO2 emissions are produced when HD video is streamed at home over a fibre optic connection, with only two grams of CO2 per hour of video streaming for the data centre and data transmission. A copper cable (VDSL) generates four grams per hour. UMTS data transmission (3G), however, produces 90 grams of CO2 per hour. If the transmission technology used to transmit data is 5G instead, only about five grams of CO2 are emitted per hour. The electricity used by the end device is not factored into this calculation.

The day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its 1.5-degree report, commissioned by the UN, was also the day William Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis” as embodied in his influential Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model. The UN Paris Agreement called to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees to contain climate risks. Nordhaus’s numbers point to 3.5 degrees as the economically optimal warming by the year 2100. Now a new study published in Nature Climate Change has produced an update to the DICE model that can help to reconcile the camps.

The European Commission has created Missions as part of its Horizon Europe R&I Framework. The goal of the Missions is to leverage scientific knowledge alongside other forms of knowledge and to partner with multiple societal actors to address critical global challenges (climate, carbon neutral cites or food security amongst others).

A key goal of Horizon Europe Missions is to engage citizens as co-producers of knowledge and partners to build solutions. The talk presents the concept of mission-oriented research and innovation and elaborates on the key challenges and opportunities this presents for research and education organisations.

Dr. Asuncion T. Lera St. Clair, philosopher and sociologist, works as Senior Principal Scientist for DNV GL Group Technology and Research (Norway) and is Senior Advisor for the Earth System Services Unit of the Barcelona SuperComputing Centre (Spain). She is Member Horizon Europe Mission Board for Climate Change Adaptation and Societal Transformation, member of Future Earth Advisory Board, and Advisor to the Sustainability in the Digital Age Initiative.

“When normally we analyse societal effects of weather extremes, now we used the corona outbreak as a study case to better understand social responses to extreme events”, explains Leonie Wenz, author and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “Using social media data, we basically counted English language tweets containing a set of key word combinations like Chinese AND Corona AND hate and examined the evolution of this daily tweet count since the corona outbreak”, Annika Stechemesser, co- author and also at PIK, adds. “The picture thus unveiled was quite striking: On March 11th the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic; stock markets around the world crashed –and within the first half of March, the number of offensive tweets in our dataset increased by more than 1000%”, she lays out.

On the occasion of this year’s 20th anniversary of the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), the Berlin-based Think-and-Do Tank Energy Watch Group (EWG) presents a legislative proposal to stimulate the system integration of renewable energy. The underlying purpose of the policy proposal is to allow renewable energy sources to finally assume responsibility for the system security of the power supply – i.e. to cover the required energy demand at every hour of the year. With a so-called combined power plant tariff, the instrument intends to stimulate investments for full demand coverage by 100% renewable energy. Based on own techno-economic cost estimates and a legal examination of EU regulations, the EWG proposes a fixed-feed-in-tariff of 8 cents/kWh, supported by a sliding market premium.

While renewables keep setting records in terms of their shares of national electricity mixes – Germany has recently hit the 50% mark –, a full transformation to an entirely renewable-based energy system is not yet widely regarded to be a tangible reality. One of the main reasons is the prevailing mistrust of the ability of renewables to provide year-round supply. Many scientific studies have already shown that a complete conversion to renewables is not only critical for reasons of climate protection, but also that it is technologically feasible (in combination with storage technologies and digital control technology) at any hour of the year and at cost-effective prices. What is still missing, however, is a legal basis to enable the market penetration of reliable and adequate 100% renewable energy systems.

TAB's policy brief in English TAB-Fokus no. 24 PDF [2,58 MB] provides an overview of Legal Tech services and applications, assesses the potentials, risks and opportunities involved and explores further potential needs for action.

A good number of the materials found in everyday products are now referred to as "critical". This means that there is a risk of failure in their supply and that they are also critical in terms of economic importance. Many metals, for instance, are already critical or could become critical in the near future due to their limited availability and the growing demand for products worldwide. Think of the newest electronic products that contain critical metals such as gallium, which is used in integrated circuits; beryllium, used in electronic and telecommunications equipment and permanent magnets and germanium found in infra-red optics. Innovative product design and reusing, recycling and remanufacturing products can help to deal with a raw materials shortage. But this can only provide an integrated solution if we keep CRMs in the loop through smarter CRM management. The starting point is to identify CRMs in products. It is not always clear what materials are in which products. It is, therefore, necessary to keep all metals in the loop for as long as possible. Scarcity in the supply chain can not only damage businesses but also negatively impact economic development and the environment. For this reason, the course will also discuss environmental issues and electric and electronic waste regulations.

Length: 6 weeks, Effort: 4-6 hours a week by TU Delft

This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entries on Environmental impacts of food production and CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

What is the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of our diet?

I have shown previously that what we choose to eat has the largest impact, making a bigger difference than how far our food has traveled, or how much packaging it’s wrapped in. This is because only a small fraction comes from transport and packaging and most of our food emissions come from processes on the farm, or from land use change.

Regardless of whether you compare the footprint of foods in terms of their weight (e.g. one kilogram of cheese versus one kilogram of peas); protein content ; or calories, the overall conclusion is the same: plant-based foods tend to have a lower carbon footprint than meat and dairy. In many cases a much smaller footprint.

As an example: producing 100 grams of protein from peas emits just 0.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO₂eq). To get the same amount of protein from beef, emissions would be nearly 90 times higher, at 35 kgCO₂eq.

This publication gives an overview of actors and areas of action and stresses that collective engagement is needed more than ever to further develop Internet governance, to strengthen multistakerholderism as well as multilateralism and to hinder the fragmentation of the net. The publication was created by iRights.Lab on behalf the FES.

Here you find the online version of "Who Governs the Internet?"

Palantir was founded in 2004, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Its founders wanted to help intelligence agencies organize the data they collected, so that they would identify threats before they could strike. It is widely rumored that its tools helped find Osama Bin Laden prior to his assassination in 2011 (another theory is that the US simply bribed Pakistani officials).

But Palantir is not good at making money. The company has never been profitable, in large part because it had to customize its products for each client, making economies of scale impossible. A new product launched in 2017, called Foundry, is supposed to solve this problem. Europe became the testing ground for this new commercial strategy, which relies largely on Foundry.

AlgorithmWatch asked close to forty German companies about their links to Palantir and browsed hundreds of open sources to map Palantir’s clients.

Palantir’s software is nothing special. Despite claims that it could turn “data landfills into gold mines,” it simply provides a visual interface that lets clients interact with their own data streams. It is built on top of existing technologies such as Apache Spark, a cluster-computing framework. An employee, who might not be privy to every product of the company, wrote in 2016 that Palantir did “no artificial intelligence”, “no machine learning” and “no magic”.

These relatively modest capabilities might explain why several clients, including American Express and Coca-Cola, dropped Palantir in the last few years. Giovanni Tummarello, co-founder of the Ireland-based Siren.io, a competitor, claimed in 2017 to have signed some of Palantir’s former clients, mostly due to lower prices.

Peter Söderbaum, (2019), Ecological Economics in relation to a digital world, World Economics Association (WEA) Conferences, No. 1 2019, Going Digital, 15th November to 20th December, 2019

Under the title “Zukunft Gesundheitsdaten — Wegweiser zu einer forschungskompatiblen elektronischen Patientenakte” (Future health data — a guide to a research-compatible electronic patient file), the iRights.Lab developed a comprehensive study on the subject of eHealth on behalf of Bundesdruckerei (federal printing house). It shows which challenges have to be mastered so that Germany can also use the potential of digitalization in the field of eHealth.

Here the study can be dowloaded in German.

The report Identity-management and citizen scoring in Ghana, Rwanda, Tunisia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and China was commissioned to AlgorithmWatch by a public-sector organization, which asked not to be cited, last May. We recently obtained permission to publish it here.

In many African countries, the obligation to issue biometric passports in the early 2000s, which the United States and, later, members of the European Union demanded, opened the door to the biometric registration of whole populations. An industry was set up to provide fingerprints readers, facial recognition technology and a vast array of software to process this newly-acquired data.

by Nicolas Kayser-Bril

In early 2016, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional association known as IEEE, launched a “global initiative to advance ethics in technology.” After almost three years of work and multiple rounds of exchange with experts on the topic, it released last April the first edition of Ethically Aligned Design, a 300-page treatise on the ethics of automated systems.

The general principles issued in the report focus on transparency, human rights and accountability, among other topics. As such, they are not very different from the 83 other ethical guidelines that researchers from the Health Ethics and Policy Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reviewed in an article published in Nature Machine Intelligence in September. However, one key aspect makes IEEE different from other think-tanks. With over 420,000 members, it is the world’s largest engineers’ association with roots reaching deep into Silicon Valley. Vint Cerf, one of Google’s Vice Presidents, is an IEEE “life fellow.”

Because the purpose of the IEEE principles is to serve as a “key reference for the work of technologists”, and because many technologists contributed to their conception, we wanted to know how three technology companies, Facebook, Google and Twitter, were planning to implement them.

By Nicolas Kayser-Bril Additional research: Veronika Thiel

doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3484550

Dr. Stephan Dreyer is Senior Researcher, Johannes Schmees is Junior Researcher at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut. This entry is based on a forthcoming and extensive article which came to being in the context of the interdisciplinary research project “Deciding about, by and together with ADM-Systems.”

In Reinventing Prosperity, Graeme Maxton and Jorgen Randers take a radically different approach and offer thirteen politically feasible proposals to improve our world. From shortening the work year and raising the retirement age to boosting welfare and redefining what we mean by work, the authors’ suggestions challenge many long-standing economic ideas and explain how it is possible to reduce unemployment, inequality, and the pace of climate change—and still have economic growth, if society wishes.

“Do you want a cogent and accessible explanation of why our paramount policy goal of GDP growth is increasing unemployment, inequality, and environmental destruction—while reducing welfare? Then read this informative book for both answers and better policies!” Herman Daly, Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland

“The problems society faces to achieve a sustainable and desirable future are well known, but solutions seem impossible. Maxton and Randers describe thirteen politically feasible proposals that can actually solve these problems.” Prof. Robert Costanza, VC’s Chair in Public Policy, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

“This book has the power to induce policy changes that are imperative for the creation of an equitable, peaceful and sustainable future for human society.” Rajendra K. Pachauri, past-chair, International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC); executive vice chairman, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)

It was announced with some fanfare that Alexa and others would soon demonstrate breakthroughs in the field of emotion analysis. Much is written about affective computing, but products are far from market ready. For example, Amazon’s emotion assistant Dylan is said to be able to read human emotions just by listening to their voices. However, Dylan currently only exists in form of a patent.

So far, Amazon, Google et al. have not launched such products. Identifying unique signals that indicate that someone is sad seems to be a bit more complicated than they initially thought. Maybe someone’s voice sounds depressed because they are depressed, but maybe they are just tired or exhausted.

However, these difficulties do not prevent other companies from launching products that claim to have solved these complex problems by using voice and speech for character and personality analysis.

In Germany, two examples spring to mind. One is the company Precire, based in Aachen, a city on border with Belgium. Their idea: you record a voice sample, and based on the person’s choice of words, sentence structure and many other indicators, the software then produces an analysis of their character traits. The software can be used in staff recruitment or to identify candidates for promotion.

The company states that its software carries out the analysis based on a 15-minute language sample. The then CEO Mario Reis stated in an interview in 2016 that the results were based on science and scientifically tested. This statement is repeated in a book published in 2018. This book also cites additional studies and findings to further support the scientific grounding of the method.

By Veronika Thiel

Especially in connection with the last elections to the European Parliament, various forms of disinformation, propagated over social networks, played an important role. This is one of the major focusses of the publication. Online “trolls” work specifically on the weakening of individual persons or opinions, and are met on the other side by the defenders of democratic discourse. Additionally, the question arises as to what role private companies play in the struggle to uphold basic democratic values. And how can or should policymakers intervene to regulate this sector? When dealing with the conflicted field of information intermediaries, it is phenomena such as fake news, hate speech and filter bubbles that come to the fore.

In this paper, we also discuss the meaning and definition of the term information intermediary. Increasingly, algorithms automatically influence people’s everyday media realities. In particular, the data that social media and other services collect from their users plays a key role in shaping the information people receive in personalized news feeds or search engine results. 

In addition to these and related topics, this issue of the Research Monitor also deals with current research projects, for example on populism in social networks or on the difficulty of proving or disproving the existence of filter bubbles in social networks.

An upcoming event is also announced that will deal with the question of how news reaches users today and whether users come into contact with news items via social networks that otherwise would not have reached them.

You can download the entire issue of the Research Monitor here.

With reference to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the Planetary Boundaries it introduces the theory and practice of Collective Stewardship as a management tool that respects the integrity of human and natural systems. Drawing on the work of transdisciplinary scientific scholars and seasoned sustainability practitioners, it shows how transformative change can be built on life’s inherent tendency to generate patterns of vitality and resilience. This ground-breaking monograph shows workable pathways to stewarding patterns of aliveness in social and ecological systems at all levels of the global society. As a highly regarded author and expert in collective leadership, Petra Kuenkel inspires academics and practitioners alike to explore new routes towards co-creating responsible futures in the era of the Anthropocene, where the human footprint has begun to change the course of planetary evolution. She invites decision-makers, researchers, planners and social activists to become stewards of systems patterns, enhance their collaborative competencies and guide life-enhancing socio-ecological interaction at scale.

The conceptual architecture the author elaborates builds on transformation literacy and boils it down to a practical guidance for planning and implementing interventions across all sectors of society. It helps bring about change through a deliberate combination of enlivening narratives, empowering metrics, enabling processes, multi-level governance, guiding regulations, and life-supporting innovation.

German and European researchers have thus far dealt only tentatively with the topic of microtargeting in election campaigns. Most of the research projects and scientific papers on the subject are from the USA. Since Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008 at the latest, it has become clear that both Democrats and Republicans in the US are employing massively data-driven processes in their election campaigns. In the paper State of Research: Microtargeting in Germany and Europe, we summarize the current expert debate on microtargeting in political communication, point to gaps in the research and provide suggestions on where new work is needed.

The paper was commissioned by the Landesanstalt für Medien NRW. The publication can be downloaded (German) free of charge from the Media Authority’s website and from our own.

In the Global Governance Spotlight 2|2019, Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann examines the successes and deficits of previous norm-building processes and regulatory efforts in the field of social media, particularly at regional and global level. On this basis, five guidelines are named which could help to overcome the shortcomings of previous attempts of regulation.

Kettemann, Matthias C. (2019): Internationale Regeln für Soziale Medien: Menschenrechte wahren und Desinformation bekämpfen [International Rules for Social Media: Safeguarding Human Rights and Fighting Disinformation]. Global Governance Spotlight 2|2019.

The recent IPCC report emphasises that climate-related risks are significantly more dangerous to human life and to the systems that sustain us at 2^oC warming compared with 1.5^oC. Yet global action is lagging, stymied by political meandering. To avoid the worst outcomes, global carbon emissions must be cut by half by 2030 and to zero by 2050 – an unprecedented task which requires bold and compelling action. The Club of Rome – Climate Emergency Plan proposes ten action points to achieve the goal set by the historic Paris Agreement, aligned with science and economic pragmatism, to limit temperature increase to 1.5^oC.

To avoid further collapse of environmental, political and socio-economic systems, urgent leadership is required now from governments, industry and citizens. Climate change is no longer a future threat. It is already affecting billions of people across the globe and every economy. Annual losses for the US alone will reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, according to the new US Climate Assessment and continued climate related impacts could create 140 million climate migrants globally by 2050.

The Club of Rome in its seminal 1972 report The Limits to Growth alerted the world to the environmental and demographic challenges. The central message was that the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods and resources, on a finite planet, would eventually result in the collapse of its economic and environmental systems. That prediction is clearly manifesting in the climate change crisis awe are confronted with today.

The Climate Emergency Plan of the Club of Rome was launched on December 4th 2018 at the European Parliament. You can download the full report here.

Germany consumes some 1.3 billion tonnes of fossil fuels, minerals, ores and biomass per year. UBA's Use of Natural Resources Report claims that the majority of raw material consumption is non-metallic minerals (45%), fossil fuels (29%) and biomass (21%). Although raw material consumption in Germany is becoming more and more efficient thanks to industry efforts and total raw material productivity has increased by 26% since 2000, Germany has an excessively high level of raw material consumption compared to other countries: 10% higher than the average in Europe, and even 100% higher than the global average. More than half of the raw materials consumed for the production of goods is sourced from abroad.

The Methodological Convention for Estimating Environmental Costs 3.0 included a large number of parameters to calculate the costs of environmental pollution. This included the costs of restoring damaged building and infrastructures, of the market value of crop losses and production losses, as well as the sum which people would be prepared to pay for the avoidance of damage to their health. The Methodological Convention 3.0 helps to compare and contrast the costs of environmental pollution and the costs of environmental protection.

1. Community Standards

2. Proactively Identifying Harmful Content

3. Discouraging Borderline Content

4. Giving People Control and Allowing More Content

5. Addressing Algorithmic Bias

6. Building an Appeals Process

7. Independent Governance and Oversight

8. Creating Transparency and Enabling Research

9. Working Together on Regulation

...

Why participate? - to learn about Space opportunities in H2020 and beyond - to get to know the new Horizon 2020 Space Work Programme - to get an idea of the next EU Framework Programme (Horizon Europe) - to meet potential partners for the open space Call

Target groups - Companies - Universities - Research Institutes - other organisations

Topics - Earth Observation - Space technologies - EGNSS - Secure and safe space environment - Space business Join this opportunity to learn about the H2020 Space Call 2019, meet inspired and motivated people and develop ideas for future projects!

The report can be downloaded here.

Authors: Sony Kapoor Managing Director re-define.org; Dr. Belay Begashaw Director SDG Center for Africa

That Twitter cannot serve as an image of our society is due to the fact that the actual figures of users in Germany are very small, explains Hölig in the interview. Only one per cent of the population in Germany uses Twitter on a daily basis. And about 90 per cent of them only use it passively. The number of those who actively participate in Twitter discourse and contribute to the mood on Twitter is very small.

Moreover, according to Höllig's study, active Twitter users have special personality traits. They are more opinionated, extroverted and generally less anxious than the rest of the online community. This does not reflect a representative picture of society as a whole.

In order for research and development of fully automated vehicles to continue in Germany, the acceptance of potential users of automated vehicles is crucial. As part of the iKoPA research initiative, a simulator for the virtual testing of automated driving is being developed with which users can experience various driving scenarios in a realistic car cockpit. As in a real automated vehicle, the steering wheel turns on its own in the simulator, while the user sees a virtual journey through a 3D world, projected onto a large screen. Various driving scenarios can be simulated, such as an undisturbed drive without other road users under ideal conditions. However, it is also possible to simulate complex traffic situations in which user intervention is necessary to prevent a collision with sudden obstacles. In addition, system errors such as unexpected rapid increases in speed, close driving due to sensor inaccuracies or hacker attacks can also be simulated.

Climate protection is important. And the goal for Germany is clear: From over 11 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent to less than 1 tonne of CO₂-equivalent per person and year. This is the position of the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) in line with the international community of states. We still have a lot to do in order to achieve this goal. And ultimately we'll only get there if we have effective government framework conditions.

But today we can already take the lead as individuals. We can already avoid not only kilograms but tonnes of carbon - both when it comes to our own emissions (our carbon footprint) as well as when it comes to helping others avoid emissions (our carbon handprint). The UBA Carbon Calculator will help you keep track: Where do you stand today? What are the main tools at your disposal? What contribution can you make to climate protection in future?

Please note: Calculations only apply to the German context. Using the calculator while living in other countries will only give you some indication of your footprint, the actual values might differ substantially.

Emissions from shared amenities such as heating and electricity are automatically divided by the number of members in your household. Only in the case of car rides you have to make this allocation yourself, as only you can estimate the way you share.

“Currently we have a twofold problem,” explains lead author Max Franks from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK): “There is a huge underprovision of basic necessary public goods such as public health systems, access to schools and clean water. On the other hand greenhouse gas emissions are still rising and there is an overuse of the atmosphere, a global common good, as a disposal space for these emissions”. So far, the two problems have mostly been dealt with separately. “But if you look at both climate and sustainable development policies at the same time, it turns out that carbon pricing could indeed address both problems simultaneously and effectively,” Franks says.

A better understanding of the cognitive dimensions of human agents in their individual and collective behavior could be the key to implementing the different goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda in a coordinated manner. The symposium addresses the question of how to strengthen “brain power” for sustainable development and aims at identifying the cognitive preconditions for a successful sustainability transition.

With this symposium, Leopoldina continues the dialogue between science and politics on sustainability and builds on the symposium “The Turn to Sustainability?”, which was held in Berlin in October 2016.

Since the Industrial Revolution, however, energy-driven consumption of fossil fuels has led to a rapid increase in CO2 emissions, disrupting the global carbon cycle and leading to a planetary warming impact. Global warming and a changing climate have a range of potential ecological, physical and health impacts, including extreme weather events (such as floods, droughts, storms, and heatwaves); sea-level rise; altered crop growth; and disrupted water systems. The most extensive source of analysis on the potential impacts of climatic change can be found in the 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report; this presents full coverage of all impacts in its chapter on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. In light of this evidence, UN member parties have set a target of limiting average warming to 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. This entry provides a historical to present day perspective of how CO2 emissions have evolved, how emissions are distributed, and the key factors that both drive these trends and hold the key to mitigating climate change.

Current ethical debates about the consequences of automation generally focus on the rights of individuals. However, algorithmic processes – the major component of automated systems – exhibit a collective dimension first and foremost. This can only be addressed partially at the level of individual rights. For this reason, existing ethical and legal criteria are not suitable (or, at least, are inadequate) when considering algorithms generally. They lead to a conceptual blurring with regard to issues such as privacy and discrimination, when information that could potentially be misused to discriminate illegitimately is declared private. Our aim in the present article is, first, to bring a measure of clarity to the debate so that such blurring can be avoided in the future. In addition to this, we discuss ethical criteria for technology which, in the form of universal abstract principles, are to be applied to all societal contexts.

With socio-economic inequality as a major public concern, researchers have long been interested in measuring how persistent inequalities are between generations. Do the descendants from successful families tend to remain successful? Or is there ‘intergenerational mobility’, such that an individual’s origin is not a prime determinant of his or her socio-economic status?

A new study by Sebastian Braun from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Jan Stuhler from the University Madrid which is published in the March 2018 issue of the Economic Journal examines the persistence of socio-economic status over four genera­tions in twentieth century Germany (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12453/full).The researchers conclude that on average, about 60 percent of socio-economic prospects were transmitted from one generation to the next, irrespective of whether socio-economic success is measured in terms of educational or occupational advantages.

The Paris climate agreement obliges the international community to limit global warming to two degrees. However, man-made greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase instead of decreasing. Is climate engineering a solution to slow global warming? In the current issue of the journal Nature, Professor Andreas Oschlies from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel warns of an underestimated long-term risk of solar radiation management, one of the proposed climate engineering measures.

When the Pinatubo volcano erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it blew huge amounts of dust and gases into the atmosphere. Therefore, solar radiation was partly reflected instead of warming the earth's surface. Global average temperatures in the lower atmosphere temporarily dropped by half a degree. So why not copy the volcano by deploying large quantities of aerosols into the atmosphere in order to slow down the current global warming?

This idea is already being discussed internationally and first tests are under way. However, in today's issue of the journal Nature, the biogeochemist Prof. Dr. Andreas Oschlies from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel warns of an often disregarded side effect of so-called Solar Radiation Management (SRM). "Once you start SRM on a large scale, you cannot stop it without significant risks. This has been shown by many computer simulations of the Earth system," he emphasizes.

Reference:

Oschlies, A. (2018): Solar engineering must take temperature debt into account. Nature 554, 423 (2018), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02203-x