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Register a new userHow can astrotourism serve the sustainable development goals? The Namibian example
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Hannah Dalgleish Dr
Publication date
2021
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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Astrotourism brings new opportunities to generate sustainable socio-economic development, preserve cultural heritage, and inspire and educate the citizens of the globe. This form of tourism can involve many different activities, such as visiting observatories or travelling to remote areas to experience an evening under a pristine, dark night sky. Together, our UK-Namibian collaboration is working to develop and showcase astrotourism in Namibia, and to enhance the possibility for astrotourism worldwide.
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The world is changing fast, and so is the space sector. Planning for large scientific experiments two decades ahead may no longer be the most sensible approach. I develop the argument that large science experiments are becoming comparable to terrestrial civil infrastructures in terms of cost. As a result, these should incorporate plans for a return on investment (or impact, not necessarily economic), require a different approach for inter-division coordination within the European Space Agency(ESA), and a broader participation of all society stakeholders (civil society representatives, and the broader public). Defining which experiments will be relevant two decades ahead adds rigidity and quenches creativity to the development of cutting edge science and technology. This is likely to discourage both senior and earlier career professionals into supporting such long-term (and often precarious) plans. A more sensible strategy would be increasing the rate of smaller well understood experiments, engage more society sectors in the development of a truly space-bound infrastructure, and formulate a strategy more in tune with the challenges faced by our society and planet. We argue that such strategy would lead to equally large -- even larger -- scale experiments in the same time-scale, while providing economic returns and a common sense of purpose. A basic but aggressive road map is outlined.
Namibia is world-renowned for its incredibly dark skies by the astronomy community, and yet, the country is not well recognised as a dark sky destination by tourists and travellers. Forged by a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Namibia, together we are using astronomy as a means for capacity-building and sustainable socio-economic growth via educating tour guides and promoting dark sky tourism to relevant stakeholders.
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes exposing promising static traits. Subsequent evolution can then canalize these rare traits. Thus, development can, under the right conditions, increase evolvability. Here, we report on a previously unknown phenomenon when embodied agents are allowed to develop and evolve: Evolution discovers body plans robust to control changes, these body plans become genetically assimilated, yet controllers for these agents are not assimilated. This allows evolution to continue climbing fitness gradients by tinkering with the developmental programs for controllers within these permissive body plans. This exposes a previously unknown detail about the Baldwin effect: instead of all useful traits becoming genetically assimilated, only traits that render the agent robust to changes in other traits become assimilated. We refer to this as differential canalization. This finding also has implications for the evolutionary design of artificial and embodied agents such as robots: robots robust to internal changes in their controllers may also be robust to external changes in their environment, such as transferal from simulation to reality or deployment in novel environments.
Reversible computation opens up the possibility of overcoming some of the hardwares current physical limitations. It also offers theoretical insights, as it enriches multiple paradigms and models of computation, and sometimes retrospectively enlightens them. Concurrent reversible computation, for instance, offered interesting extensions to the Calculus of Communicating Systems, but was still lacking a natural and pertinent bisimulation to study processes equivalences. Our paper formulates an equivalence exploiting the two aspects of reversibility: backward moves and memory mechanisms. This bisimulation captures classical equivalences relations for denotational models of concurrency (History-and hereditary history-preserving bisimulation, (H)HPB), that were up to now only partially characterized by process algebras. This result gives an insight on the expressiveness of reversibility, as both backward moves and a memory mechanism-providing backward determinism-are needed to capture HHPB.
In this study, we will discuss recent developments in risk management of the global financial and insurance business with respect to sustainable development. So far climate change aspects have been the dominant aspect in managing sustainability risks and opportunities, accompanied by the development of several legislative initiatives triggered by supervisory authorities. However, a sole concentration on these aspects misses out other important economic and social facets of sustainable development goals formulated by the UN. Such aspects have very recently come into the focus of the European Committee concerning the Solvency II project for the European insurance industry. Clearly the new legislative expectations can be better handled by larger insurance companies and holdings than by small- and medium-sized mutual insurance companies which are numerous in central Europe, due to their historic development starting in the late medieval ages and early modern times. We therefore also concentrate on strategies within the risk management of such small- and medium-sized enterprises that can be achieved without much effort, in particular those that are not directly related to climate change.
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