Zoekresultaten

Production in peatlands

The majority of Dutch peatlands are drained and used intensively as grasslands for dairy farming. This delivers high productivity but causes severe damage to the provisioning of ecosystem services. Peatland rewetting is the best way to reverse the damage, but high water levels do not fit with intensive dairy production. Paludiculture, defined as crop production under wet conditions, provides viable land use alternatives, but these alternatives are rarely compared to conventional drainage-based systems. Here, we compare ecosystem services of six theoretical production systems on peatland following a gradient of low, medium, and high water levels. This includes conventional and organic drainage-based dairy farming, low-input grasslands for grazing and mowing, and high-input paludiculture systems with reed and Sphagnum cultivation. For each production system, a theoretical 1 ha unit was designed using data from literature. Four aspects of ecosystem services were quantified and monetized, including agricultural productivity, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, water storage, and biodiversity potential. Results show that drainage-based dairy farming systems only support high milk production without any of the other ecosystem services included, even with organic farming practices. Biomass producing paludiculture systems have high ecosystem services value, but do not lead to production values comparable to the present dairy farming. Capitalizing GHG reduction and other ecosystem services from peatland rewetting with carbon credits or other payment schemes would close this production and income gap. However, standard practice to monetize provision of ecosystem service is currently unavailable. Sustainable use of peatlands urges more fundamental changes in land and water management along with the financial and policy support required.

Telling the Bigger Video Story

Natalie Bookchin’s work is synonymous with the Video Vortex network and the rise of YouTube. Whereas we got to know each other’s work in the turbulent net.art late nineties years, this particular story started with a DVD I got from Natalie, containing The Trip (2008), a video collection of early YouTube fragments, which Natalie reassembled into an imaginary travel around the globe, shot during car trips on all continents. What has always defined Natalie Bookchin’s work is her ability to recreate unity out of dispersed fragments. We, as users, may feel lost and desperate, but the artist gives us hope again that we can overcome distraction and senseless multi-tasking by creating an all-together new meta narrative that is human—again. This is database cinema as you always imagined it, overcoming the isolation of the individualized voice-as-image while paying respect to the unique status that each of us has.

It works! But now what? Upscaling smart city experiments

Ideological Platforms

Book review of: M. Pepi (2025). Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, Melville House, Brooklyn-London, 224 p.

Tencent

Tencent is a Chinese IT company that offers a wide variety of products in the e-commerce, online advertising, online games and social network markets. Most of these services are centered around the central hubs of QQ and Weixin/WeChat. This allows for a spillover of users and a brand name that can be used for a variety of products. Most of Tencent’s software products are free to use, but allow users to buy small cosmetic upgrades. For Tencent, these value-added services are the main source of income. This differentiates the company from most of its competitors, which still rely mostly on online advertisements to monetize users of free services. Tencent focuses on ‘micro-innovation’, taking a proven concept and adjusting it to the Chinese market. The company is very strong in the domestic market, but has had trouble in foreign markets. More recently, Tencent started strategic partnerships with companies in segments where the company cannot become market leader on its own. Perhaps the company could also use this strategy for foreign market entry.

Business model for business rules

Business rule models are widely applied, standalone and embedded in smart objects. They have become segregated from information technology and they are now a valuable asset in their own right. As more business rule models are becoming assets, business models to monetize these assets are designed. The goal of this work is to present a step towards business model classification for organizations for which its value position is characterized by business rule models. Based on a survey we propose a business model categorization that is aligned to different types of assets and business model archetypes. The results show five main categories of business models: The value adding business rule model, the ‘create me a business rule model’ business model, the KAAS business model, the bait and hook business model and the market place business model.