We provide an overview of a transdisciplinary project about sustainable forest management under climate change. Our project is a partnership with members of the Menominee Nation, a Tribal Nation located in northern Wisconsin, United States. We use immersive virtual experiences, translated from ecosystem model outcomes, to elicit human values about future forest conditions under alternative scenarios. Our project combines expertise across the sciences and humanities as well as across cultures and knowledge systems. Our management structure, governance, and leadership behaviors have (...) both fostered and constrained our work and must be continuously responsive to changing group dynamics. Our project presents opportunities for substantial contributions to society, including insights and knowledge about complementary ways of knowing, skills training, and professional development, and opportunities for reflexive learning about effective transdisciplinary, translational, and transformative scientific processes. (shrink)

People often solve spatially presented cognitive problems more easily than their nonspatial counterparts. We explain this phenomenon by characterizing space as an inter-modality that provides common structure to different specific perceptual modalities. The usefulness of spatial structure for knowledge processing on different levels of granularity and for interaction between internal and external processes is described. Map representations are discussed as examples in which the usefulness of spatially organized symbols is particularly evident. External representations and processes can enhance internal representations and (...) processes effectively when the same structures and principles can be implicitly assumed. (shrink)

Johann August Schlettwein established a reputation during the later eighteenth century as Germany's foremost Physiocrat. Schlettwein's primarily literary reputation was lent authority by his direct participation in two practical Physiocratic experiments: the Markgraf of Baden's trial introduction of a single tax during the the early 1770s, and the creation of an Economic Faculty at the University of Giessen as part of a general financial reform in the state of Hessen-Darmstadt. It is this latter case which will be examined here, where (...) university reform was assigned an important role in the general reconstruction of state finances. But why should the reformers in Darmstadt have lighted upon a maverick figure such as Schlettwein to lead a Faculty which was in turn assigned a leading role in the reform of their state university? And given the apparent failure of Schlettwein to fulfil the hopes placed in him, to what can we attribute his generally lacklustre performance in Giessen? While the first of these questions can be fairly readily answered by considering the choices facing the state government, the second problem is more open: a number of possibilities suggest themselves. The fact that Physiocratic principles conflicted sharply with those governing cameralistic teaching in the German university could have been a significant obstacle; or it could have been that the role assigned to Schlettwein proved impossible, caught between the agenda of Physiocratic reform and that of the state government; or it might of course be that Schlettwein bore personally the major share of the blame. The Physiocratic programme was sweeping in its ambitions; but where it was put into practice (in Baden), or was lent an academic platform (in Giessen), it failed. By examining the reasons behind the failure in Gie?en we can perhaps learn something more of the scope of Physiocracy as a programme of reform in the eighteenth century and thence, indirectly, about the contemporary reception of Physiocratic ideas. (shrink)

This article discusses an approach to characterizing movement patterns (paths/trajectories) of individual agents that allows for relating aspects of cognitive conceptualization of movement patterns with formal spatial characterizations. To this end, we adopt a perspective of characterizing movement patterns on the basis of perceptual and conceptual invariants that we term movement choremes (MCs). MCs are formally grounded by behaviorally validating qualitative spatio-temporal calculi. Relating perceptual and cognitive aspects of space and formal theories of spatial information has shown promise to foster (...) understanding of the semantics of movement patterns. Specifically, we discuss our approach in relation to existing qualitative formalisms such as the region connection calculus and the Egenhofer’s intersection formalisms. We show that the MC approach is compatible with these approaches but offers additional opportunities to improve the cognitive adequacy of these formalisms. We summarize this paper using a movement taxonomy that also provides guidance for future research. (shrink)

Der Sammelband stellt die Frage nach dem Verhaltnis von Naturrecht und Staat in Europa.