From 'land grabbing' to sustainable investments in land: potential contributions by land change science

This paper assesses possible contributions of land change science to the growing body of knowledge about large-scale land acquisition. Despite obvious commonalities, such as a problem-oriented and interdisciplinary approach to land change, there seems to be little overlap between the two fields thus far. We adopt a sustainability research perspective — an important feature of land change science — to review research questions about large-scale land acquisition that are currently being addressed, and to define questions for further inquiry. Possible contributions of land change science toward more sustainable land investments are based on understanding land use change not only as a consequence, but also as a cause of large-scale land acquisition and as a solution to the problems land acquisition can create.

Desertification and Global Change: Innovative Management of Scarce Resources in Semi-Arid Areas. Experiences from development and research: Challenges for a better future

While most events related to the International Year of Deserts and Desertification 2006 took mainly a problem-oriented perspective and approach, the Bern Symposium held in May 2006 tried to adopt a more positive attitude by attempting to take stock of experience as well as best and worst practices in the past, both in development practice and in research. Through this deliberate focus on potentials, positive experiences, solutions and pathways, predominant passive and reactive attitudes and hopelessness might be better overcome. The Symposium was organized by CDE, NCCR North-South and Forum SLM.

Context-Oriented Programming

Context-dependent behavior is becoming increasingly important for a wide range of application domains, from pervasive computing to common business applications. Unfortunately, mainstream programming languages do not provide mechanisms that enable software entities to adapt their behavior dynamically to the current execution context. This leads developers to adopt convoluted designs to achieve the necessary runtime flexibility. We propose a new programming technique called Context-oriented Programming (COP) which addresses this problem. COP treats context explicitly, and provides mechanisms to dynamically adapt behavior in reaction to changes in context, even after system deployment at runtime. In this paper we lay the foundations of COP, show how dynamic layer activation enables multi-dimensional dispatch, illustrate the application of COP by examples in several language extensions, and demonstrate that COP is largely independent of other commitments to programming style.

Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns

The rapid growth of object-oriented development over the past twenty years has given rise to many object-oriented systems that are large, complex and hard to maintain. Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns addresses the problem of understanding and reengineering such object-oriented legacy systems. This book collects and distills successful techniques in planning a reengineering project, reverse-engineering, problem detection, migration strategies and software redesign. The material in this book is presented as a set of "reengineering patterns" --- recurring solutions that experts apply while reengineering and maintaining object-oriented systems. The principles and techniques described in this book have been observed and validated in a number of industrial projects, and reflect best practice in object-oriented reengineering.