The history of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) is given in brief. A summary is provided of the plans for the Fourth Meeting of the CSD and of international conferences and activities related to sustainable development. Specific conference topics were consumption patterns, financial resources, the integration of environmental and development issues into decision making, informa...

This paper describes what the Wellcome Trust has done and aims to do through its population initiative. The Trust is required to spend its funds to improve the physical welfare of mankind, and in this context there can be no more important issue than the rapid changes that are occurring in the human population. The Trust's first involvement was to help fund the New Delhi population summit cover...

This paper presents some aspects related to the issues of aggregating economic indicators. Departing from the research of Gh. Paun (1983) we will prove a theorem which states that under certain, natural assumptions, it is impossible to obtain an optimum aggregation. Unlike the original work of Paun, in this paper we are giving a rather simple proof of this theorem.

The validity of the Michaelis-Menten-Briggs-Haldane approximation for single enzyme reactions has recently been improved by the formalism of the total quasi-steady-state approximation. This approach is here extended to fully competitive systems, and a criterion for its validity is provided. We show that it extends the Michaelis-Menten-Briggs-Haldane approximation for such systems for a wide ran...

In December 2003, seventeen years after the first UK research assessment exercise, Italy started up its first-ever national research evaluation, with the aim to evaluate, using the peer review method, the excellence of the national research production. The evaluation involved 20 disciplinary areas, 102 research structures, 18,500 research products and 6,661 peer reviewers (1,465 from abroad); i...

Ameisen: Die heimliche Weltmacht (Ants: Nature's Secret Power) is a nature documentary about ants. Wolfgang Thaler wrote, filmed, and directed the film, which focuses on the work of ant researcher Bert Hölldobler. The 2004 film was produced by Adi Mayer Film for Österreichischer Rundfunk (Austrian Broadcasting), a public service broadcaster headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Ants: Nature's Secre...

This study is aimed to develop agroecological zone model (AEZ) integrated with the evaluation of land suitability in order to attain the food tenacity in Boyolali County, Central Java, Indonesia. This model is established through five steps. First, it is stocktaking and identifying biophysical land characteristic. The second step is compiling map of suitability of land commodities. The third is...

Sustainable development system is a “black box,” or at least “grey and it not very clear whether there causal relationship between various factors. Artificial neural network can simulate the realistically. In this paper, artificial BP model used as tool, Matlab language to predict indexes of regional sustainable economic subsystem. Through data collection, structure design, program training, st...

The concepts of sustainable development, quality of life, wellbeing, green growth, etc., and their assessment by various kinds of indicators (within the “Beyond GDP”, or later known as the “GDP and Beyond” movement) have become important features of the professional life of many researchers, administrators and even policy makers. The underlying concepts, as well as the indicators are very broad...