Governments at all levels account for 30-50% of most countries’ GDP, exerting profound influence not only by executing their own digital transformations but also by catalyzing digital transformations in other societal sectors.

The coming data revolution will be deeply transformational and that data will produce a shift in the public sector’s quality of service, allowing governments to deliver better integral service, more-productive operations, and better policy outcomes. Governments also need to install a complete and open performance-management system by enabling data that provides a solid fact base for policy making without sacrificing transparency and public accountability.

With this perspective in mind, governments need to launch data initiatives focused on:

• Understanding public attitudes toward specific policies and identifying needed changes.
• Developing and using undisputed key performance indicators that reveal the drivers of policy performance.
• Gauging what is happening in the field by enabling citizens, business operators, and civil servants to provide fact-based information and feedback.
• Evaluating policy performance, reconciling quantitative and qualitative data, and allowing the implementation of a continuous-improvement approach to policy making.

Two powerful trends are fueled by the continuing evolution taking place in public service, supported by true data:

1. The cost of computing power, data transportation, analysis, and storage continue to become more affordable. Meanwhile, software providers have implemented analytic innovation tools that have made it possible for nearly every business and government to benefit from large datasets, and to be provided insight.
2. Data volumes have increased exponentially. The volume of digitally generated data doubles every 2 years, and a new explosion of data is on the horizon. Wide-scale deployment of connected devices are expected to increase from 10 billion in 2013 to 50 billion by 2020.

Throughout history, famous people have reached their status not because their ideas flowed from a group, but rather that they continuously thought independently. For example, take Frank Lloyd Wright, mastermind behind the renowned architecture of Fallingwater. This original piece to come to fruition not because he was rushed into dreaming it up, but rather allowing himself time to procrastinate his ideas. He knew when it was time to procrastinate before he began on his work. Here are some ideas on how to think freely, and allow ideas to develop:

Allow for quantity over size of ideas.

Every original thought and idea throughout history was rarely a finished idea, but rather an idea that was on a list of ideas, and then tinkered with. If you look at musicians, for example—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—their average hit rate is not any higher than many composers you have never heard of.

But what makes them different? They came up with a lot more ideas than their peers. The reason for that is you have to generate a lot of variety to be original. You have to rule out the familiar in order to get to the novel. Most people fall in love with their first idea, or they end up questioning whether they have the ability to come up with more ideas.

Judging ideas creatively.

Just as ideas that you have created can become mostly focused on the pros instead of the cons, doesn’t necessarily mean that managers can judge the idea fairly either, as they can tend to focus more on the negatives. What is constructive however is to take new ideas and compare them to existing prototypes.

What you want to do is ask: “Is this going to appeal to the audience?” This is opposed to “Is this similar to what’s come before?” Whom would provide a fair judgment for an idea? The answer is those that also tend to be a little risk averse, such as your peers and fellow creators.

The creative mind-set of your peers will allow new possibilities to be generated, and thinking creatively increases your openness to novel performances. You’re much more likely, then, to bet on great, original ideas.

Ideas don’t have to come from youth.

Not all ideas need to be generated from youth. For example, if you look at founders of start-ups, the average venture-backed founder is 38. There are a lot of people who are starting companies much later than we’ve ever seen before.

Youth does have its assets. Youth gives you a pair of fresh eyes that disregard the learned practices. On the other hand, though, one of the things you can bring if you have more experience is some degree of breadth. The experienced gives advantages because you know your domain.

As you learn about a domain, if you can gain experience in other domains—and the older you are the more of those domains you can learn—you can start importing and exporting ideas from one place to another, which gives you a great advantage because all original ideas come out of a culmination of depth and breadth.

Groupthink changes creative ideas.

Groupthink is a huge barrier to innovation, and can lead to all kinds of bad decisions. It gets in the way of change. Instead, find somebody who genuinely holds a different opinion and invite them into the conversation. Look for the person who’s in the silent minority and ask them, “What do you think?”

Dissent is even useful when it’s wrong. When somebody brings in a divergent thought it forces the group to step back and say, “Let’s review our assumptions. Let’s look at all the criteria on the table for this decision.” Then they’re much more likely to get to a good answer or a novel possibility that they hadn’t seen before.

Procrastinate wisely.

The word “procrastinate” tends to always have a negative tone. However, it can become to be a virtue.  Sometimes, preparing for a project months in advance can hinder original ideas. The reason is, when you dive right into a task, you end up with tunnel vision. You think in linear ways, and you sit down, and you only have access to the obvious and familiar ideas that you initially started with. If time passes between the planned start of a project, and when it actually starts, there is a greater chance to see unexpected connections between ideas, and to have leaps from one possibility to another.

Channel this thought back to the example of Fallingwater. Frank Lloyd Wright procrastinated the idea for the architecture for a year, before his client became so upset that he literally drove out and said, “I want you to design this for me on the spot,” not believing it was ever going to get done. Since Frank Lloyd Wright procrastinated over a number of months, his ideas were processed to the point that he finally came up with the brilliant design.

As the US financial growth has become strained, one thing has become abundantly clear; the past growth engine isn’t the same as it has been in decades. As international companies and domestic companies have realized this change, Europe has continued in their long recession.

Above all, progress will require a willingness to stretch for new opportunities rather than wait for the old economy to bounce back. Four areas can push businesses through the economic bottleneck.

Develop industry standards

Lingering uncertainties are slowing progress in a number of areas, but business leaders can move these issues forward without waiting for legislative or regulatory action. Some companies already are working with universities and nonprofits to find technical and legal solutions for assuring privacy and cyber-security.

Take for example shale energy; oil and gas players can help alleviate environmental risks by pursuing standards for all producers to follow in fracking—and by continuing to improve drilling and well technologies to reduce its environmental impact. Some energy companies are joining with environmental groups, academic researchers, and foundations to monitor the risks and create operational standards. The Center for Sustainable Shale Development, for example, is a coalition of environmental groups and energy firms. Alleviating these risks is crucial to protecting the air and groundwater while allowing the economy as a whole to reap the full benefits of shale development.

Form new types of partnerships

As the shale examples suggest, companies hoping to stay in the forefront of the new economy must look beyond their own boundaries and find new forms of collaboration. Big data, for example, is tailor-made for partnerships, such as a joint effort by Google and the US Patent and Trademark Office to create a new searchable database of intellectual property. Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are entering new multidisciplinary research partnerships to analyze enormous open databases of clinical and genetic information and collaboratively develop new drugs and diagnostics.

Change locally

Local innovation is the key to realizing the game changers on a national level. Industry leaders can work with city and state officials to build on local capabilities. These types of partnerships should move the opportunities presented by the game changers to the top of the local agenda by developing infrastructure, promoting export industries, supporting the use of big data, expanding vocational training, and assessing the role a region can play.

Stretch thinking and step out of the box

Fully exploiting the opportunities will also require business leaders to stretch their thinking and their capabilities. The potential in energy, big data, and knowledge-intensive industries is large enough to spark the development of whole new supply chains. That could stimulate growth among a wide range of B2B goods, from fabricated metals to electronic controls, as well as service providers in areas such as logistics and data storage.

Policy makers have a role to play, as well, but they need to take a nuanced approach. For game changers such as shale energy and the private sector’s use of big data, the government’s role will largely be laying the groundwork by setting legal and regulatory frameworks, often in conjunction with businesses.

A research paper has predicted the widespread death of needle-leaf evergreen trees within the Southwest United States by the year 2100 under projected global warming scenarios. The research team that conducted the study considered both field results and a range of validated regional predictions and global simulation models of varying complexity, in reaching this grim conclusion.

The Southwest U.S. is a semi-arid region that includes Arizona and parts of New Mexico, California, Colorado, Utah and Texas amongst other states. It is home to 11 national forests spanning more than 20 million acres in Arizona and New Mexico.

The loss of broad-scale forest cover over the Southwest could contribute additional carbon to the atmosphere, creating additional warming. This is because trees and understory vegetation, such as shrubs and bushes, sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Less vegetation means less carbon capture, which can create a negative feedback loop that can accelerate climate change.

The full report can be found here.

Today’s lifestyles have made humans heavier, but noticeably lighter weight than our hunter-gatherer ancestors in one particular way: the bones.

A study of the bones of hundreds of humans who lived during the past 33,000 years in Europe finds the rise of agriculture and a corresponding fall in mobility drove the change, rather than urbanization, nutrition or other factors. The discovery sheds light on a monumental change that has left modern humans susceptible to osteoporosis, a condition marked by brittle and thinning bones.

At the root of the finding is the knowledge that putting bones under the "stress" of walking, lifting and running leads them to pack on more calcium and grow stronger.

The study was a collaborative effort of researchers from across Europe and the United States that began in 2008. It focused on Europe because it has many well-studied archeological sites, and because the population has relatively little genetic variation, despite some population movements. That meant that any changes observed could be attributed more to lifestyle than to genetics.

The researchers took molds of bones from museums' collections and used a portable X-ray machine to scan them, focusing on two major bones from the legs and one from the arms. When they analyzed the geometry of bones over time, the researchers found a decline in leg bone strength between the Mesolithic era, which began about 10,000 years ago, and the age of the Roman Empire, which began about 2,500 years ago. Arm bone strength, however, remained fairly steady. 

A fungus called Rapid Ohia Death has been recently discovered, and is killing a tree species that is critical to Hawaii's water supply, endangered native birds.

The disease has hit hundreds of thousands of ohia lehua trees on the Big Island. As of last year, it was found to have affected 50% of the ohia trees across 6,000 acres of forest, but it's believed to have spread further. Hawaii is planning aerial surveys next month to learn how many acres are affected by the fungus. A world expert in similar diseases is also expected to visit the islands to advise the state on how to control the outbreak.

Ohia is important to the water supply because it's so effective at soaking water into the ground and replenishing the watershed. It's critical for native birds because the animals feed on its nectar. It provides a canopy to native plants growing underneath it in the forests. Ohia wood was used for weapons, hula instruments, homes and temples in ancient Hawaii.

To prevent spreading, the state Department of Agriculture has created rules prohibiting moving wood, flowers and other parts of the ohia tree between islands. Hawaii is also encouraging people to clean tools used on ohia and clean shoes and clothes used near ohia.

Biofuel to run cars and generators could come from large swaths of seaweed grown in the open ocean. That's the vision of a new project being led by Marine BioEnergy, Inc.

Marine BioEnergy has proposed a patented method to grow one of the fastest producers of biomass, giant kelp, in the open ocean. Sunshine and space are abundant in the open ocean, but waters are too deep there for kelp to grow on the sea floor. Instead, Marine Bioenergy will develop technology to enable the eventual attachment of kelp to large grids towed by inexpensive robotic submarines that cycle between sunlight at the sea surface and nutrients in deeper waters.

Once farmed, the kelp will be turned into biocrude oil and other hydrocarbon liquids through a conversion process. Development of a multi-step method that will combine hydrothermal liquefaction will follow, all of which involve changes in temperature, pressure and water - to convert biomass. This method will cost-effectively turn kelp into hydrocarbons that are ready for final processing at a commercial oil refinery.

According to a new study, scientists have been significantly overestimating the amount of carbon stored in the world's tropical forests.

World leaders and climate scientists use carbon storage estimates to devise carbon trading and mitigation agreements. Deforestation is a huge source of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and leaders recognize forest conservation and restoration as a critical tool for reducing and mitigating climate change. This applies to forests where people have cleared trees – usually for roads, timber or agriculture. The more intensely humans use a forest, the more fragmented it becomes. This fragmentation creates drier, more exposed forest edges, which disables the ability to store carbon.

Forest clearing accounts for an estimated 12-15% of global greenhouse gas emissions through the annual loss of nearly 77,000 square miles of forest, a third of which is in the tropics. These emissions are calculated through forest carbon inventories, which do not take into account the decrease in carbon stocks occurring in forests where they meet with converted land. If current carbon stock estimates for tropical forests are low, then mitigation plans designed to offset timber cutting will need to be adjusted to achieve climate stabilization goals.

The authors of the study used insights gained from local studies, and joined remotely sensed biomass data with land cover data, showing that edge effects vary considerably across forests. Wetter, tropical forests are more affected than drier counterparts. This research stems from an earlier collaboration that found a similar edge effect looking only at forests in Brazil.

That babbling brook shouldn’t be underestimated when it comes to emmisions of greenhouse gases. The rural water bodies have the potential to create a lot of hot air.

According to a new research conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues, the world's rivers and streams pump about 10 times more methane into our atmosphere than scientists estimated in previous studies. The new study also found that human activity seems to drive which streams are the biggest contributors.

Like carbon dioxide, methane is a greenhouse gas that traps heat at the Earth's surface. It is less prevalent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but also more potent: A molecule of methane results in more warming than a molecule of carbon dioxide. Understanding how much methane is emitted into the atmosphere from all sources helps scientists account for the full global greenhouse gas budget, and take measures to mitigate its impact.

Rivers and streams haven't received much attention in accounting for that budget, because they don't take up much surface area on a global scale and, with respect to methane, didn't seem to be all that gassy. But over the years, measurements taken seemed to indicate these sources may produce more methane than scientists had previously known.

The team created a database of measured methane flux (the exchange of the gas between water and atmosphere) and methane concentrations measured in streams and rivers using data from 111 publications and three unpublished datasets. The research team then used two different methods to calculate the best estimates of global methane emissions from the data. They found the emissions to be an order of magnitude higher than scientists had previously reported.

The researchers pointed to one possible reason: Not every stream is identical. The analysis revealed noticeably higher methane emissions from streams and rivers in watersheds marked with heavy agriculture, urban development or the presence of dams. This suggests efforts to improve stream health may have the added benefit of reducing greenhouse gases.

Methane from freshwater is often a byproduct of bacterial metabolism, as they break down organic matter under low-oxygen conditions, like in the sediment at the bottom of a lake. As the climate warms, the contribution of greenhouse gases from natural sources like rivers, streams and wetlands is expected to increase because higher temperatures accelerate this bacterial breakdown, releasing more carbon dioxide and methane.

Researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) have developed a technology based on the use of carbon dioxide to improve the energy production in solar fields. The usage of this fluid on solar energy has been verified by the research group of UPM at the Almeria Solar Platform (PSA), achieving excellent results:  fluid and inexpensive solar fields that are friendly to the environment.

Agriculture has always been a benchmark for production systems in which huge areas are required to obtain economic benefits and trying to reduce harvesting costs. This principle can be applied to the use of solar energy on solar fields for renewable energy production where there are two major competitors: photovoltaic energy and thermal energy. The first competitor cannot currently store large amounts of the energy produced with optimal performance. However, thermal energy allows us to storage energy improving the management of renewable energy, similar to a dam that stores water for a hydroelectric plant.

In the case of solar thermal energy, there are four commercialized technologies with varying costs and energy conversion efficiencies: parabolic trough, power tower, solar dish and linear Fresnel system. The first two types have been developing since the 80’s but the other two technologies have been less developed. In fact, the analogous to the three-bladed wind turbines has not been found yet.

Researchers have carried out a study that adopts an innovative prospect for making design decisions:  thermal coherence that prevents excessive temperatures or unnecessary material usage. Observing other fields of energy engineering such as nuclear powers plant is required, since numerous plants work with moderate temperatures. Therefore, the solar industry trend of reaching higher temperatures can be unsuitable. Besides, the high production cost can slow down the technological development of the assumed design philosophies. Thus, the disruptive innovation proposed in this study has more potential.

The development of these ideas leads to an improved concept of Fresnel by using carbon dioxide as a fluid working that can be used in severe thermal applications such as the cooling of high-temperature nuclear reactors. In addition, the usage CO2 in solar energy can work to confine this fluid and, at the same time, prevent emissions by replacing other thermoelectric plants that use fossil fuels.

The technology, developed by UPM researchers, is currently being exploited through the Futuro Solar project by signing an agreement between UPM and OHL Industrial. The Futuro Solar project was submitted in the 2nd call for Research and Development Projects co-financed by the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism (EEA-Grants). This technology is an advanced prototype of the learning curve regarding the current state of thermosolar technology. It is expected to start operating in spring 2016.

A reports has been released stating that the world’s soils are at best only in fair condition and in some areas are very poor.

According to the report, 33% of land is being moderately to highly degraded due to erosion, salinization, pollution, compaction or acidification. The current rate of soil degradation threatens the capacity to meet the needs of future generations. Evidence that the loss of soil resources and function can be avoided. Sustainable soil management, using scientific and local knowledge and evidence-based approaches and technologies, can increase nutritious food supply. It can also provide a valuable lever for climate regulation and safeguard for ecosystem services.

The threats to soil function combined with other pressures caused by increasing population and climate change are especially challenging in southwest Western Australia and on the atoll islands of the Pacific. The document highlights the example of soil monitoring in New Zealand and how this demonstrates the capability to track and respond to changes.

Increasing trade of agricultural products is vital to eliminating world hunger, but only if open trade policies do not endanger food security. Trade affects all dimensions of food security: food availability, access, utilization and stability, a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has stated.

World trade in food and agricultural products, which has grown almost three-fold in value over the past decade, is set to continue to expand with regions such as Asia, North Africa and Middle East increasing net imports, while others like Latin America boosting exports. The challenge has therefore become one of ensuring that the expansion of agricultural trade works for, and not against, the elimination of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.

Trade affects many of the economic and social variables that ultimately determine a population's food security and nutrition status – including growth, incomes, poverty levels, food prices and government budgets. While trade in itself is neither a threat nor a complete solution, it does pose challenges and risks that need to be considered in policy decision-making.

The report cited such risks as relying on the global marketplace for imported food which could see sudden price hikes and also leave the importing country vulnerable to actions by trading partners and short-term market shocks. Still, the report concluded there is no "one size fits all" for a trade policy that supports food security. It suggests that trade and related government policy will differ by countries and will change over time as their economies develop.

The distribution and location of food-insecure populations can affect the balance between policies focused on increased production and rural incomes, and those focused on securing cheaper food for urban populations. Overall, trade reforms should be considered as part of broader policy packages aimed at achieving sustainable development goals, including eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.

"The eradication of global hunger by 2030 is a key goal in the new post-2015 sustainable development agenda – and trade is one of the means for achieving this goal," the FAO said.

The African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), aims to achieve twice the continent's total current electricity supply of 10 gigawatts of new renewables by 2020 and mobilize the potential to generate 300 gigawatts by 2030. The initiative is driven by African countries and represents a part of their contribution to the global efforts on climate change and eliminating energy poverty.

The AREI initiative will help African nations embrace low-carbon development strategies while creating jobs, improving energy security and bringing clean, safe and affordable energy to the 640 million Africans who currently lack access to it. This plan was met with an announcement by France that it will provide 2 billion euros for renewable energy in Africa between 2016 and 2020.

The impacts of global climate change is likely to have far-reaching on food security throughout the world, especially for the poor and those living in tropical regions, according to a new international report “Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System.”

The report warns that warmer temperatures and altered precipitation patterns can threaten food production, disrupt transportation systems, and degrade food safety, among other impacts. As a result, international progress in the past few decades toward improving food security will be difficult to maintain.

This report provides an overview of recent research in climate change and agriculture. Led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and published under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, it includes contributors from 19 federal, academic, nongovernmental, intergovernmental, and private organizations in the United States, Argentina, Britain, and Thailand.

The report focuses on identifying climate change impacts on global food security through 2100. The authors emphasize that food security – the ability of people to obtain and use sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food – will be affected by several factors in addition to climate change, such as technological advances, increases in population, the distribution of wealth, and changes in eating habits.

In Quezaltepeque, a village 30 kilometers north of San Salvador, 14 co-farmers feel fortunate to be the first testing a bean that survives droughts. They proudly showed off an abundant harvest of around 1.7 acres of the bean grown on the farm where they work, to the awed gaze of visitors. The type of light red bean they are using, which is also resistant to an infection known as bean golden yellow mosaic virus, was painstakingly developed with the help of El Salvador's National Center for Agricultural and Forestry Technology (CENTA).

Dubbed CENTA-EAC, the bean is not a biotech crop designed by genetic engineers slicing up chromosomes. Rather it is the product of hybridization: the combining of naturally formed plants to form a cross-breed. The Salvadoran experiment came as a prolonged drought settled on Central America this year, causing heavy crop losses across a broad swathe of land stretching from Costa Rica to Guatemala.

Because of the lack of water, 2.3 million small Central American farmers will need food aid, the UN's World Food Program has warned. The CENTA-EAC bean is part of a decade-old effort by laboratories in the region to come up with hybrids able to survive and even prosper during the recurring droughts. With the help of farmers, it was noted that it was possible to come up with crops adapted to extreme weather conditions.

The whole region is working along the same lines. In Guatemala, scientists are working on the ICTA-Chorti, which will not only resist droughts but also be rich in iron. In Nicaragua, another institute has made a variety of red bean, the INTA-Tomabu, also able to survive when water is scarce. In Panama, one of the first countries in the region to work with types of corn resistant to changing weather, has come up with a new seed. In El Salvador, farmers already have the option of using a type of corn called CENTA-Pasaquina, but it has fallen from favor because of its perceived low yield. Nicaragua meanwhile has a type of virus-resistant tomato seed christened INTA-Jinotega that copes with temperatures over 25 degrees centigrade. In Costa Rica, it's cocoa—a crop essential to the economy—that is being looked at in the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center with hopes of coming up with a more resistant variety.

An aim of stopping destruction of the world’s largest and greatest forest by 2030 has been set back as illegal logging and clearing of Brazil's Amazon rainforest increased 16% in the last year.

The area of deforestation grew to 2,251 square miles between July 2014 and August 2015. The biggest increases of deforestation were in the states of Amazonas, with a 54% rise, Rondonia with 41% and Mato Grosso with 40%. The sharp deterioration came despite Brazil's attempts to increase policing of the rainforest, which is seen as a key element in the fight to keep greenhouse gases under control—the subject of a major climate change summit starting in Paris on Monday.

Preliminary reports suggest that expansion of cattle ranching and agriculture is to blame for the clearances.

The Amazon is a giant trap for carbon that would otherwise be released, contributing to global warming. It is also one of the world's greatest remaining sanctuaries for rare and often still barely studied flora and fauna.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that a staggering $2.6 billion worth of treated drinking water is lost each year due to leaking water mains and approximately 240,000 main breaks. To address this problem, the agency proposed that more than $600 billion be invested in water infrastructure improvements over the next 20 years.

These numbers don’t surprise Greg Harrington, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on our drinking water infrastructure. Harrington knows better than most people the importance of the public water utility, and the tremendous role it plays in keeping everyone safe.

In 1993, more than 400,000 Milwaukee residents got sick from drinking their tap water due to an outbreak of the parasite Cryptosporidium. The largest known waterborne disease outbreak in U.S. history, this incident spurred an investment of $89 million in upgrading the city’s water treatment plants during the next five years.

Harrington conducted research on new water treatment technologies in the aftermath of Milwaukee’s Cryptosporidium outbreak. But the EPA’s concerns about infrastructure are also Harrington’s. Water treatment technology is important, but upgrading the water delivery grid is equally as important, both for public health reasons and for conserving energy. Many of the nation’s water pipes were either installed more than a century ago or right after World War II. Leakages or water main breaks are one consequence of the deterioration, or corrosion, of these pipes since then. But another consequence involves public health: Even if old pipes don’t break, they might contaminate the water they carry.

Up until the 1950s, lead was a commonly used material for service lines, or pipe sections that connect the water main to a consumer’s home. The corrosion of these lead service lines may result in dangerous levels of lead leaching into drinking water, which can cause irreversible brain damage in children. Many utilities have employed chemical corrosion control to reduce lead leaching, but Harrington says the best long-term solution to this problem is replacing all lead service lines with newer pipes made of plastic or copper.

Since both water treatment and water pumping require substantial energy, one of the best ways for water utilities to conserve energy is to minimize water loss by upgrading the water delivery grid. But Harrington also emphasizes that a utility’s energy use for water quality assurance and infrastructure maintenance is a fixed expense unrelated to the amount of water delivered to a home. Since this expense has to be recovered from monthly water bills, a 50% decrease in a customer’s water use may not translate to a 50% decrease in their water bill.

For more on this topic click here.

Questions that face the German educational system currently are:

• Does Germany's education system discriminate against children and young people with a migrant background?
• What obstacles do they face in reality?
• Are there differences between groups from different backgrounds?

A new study provides an overview of the current state of research in this field. It suggests that a child's social origin has a greater impact on their educational opportunities than foreign origin.

Performance gaps between young people of immigrant and non-immigrant backgrounds are apparent from an early stage in education. Those differing results comprise a recurring theme through the whole system, and this is primarily due to social conditions. Although migration-related factors are also present, e.g. in the area of language, these are, on the whole, less significant than factors associated with social origin.

In summarizing the central findings, the editors point out clear differences in the performance of different groups. Children of Turkish origin generally achieve far lower results than other immigrant groups, such as first-generation immigrants from the former Soviet Union. This is apparent, for example, in the transition to on-the-job training, with many studies finding transition rates to be far lower among young Turkish men. They tend to do better in large companies, however, indicating that the standardized selection procedures applied in such settings can prevent ethnic discrimination.

Within the education system, individual discrimination in the form of appraisal by teachers does not play a major role in explaining ethnic disadvantages in education. Instead, it is the social backgrounds of pupils that influence their teachers' decisions, generally to the detriment of children from educationally disadvantaged homes. Of course, this group has a disproportionate weighting of children from immigrant backgrounds.

Electricity resulting from renewable sources lacks clear regulations that would enable it to be used at large scale, and thus, the grid already faces transmission challenges as the alternative current infrastructure has almost reached its transport capacity. That's why large transport of electricity through the grid has stability problems, leading to the rise of overall system costs, outages and blackouts.

Additionally by 2050, the majority of Europe's electricity has to come from renewables. Therefore, the security of supply and energy affordability need to be ensured. The offshore winds farms in the North and Baltic Seas have started to supply power for neighboring countries. But to transport vast amounts of electricity produced in the European waters over longer distances, a power grid infrastructure at the sea should be built. There is a huge potential of connecting wind farms to each other or to different countries and to transport the electricity to the markets that need it.

Growing the percentage of renewable electricity implies fundamental changes in the way transmission lines are designed, used and controlled. Indeed, establishing the EU internal energy market will allow a smooth penetration of renewable energy sources and will lead to reduction of CO2 emissions, while ensuring an affordable market for electricity consumers.

For the time being, the unclear methodology for cross-border cost allocation led to unanswered questions. For example, it is hard to define who is financially responsible for building an interconnector from which more countries will benefit.

There are also technical barriers related to the appropriate application of high voltage direct current (HVDC) technology designed to transport the electricity over very long distances. This technology will also permit the connection between the remote wind farms and the continent or from the large solar farms in the south of Europe or North Africa to the European grid. These barriers are also analyzed by the European project Best Paths. The lack of a common vision and a stable investment framework for renewables also need to be addressed. At the EU level, the European Commission set budget allocations for projects of common interest, which co-finance several cross border electricity connections. But the experts say it is not enough.

Innovative technologies were recently showcased at the UK National Centre for Food Manufacturing. Amongst these technologies, the robotic harvesting of vegetables, automated weeding techniques and the use of sensitive disease detection software are part of the new agri-tech initiative in the United Kingdom.

Launched in line with the Government's quest for the UK to become a world leader in agricultural technology, innovation and sustainability, the first Agri-Tech Week aims to create a better understanding of the issues facing farmers and growers, while showcasing some of the most interesting emerging technologies. As part of this project, the University of Lincoln's National Centre for Food Manufacturing (NCFM) welcomed business representatives, leading academics, industry funders and students to a unique event exhibiting cutting-edge science and technology in the agri-food sector.

Included were featured presentations and demonstrations from the teams behind a number of pioneering projects, many of which are part of the new Lincoln Institute for Agri-food Technology (LIAT). The research institute has been established by the University of Lincoln to support and enhance productivity in the agri-food sectors.

Professor Tom Duckett from the University of Lincoln presented a new research project developing 3D camera technology which could result in a fully automatic robotic harvesting system for broccoli. Funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Innovate UK as part of the Agri-Tech Catalyst fund, the project will test whether 3D camera technology can be used to identify and select when the vegetables are ready for harvesting. This will be a key step towards the development of a fully automatic system which could significantly reduce production costs. Showcasing Developments in Agri-Food Technology also included robotics demonstrations led by academics from the University of Lincoln's School of Engineering and Computer Science.