Technodiversity Glossary

In a study from 2009, Kleinhückelkotten et al. have found five different groups of people who use the forests for recreation. One of them are the indifferent persons, the others are holistic forest friends, ecological forest romantics, pragmatical distant persons, and self-centered forest users.

With 18% of the total, the indifferent persons form a relatively large group. They feel no emotional connection with forests at all. If they talk about forestry, they assume that forestry is too primitive for them. Often, they don’t accept that forestry earns money with forest products. Fortunately, members of this group will seldom visit a forest.

(See more under TDiv PR1-E02)

see individualizing

Individualizing is the third step of the three-step-model of decision-making in forest technology. The first step is functionalizing and the second one is localizing.

With the third step, one extracts from the remaining processes that option that offers the best fit with the individual aims of the decision-maker. It will be one of the technical processes, but it can also be that the zero-option is the best.

(See more under TDiv PR1-A04 and PR1-F01 to F05)

Interest costs are a part of the cost calculation with the engineering formula. They consider the costs that have to be paid back to the bank for borrowing the money. Normally, the interest is indicated as a percentage of the borrowed sum per year.

In reality, it is calculated monthly on the base of the actual residual debt. So, it becomes less from month to month. In the last month it is nearly zero. Taken as the grand average, interest is calculated over half of the borrowed sum.

Thus, we can approximately calculate the interest costs with

•       the price of the initial investment

•       divided by 2 (to reach the average)

•       times the interest rate in percent.

(See more at TDiv PR1-C02)

The interim calculation is a part of the cost calculations that a manager must do during the work life of a machine or working system.

The task of the interim calculation is to check whether the preliminary estimations of the system costs were realistic and can be approved by the real work of the system. If there are deviations, it is necessary to calculate newly and to correct the data for the further use of the system. In extreme situations it can be optimal to finish the utilization of the system earlier than planned and to sell it if possible, in order to limit the economic damage.

This seems to be simple, but it is not:

In contrast to the pre-calculation, where the costs are calculated as average over the total planned life span, now the real cost curves are observed. The experiences with the curves of repair and maintenance costs of written-off machines show that they vary extremely due to the age of the machine. So, in order to find a realistic view from the machine, the real costs must be compared with the an estimation how the cost curves normally will behave.

(See more at TDiv PR1-C01 and PR1-C05)