Historical forest biomass dynamics modelled with Landsat spectral trajectories

Acknowledgements National Forest Inventory data are available online, provided by Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente (España). Landsat images are available online, provided by the USGS.Peer reviewedPostprin

So Many Rocket Scientists, So Few Marketing Clerks: Occupational Mobility in Times of Rapid Technological Change

The transition from centrally planned to market economy involves a process of massive occupational change that has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper investigates this process using data from the 1995 Estonian Labour Force Survey. We find that between 35 and 50 percent of wage earners changed occupations from 1989 to 1995 and that job tenure is a consistently important determinant of occupational mobility. Our results also show the speed with which the market mechanism takes root: the returns to current and alternative occupations play, over these few years, increasingly important roles in explaining occupational change.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39937/3/wp552.pd

The First World Trade Center Project: A Historical Tribute to a Great Mega Project

The tragic collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 could not erase the memory of one of the most successful projects in history. The project set standards of excellence in project management for years to come. Using a retrospective look at the construction management of the WTC during the 1960s and 1970s, we show how the vision of great leadership and a determined organization transformed the economy of one of the most important cities in the world

Prospective memory impairments in Alzheimer's Disease and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia: Clinical and neural correlates

BACKGROUND: Prospective memory (PM) refers to a future-oriented form of memory in which the individual must remember to execute an intended action either at a future point in time (Time-based) or in response to a specific event (Event-based). Lapses in PM are commonly exhibited in neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), however, the neurocognitive mechanisms driving these deficits remain unknown. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the clinical and neural correlates of Time- and Event-based PM disruption in AD and the behavioral-variant FTD (bvFTD). METHODS: Twelve AD, 12 bvFTD, and 12 healthy older Control participants completed a modified version of the Cambridge Prospective Memory test, which examines Time- and Event-based aspects of PM. All participants completed a standard neuropsychological assessment and underwent whole-brain structural MRI. RESULTS: AD and bvFTD patients displayed striking impairments across Time- and Event-based PM relative to Controls, however, Time-based PM was disproportionately affected in the AD group. Episodic memory dysfunction and hippocampal atrophy was found to correlate strongly with PM integrity in both patient groups, however, dissociable neural substrates were also evident for PM performance across dementia syndromes. CONCLUSION: Our study reveals the multifaceted nature of PM dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders, and suggests common and dissociable neurocognitive mechanisms, which subtend these deficits in each patient group. Future studies of PM disturbance in dementia syndromes will be crucial for the development of successful interventions to improve functional independence in the patient's daily life

Simon Hantaï: Round table discussion

Edited transcript of the round table discussion about the work of Simon Hantaï held at the French Institute, 3 June 2014 François Rouan, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Mick Finch, Philip Armstrong, Stuart Elliot, Andy Harper, Laura Lisbon and Daniel Sturgis. The round table discussed the work of the Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) has gained increasing recognition in the last few years, particularly in terms of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as an important exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. After Hantaï moved to France in 1949, the series of paintings he made from the 1960s on – where processes of folding were materially at the heart of his practice – became a major and continuing influence on successive generations of French artists

On-line Non-stationary Inventory Control using Champion Competition

The commonly adopted assumption of stationary demands cannot actually reflect fluctuating demands and will weaken solution effectiveness in real practice. We consider an On-line Non-stationary Inventory Control Problem (ONICP), in which no specific assumption is imposed on demands and their probability distributions are allowed to vary over periods and correlate with each other. The nature of non-stationary demands disables the optimality of static (s,S) policies and the applicability of its corresponding algorithms. The ONICP becomes computationally intractable by using general Simulation-based Optimization (SO) methods, especially under an on-line decision-making environment with no luxury of time and computing resources to afford the huge computational burden. We develop a new SO method, termed "Champion Competition" (CC), which provides a different framework and bypasses the time-consuming sample average routine adopted in general SO methods. An alternate type of optimal solution, termed "Champion Solution", is pursued in the CC framework, which coincides the traditional optimality sense under certain conditions and serves as a near-optimal solution for general cases. The CC can reduce the complexity of general SO methods by orders of magnitude in solving a class of SO problems, including the ONICP. A polynomial algorithm, termed "Renewal Cycle Algorithm" (RCA), is further developed to fulfill an important procedure of the CC framework in solving this ONICP. Numerical examples are included to demonstrate the performance of the CC framework with the RCA embedded.Comment: I just identified a flaw in the paper. It may take me some time to fix it. I would like to withdraw the article and update it once I finished. Thank you for your kind suppor

Using Networks To Understand Medical Data: The Case of Class III Malocclusions

A system of elements that interact or regulate each other can be represented by a mathematical object called a network. While network analysis has been successfully applied to high-throughput biological systems, less has been done regarding their application in more applied fields of medicine; here we show an application based on standard medical diagnostic data. We apply network analysis to Class III malocclusion, one of the most difficult to understand and treat orofacial anomaly. We hypothesize that different interactions of the skeletal components can contribute to pathological disequilibrium; in order to test this hypothesis, we apply network analysis to 532 Class III young female patients. The topology of the Class III malocclusion obtained by network analysis shows a strong co-occurrence of abnormal skeletal features. The pattern of these occurrences influences the vertical and horizontal balance of disharmony in skeletal form and position. Patients with more unbalanced orthodontic phenotypes show preponderance of the pathological skeletal nodes and minor relevance of adaptive dentoalveolar equilibrating nodes. Furthermore, by applying Power Graphs analysis we identify some functional modules among orthodontic nodes. These modules correspond to groups of tightly inter-related features and presumably constitute the key regulators of plasticity and the sites of unbalance of the growing dentofacial Class III system. The data of the present study show that, in their most basic abstraction level, the orofacial characteristics can be represented as graphs using nodes to represent orthodontic characteristics, and edges to represent their various types of interactions. The applications of this mathematical model could improve the interpretation of the quantitative, patient-specific information, and help to better targeting therapy. Last but not least, the methodology we have applied in analyzing orthodontic features can be applied easily to other fields of the medical science.</p

Simon Hantaï: round table discussions

The work of the Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) has gained increasing recognition in the last few years, particularly in terms of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as an important exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. After Hantaï moved to France in 1949, the series of paintings he made from the 1960s on – where processes of folding were materially at the heart of his practice – became a major and continuing influence on successive generations of French artists. The evening’s event will comprise two round table discussions. The first will look at the recent reception of Simon Hantaï and concentrate on a discussion with the artist François Rouan and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine who was one of the curators of the recent retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. The second will look at Simon Hantaï’s ongoing influence for subsequent artists and thinkers. Speakers: François Rouan, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Mick Finch, Philip Armstrong, Stuart Elliot, Andy Harper, Laura Lisbon and Daniel Sturgi