Quantitative Techniques in Participatory Forest Management

Forest management has evolved from a mercantilist view to a multi-functional one that integrates economic, social, and ecological aspects. However, the issue of sustainability is not yet resolved. Quantitative Techniques in Participatory Forest Management brings together global research in three areas of application: inventory of the forest variables that determine the main environmental indices, description and design of new environmental indices, and the application of sustainability indices for regional implementations. All these quantitative techniques create the basis for the development of scientific methodologies of participatory sustainable forest management

Proceedings of the European Workshop on the Evaluation of Farm Investment Support, Investment Support for Improvement of Processing and Marketing of Agricultural Products

Contents: i - Angela Bergschmidt, Walter Dirksmeyer and Bernhard Forstner - Proceedings of the European Evaluation Workshop – Foreword -- PAPERS PRESENTED IN THE PLENARY SESSIONS -- 3 - Stefan Meyer - Methods for the Evaluation of Investment Support -- 15 - Andrea Pufahl - Programme Evaluation of Rural Development Plans – Purpose, Approaches and Exemplary Results -- 27 - Carel Gosselink - Agri Finance: Lost without Support? -- 33 - Anne Margarian - How to Evaluate a Measure without Goals – Considerations on the Basis of the Paradigmatic Example of Farm Investment Support in Germany -- 45 - Rudy Ooijen - Ex Ante Evaluations of Rural Development Programmes – Not just an Appraisal -- PAPERS PRESENTED IN THE SESSION ON FARM INVESTMENT SUPPORT -- 61 - Angela Bergschmidt and Walter Dirksmeyer - A Comparison of Farm Investment Support in Selected EU Member States -- 69 - Monika Beck and Thomas Dogot - The Use of Impact Indicators for the Evaluation of Farm Investment Support – A Case Study Based on the Rural Development Programme for Wallonia (2000 – 2006) -- 79 - Barbara Costantini and Maria Cristina Sibilla - Implementation of Farm Investment Support in Italy – Mid-Term Analysis -- 93 - Pawel Chmielinski - Regional Absorption Capacity of Farm Investment Support in Poland -- 105 - Luis A. Collado Cueto - Effectiveness and Impacts of Farm Investment Support in Spain – The Experience of the Updated Mid-Term Evaluation (2000 – 2006) -- 121 - Dimitros Lianos and Triantafyllia Giotopoulou - The Experience of the Evaluation of Farm Investment Support in Greece -- 133 - Bernhard Forstner - Evaluation of Farm Investment Support in Germany – Lessons Learned from the Application of Different Approaches -- 147 - Stephan Pfefferli - Impact Analysis of Investment Support for Agricultural Buildings in Switzerland -- 159 - Justyna Ziólkowska, Joanna Nargiello and Cezary Klimkowski - The Analysis of Changes in Farm Investment Support Policy in Poland after Joining the European Union -- PAPERS PRESENTED IN THE SESSION ON INVESTMENT SUPPORT FOR IMPROVEMENT OF PROCESSING AND MARKETING OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS -- 177 - Inge Uetrecht, Heinz Wendt, Volker Krah and Annette Trefflich - The Implementation of Investment Support for Improving Processing and Marketing of Agricultural Products in the EU Member States – An Overview -- 187 -Andreas Pölking - Synthesis of the RDP Mid-Term Evaluation in Germany (16 Länder) and EC 15 in 2005 – Methodologies, Possibilities, Pitfalls and some Selected Results -- 195 - Julia Neuwirth and Karlheinz Pistrich - Improving Processing and Marketing of Agricultural Products – Organisation, Problems and Results of Evaluation in Austria -- 201 - Alois Grabner - Improving of Processing and Marketing of Agricultural Products – Assessment of Projects -- 205 - Pedro Serrano - Support to Processing and Marketing of Agricultural Products in Portugal -- 215 - Mark Temple - Two Approaches to Evaluation – The Case of the Processing and Marketing Grant in England -- 227 - Jochen Nölle and Josef Efken - Does Complete Field Research Build a Good Basis to Evaluating the Measure? -- CLOSURE OF THE EUROPEAN EVALUATION WORKSHOP -- 241 - Bernhard Forstner and Heinz Wendt - Summary and Final Discussion --

Crowdsourcing for Engineering Design: Objective Evaluations and Subjective Preferences

Crowdsourcing enables designers to reach out to large numbers of people who may not have been previously considered when designing a new product, listen to their input by aggregating their preferences and evaluations over potential designs, aiming to improve ``good'' and catch ``bad'' design decisions during the early-stage design process. This approach puts human designers--be they industrial designers, engineers, marketers, or executives--at the forefront, with computational crowdsourcing systems on the backend to aggregate subjective preferences (e.g., which next-generation Brand A design best competes stylistically with next-generation Brand B designs?) or objective evaluations (e.g., which military vehicle design has the best situational awareness?). These crowdsourcing aggregation systems are built using probabilistic approaches that account for the irrationality of human behavior (i.e., violations of reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity), approximated by modern machine learning algorithms and optimization techniques as necessitated by the scale of data (millions of data points, hundreds of thousands of dimensions). This dissertation presents research findings suggesting the unsuitability of current off-the-shelf crowdsourcing aggregation algorithms for real engineering design tasks due to the sparsity of expertise in the crowd, and methods that mitigate this limitation by incorporating appropriate information for expertise prediction. Next, we introduce and interpret a number of new probabilistic models for crowdsourced design to provide large-scale preference prediction and full design space generation, building on statistical and machine learning techniques such as sampling methods, variational inference, and deep representation learning. Finally, we show how these models and algorithms can advance crowdsourcing systems by abstracting away the underlying appropriate yet unwieldy mathematics, to easier-to-use visual interfaces practical for engineering design companies and governmental agencies engaged in complex engineering systems design.PhDDesign ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133438/1/aburnap_1.pd

Quantitative Techniques in Participatory Forest Management

Forest management has evolved from a mercantilist view to a multi-functional one that integrates economic, social, and ecological aspects. However, the issue of sustainability is not yet resolved. Quantitative Techniques in Participatory Forest Management brings together global research in three areas of application: inventory of the forest variables that determine the main environmental indices, description and design of new environmental indices, and the application of sustainability indices for regional implementations. All these quantitative techniques create the basis for the development of scientific methodologies of participatory sustainable forest management

Social class, pedagogy and achievement in art

Includes bibliographical references (p.256-271).This thesis explores pedagogy associated with high levels of achievement in art in the final year of secondary school, by learners in different social positions. It investigates first, achievement patterns in final-exhibition percentage grades, in relation to learners' social class, race, and gender. Second, based on comparison of high and lower-achieving school classes of socially similar learners, it examines specific pedagogic features linked to success in particular social contexts. The research asks whether or not specific pedagogic features are associated with achievement in art for learners in particular social positions, and if so, whether. These are similar to pedagogic features linked to success in science. It combines different methods to address these questions: a survey to identify art achievement patterns in relation to learners' social class, race and gender, and a multiple case study for detailed exploration of pedagogy and curriculum linked to performance in art, in six school classes. Finding achievement patterned more strongly in relation to social class than race or gender, analysis focuses on social class and achievement

Toward a Heuristic Model for Evaluating the Complexity of Computer Security Visualization Interface

Computer security visualization has gained much attention in the research community in the past few years. However, the advancement in security visualization research has been hampered by the lack of standardization in visualization design, centralized datasets, and evaluation methods. We propose a new heuristic model for evaluating the complexity of computer security visualizations. This complexity evaluation method is designed to evaluate the efficiency of performing visual search in security visualizations in terms of measuring critical memory capacity load needed to perform such tasks. Our method is based on research in cognitive psychology along with characteristics found in a majority of the security visualizations. The main goal for developing this complexity evaluation method is to guide computer security visualization design and compare different visualization designs. Finally, we compare several well known computer security visualization systems. The proposed method has the potential to be extended to other areas of information visualization

Pioneers of Parametrics

This paper provides a historical account of the development of the field of parametrics through information obtained during interviews of twelve pioneers of the field. Cost model developers, users, and practitioners were interviewed with the intent to capture their views on the impact between cost estimation research and practice. The individuals interviewed represent a diverse range of perspectives including academia, government, and industry. Each perspective sheds light on the areas in which the field of parametrics has had an impact and which synergies have been influential in the development of the field. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of the future challenges for the field of parametrics

Attributing Benefits to Voluntary Programs in EPA’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery: Challenges and Options

This paper reviews the economic justification for voluntary environmental programs to derive defensible measures of their positive social outcomes. We consider ideal experimental and statistical designs to detect and attribute benefits. We also explore a set of more practical approaches to benefit attribution that take into account the data gaps and statistical challenges that often make more rigorous approaches infeasible.voluntary programs, cost–benefit assessment, program evaluation