Impact on food security and rural development of reallocating water from agriculture:

The competition for limited water resources between agriculture and more highly valued domestic and industrial water uses is rapidly increasing and will likely require the transfer of water out of agriculture. This paper reviews and synthesizes the available evidence of the effects of water transfers from agricultural to urban and industrial areas on local and regional rural economies; and analyzes the potential impacts of a large reallocation on global food supply and demand. It concludes with a discussion on the potential for water policy reform and demand management to minimize adverse impacts when water is reallocated from agriculture. It is argued that comprehensive reforms are required to mitigate the potentially adverse impacts of water transfers for local communities and to sustain crop yield and output growth to meet rising food demands at the global level. Key policy reforms include the establishment of secure water rights to users; the decentralization and privatization of water management functions to appropriate levels; the use of incentives including pricing reform, especially in urban contexts, and markets in tradable property rights; and the introduction of appropriate water-saving technologies.Agricultural resources., Resource allocation., Water resources, Water use Management.,

Impact on Food Security and Rural Development of Transferring Water Out of Agriculture

The competition for limited water resources between agriculture and more highly valued domestic and industrial water uses is rapidly increasing and will likely require the transfer of water out of agriculture. This paper reviews and synthesizes the available evidence of the effects of water transfers from agricultural to urban and industrial areas on local and regional rural economies; and analyzes the possible impacts of a large reallocation on global food supply and demand. It concludes with a discussion of the potential for water policy reform and demand management to minimize adverse impacts when water is reallocated from agriculture. It is argued that comprehensive reforms are required to mitigate the potentially adverse impacts of water transfers for local communities and to sustain crop yield and output growth to meet rising food demands at the global level. Key policy reforms include the establishment of secure water rights to users; the decentralization and privatization of water management functions to appropriate levels; the use of incentives including pricing reform, especially in urban contexts, and markets in tradable property rights; and the introduction of appropriate water-saving technologies

PM-PVM: a portable multithreaded PVM

PM-PVM is a portable implementation of PVM designed to work on SMP architectures supporting multithreading. PM-PVM portability is achieved through the implementation of the PVM functionality on top of a reduced set of parallel programming primitives. Within PM-PVM; PVM tasks are mapped onto threads and the message passing functions are implemented using shared memory. Three implementation appproaches of the PVM message passing functions have been adopted. In the first one, a single message copy in memory is shared by alI destination tasks. The second one replicates the message for every destination task but requires less synchronization. Finally, the third approach uses a combination of features from the two previous ones. Experimental results comparing the performance of PM-PVM and PVM applications running on a 4-processor Sparcstation 20 under Solaris 2.5 show that PM-PVM can produce execution times up to 54% smaller than PVM

Water challenge and institutional response (a cross-country perspective)

This cross-country evaluation of institutional responses to problems in the water sector shows that changes in the nature of water problems have changed the development paradigm underlying water institutions. There is increasing recognition of how decentralized allocation mechanisms can influence economic forces and stakeholders in water sector decisions. As the notion of water provision as a public good and welfare activity gives way to the concept of water as an economic good and an input of economic activity, there is more policy concern about efficient and equitable use, cost recovery, and financial viability. All of the countries the authors studied (Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, and Sri Lanka) are committed to changing the policies and institutions that have caused the present water sector crisis, but they are at different stages of institutional reform. Among cases discussed, Australia and Chile (and, in the United States, California and Colorado) are at an advanced (though not ideal) stage of institutional change. Israel, with its technologically advanced water sector, could well be ahead of them when the proposal to allow water transfers and decentralize water development and distribution systems takes practical shape. Tentative conclusions reached by the authors are: 1) Attempts to fix isolated parts of the water sector will influence other dimensions but an integrated approach is best. At the heart of such an approach should be institutional changes aimed at modernizing and strengthening legal, policy, and administrative arrangements for the whole sector. 2) Institutional changes taking place everywhere suggest that the opportunity costs of (and net gain from) institutional change is not uniform, suggesting that opportunity and transaction costs vary. 3) Funding agencies should focus efforts and resources in countries, areas, and subsectors that already have enough critical mass in institution-building to ensure success and lower transaction costs. 4) The sequence and pace of reform should reflect realities of scale economies and political pressures from reform constituencies. When possible, political economy should be exploited to move reform along more quickly.Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Conservation,Water and Industry,Water Supply and Systems,Decentralization,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water and Industry,Water Conservation,Water Use

Remote sensing big data computing: challenges and opportunities

As we have entered an era of high resolution earth observation, the RS data are undergoing an explosive growth. The proliferation of data also give rise to the increasing complexity of RS data, like the diversity and higher dimensionality characteristic of the data. RS data are regarded as RS ‘‘Big Data’’. Fortunately, we are witness the coming technological leapfrogging. In this paper, we give a brief overview on the Big Data and data-intensive problems, including the analysis of RS Big Data, Big Data challenges, current techniques and works for processing RS Big Data

NCESPARC+: an implementation of a SPARC architecture with hardware support to multithreading for the multiplus multiprocessor

NCESP ARC + is an implementation of the SP ARC v: 8 architecture with hardware support to a variable number of thread contexts, which is under development for use within the framework of the Multiplus distributed shared-memory multiprocessor. It is expected to provide an efficient and automatic mechanism to hide the latency of busy-waiting synchronization loops, cachecoherence protocol and remote memory access operations within the Multiplus multiprocessor. NCESPARC + performs context-switching in at most four processor cycles whenever there is an instruction cache miss, a data dependency in relation to the destination operand of a pending load instruction or a busy-waiting synchronization loop. It has a decoupled architecture which allows the main pipeline to process instructions from a given context while the Memory Interface Unit performs memory access operations related to that same context or to any other context. Results of simulation experiments show the impact of some architectural parameters on the NCESPARC + processor performance and demonstrate that the use of multiple thread contexts can e.ffectively produce a much better utilization of the processor when long latency operations are performed In addition, NCESPARC + processor performance with a single context is superior to that of a standard implementation of the SPARC architecture due to its decoupled architecture

Res Ipsa Loquitur

https://scholarship.shu.edu/law_newspapers/1072/thumbnail.jp

Morris Catalog 2003-05

This catalog is the third semester-based catalog produced for the University of Minnesota, Morris. It covers academic years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005. The Morris Catalog is in effect for nine years; this catalog is in effect from fall 2003 through the end of summer session 2012.https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/catalog/1006/thumbnail.jp