Ghana airborne geophysics project in the Volta and Keta Basin : BGS final report

This report describes the work undertaken by BGS between November 2006 and March 2009 in collaboration with Fugro Airborne Surveys Pty Ltd on an airborne geophysical survey and ground reconnaissance mapping of the Volta River and Keta Basins, Ghana. The project was supported by the EU as part of the Mining Sector Support Programme, Project Number 8ACP GH 027/13. The initial contract duration was three years, but this was extended by five months to account for acquisition of gravity data by another project. Some parts of Ghana have been airborne surveyed as part of the Mining Sector Development and Environmental Project, co-funded by the World Bank and the Nordic Development Fund, but no work was carried out on the Volta River and Keta basins, which together form a major portion of the Ghanaian territory. The approximate areas covered by the surveys are estimated at 98,000 km² for the satellite imagery and the airborne geophysics, except for the Time Domain Electromagnetic (TDEM) survey which was limited to 60,000 km². The main beneficiary of this project is the Geological Survey Department, GSD. The work enhanced its geological infrastructure and its personnel received hands-on training on modern geological mapping technology. Indirect beneficiaries were the mining and exploration companies that can follow up the reconnaissance work with detailed exploration work. The project was conducted in five phases, and this document reports on the BGS input to Phase 1, 4 and 5, with no inputs required in Phases 2 and 3: • Phase1: geological outline through Radar and optical satellite imageries. • Phase 2: airborne geophysical survey over the two basins for magnetics and Gamma Ray spectrometry (Fugro survey). • Phase 3: airborne electromagnetic and magnetic geophysical survey of specific areas, following the completion and interpretation of phase 2, using fixed wing time domain technology (Fugro survey). • Phase 4: interpretation of the combined geology and geophysics. • Phase 5: production of factual and interpretation maps. The full list of BGS products is outlined in Table 1 below, while Jordan et al. (2006) describe the products delivered on schedule in Phase 1

Managed Floats to Damp Shocks like 1982-5 and 2006-9: Field and Laboratory Evidence for Chinese Interest in a Single World Currency

This paper’s field evidence is: (1) many official sectors rapidly forget the damage of the 1982-85 exchange rate liquidity crisis and reverted to what caused that crisis, namely a closed economy clean floats perspective; and (2) the 2006-2008/9 exchange rate liquidity shock would have been more drastic but for central bank currency swaps. This evidence is bolstered by a laboratory experiment that incorporates more aspects of real world complexity and more different sorts of official and private sector agents than are feasible in econometric or algebraic investigations and employs a new central bank cooperation-conflict model of exchange rate determination , and is within an umbrella theory of Pope, namely SKAT, the Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory. SKAT allows for risk effects from stages omitted in normal models, including those from (a) difficulties of agents in evaluating alternatives in a complex environment in which the assumed maximization of expected utility is impossible; and (b) preference for safety and reliability is not trivialized. Our joint field plus laboratory evidence indicates that official sectors should maintain an international exchange rate oriented perspective, or better yet, a single world currency as recommended by Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the People’s Bank of China. To avoid rapid forgetting of havoc from isolationist clean floats and the value of stable exchange rates, a new syllabus, as under the SKAT umbrella, is fundamental in the education of official sector members in order to furnish them with a coherent alternative intellectual framework to current university education that excludes liquidity crises.clean float, managed float, IMF imposed conditions, exchange rate regime, exchange rate volatility, experiment, SKAT the Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory, monetary policy, transparent policy, exchange rate shocks, central bank cooperation, central bank conflict

Systematics of Advanced Capital Market Models based on Empirical Research

The complex blue prints of ODE and PDE based capital market models remain closed to systematic review. Particularly, when some authors of mathematical models can not or may not offer explicit solutions. Artificially generated 'cloned' courses can demonstrate the impact of various types of stochastic volatility in these cases. The Black and Scholes formula has the disadvantage that its key variable, the (future) volatility. is not known. In fact, what is known is that the volatility is volatile itself and the assumption of a stable volatility is violated. The socalled advanced models try to model the stochastic volatility. However, this still implies assumptions how a particular volatility may (or may not) develope until a given point of time. An analysis of key indexes shows stochastic properties difficult to cover in mathematical models yet being still interesting.Model Systematics, Black Scholes, fair value, option pricing, mispricing, artificially generated 'cloned' quotations, stochastic volalatility, mean reversion, test methods, testing capital market models, experimental economical research, ODE, PDE, hyperbolic, index particularities

Hierarchical Implementation of Aggregate Functions

Most systems in HPC make use of hierarchical designs that allow multiple levels of parallelism to be exploited by programmers. The use of multiple multi-core/multi-processor computers to form a computer cluster supports both fine-grain and large-grain parallel computation. Aggregate function communications provide an easy to use and efficient set of mechanisms for communicating and coordinating between processing elements, but the model originally targeted only fine grain parallel hardware. This work shows that a hierarchical implementation of aggregate functions is a viable alternative to MPI (the standard Message Passing Interface library) for programming clusters that provide both fine grain and large grain execution. Performance of a prototype implementation is evaluated and compared to that of MPI

Volumes of Evidence - Examining Technical Change Last Century Through a New Lens

Although technical change is central in much of modern economics, traditional measures of it are, for a number of reasons, flawed. We discuss in this paper new indicators based on data drawn from the MARC records of the Library of Congress on the number of new technology titles in various fields published in the United States over the course of the last century. These indicators, we argue, overcome many of the shortcomings associated with patents, research and development expenditures, innovation counts, and productivity figures. We find, among other things, the following: the pattern and nature of technical change described by our indicators is, on the whole, consistent with that of other measures; they represent innovation not diffusion; a strong causal relationship between our indicators and changes in TFP and output per capita; innovations in some sub-groups have had a greater impact on output and productivity than others and, moreover, the key players have changed over time. Our indicators can be used to shed light on number of important issues including the empirical relationship between technology shocks and employment, the role of technology in cross-country productivity differences, and the part played by technological change in growing skills premia in the U.S. during the last few decades.Business Cycles, Technical change, productivity, measurement

Co-constructing a new framework for evaluating social innovation in marginalized rural areas

The EU funded H2020 project \u2018Social Innovation in Marginalised Rural Areas\u2019 (SIMRA; www.simra-h2020.eu) has the overall objective of advancing the state-of-the-art in social innovation. This paper outlines the process for co- developing an evaluation framework with stakeholders, drawn from across Europe and the Mediterranean area, in the fields of agriculture, forestry and rural development. Preliminary results show the importance of integrating process and outcome-oriented evaluations, and implementing participatory approaches in evaluation practice. They also raise critical issues related to the comparability of primary data in diverse regional contexts and highlight the need for mixed methods approaches in evaluation