36,252 research outputs found

    The Federal Emergency Employment Act of 1971: An Appraisal of Texas\u27 Experience

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    An assessment of the first few years of the Federal Emergency Employment Act’s implementation in the state of Texas, with focuses on various perspectives including the federal, state, and city levels

    Cross-Border Policies and Spatial and Social Integration: Between Challenges and Problems

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    The article is discussing both challenges and problems that emerge from an intensified cross-border integration, particularly in Europe, which is creating a sort of ‘cross-border regionalism’ that might be sought as a new constituent part of a complex, multi-level system of governance incorporating not only national, but also local/regional agents. Cross-border regionalism is thus not only a system of government, but also a system of ‘grass-rooted’ social and spatial (re)integration of borderlands. This process is closely related to the question of changing territoriality, preserving on the one hand the regional control and on the other hand re-acting societal and territorial co-dependence

    The costs of uncoordinated infrastructure management in multi-reservoir river basins

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    Though there are surprisingly few estimates of the economic benefits of coordinated infrastructure development and operations in international river basins, there is a widespread belief that improved cooperation is beneficial for managing water scarcity and variability. Hydro-economic optimization models are commonly-used for identifying efficient allocation of water across time and space, but such models typically assume full coordination. In the real world, investment and operational decisions for specific projects are often made without full consideration of potential downstream impacts. This paper describes a tractable methodology for evaluating the economic benefits of infrastructure coordination. We demonstrate its application over a range of water availability scenarios in a catchment of the Mekong located in Lao PDR, the Nam Ngum River Basin. Results from this basin suggest that coordination improves system net benefits from irrigation and hydropower by approximately 3–12% (or US$12-53 million/yr) assuming moderate levels of flood control, and that the magnitude of coordination benefits generally increases with the level of water availability and with inflow variability. Similar analyses would be useful for developing a systematic understanding of the factors that increase the costs of non-cooperation in river basin systems worldwide, and would likely help to improve targeting of efforts to stimulate complicated negotiations over water resources

    Defining and Measuring Excellence in the Changing World of Higher Education: Case Stories from Five Colleges of Education

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    This paper presents a collection of case stories from five Educator Preparation Programs (EPPs) within colleges of education, four from institutions in Texas and one from California, to present a micro cross-sectional narrative interpretation of what constitutes excellence in educator preparation. The broad framework utilized in this interpretation focuses on the individual approaches used by each institution for creating and sustaining positive cultures of data-informed decision-making, with the ultimate objective of continuous program improvement, while also meeting the accreditation expectations of each institution

    A survey of real-time crowd rendering

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    In this survey we review, classify and compare existing approaches for real-time crowd rendering. We first overview character animation techniques, as they are highly tied to crowd rendering performance, and then we analyze the state of the art in crowd rendering. We discuss different representations for level-of-detail (LoD) rendering of animated characters, including polygon-based, point-based, and image-based techniques, and review different criteria for runtime LoD selection. Besides LoD approaches, we review classic acceleration schemes, such as frustum culling and occlusion culling, and describe how they can be adapted to handle crowds of animated characters. We also discuss specific acceleration techniques for crowd rendering, such as primitive pseudo-instancing, palette skinning, and dynamic key-pose caching, which benefit from current graphics hardware. We also address other factors affecting performance and realism of crowds such as lighting, shadowing, clothing and variability. Finally we provide an exhaustive comparison of the most relevant approaches in the field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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