Regulatory Issues in Biosecurity

The management of biosecurity risks (risks to the production sector, to indigenous biodiversity, and to public health) involves the exercise of extensive regulatory powers both at the border and within New Zealand. This paper reviews the Biosecurity Act 1993, paying particular attention to its requirements for risk analysis and decision-making. These are generally of a high standard. Requirements at the border are significantly influenced by New Zealand’s trading obligations and opportunities. Requirements for domestic pest management strategies are elaborate but can be sidestepped. Cost recovery practices for biosecurity differ widely and have been controversial.biosecurity, pests, regulation, risk management, cost recovery

ECONOMICS OF DETECTION AND CONTROL OF INVASIVE SPECIES: WORKSHOP HIGHLIGHTS

Invasive species are species that are not native to an ecosystem, and when introduced into the new ecosystem, they cause economic or environmental damage. Trade is one way in which these species are introduced into new regions, and as trade increases, the introduction of invasive species also rises. The Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies, North Dakota State University, held a workshop on April 30, 2004 in Fargo, ND, titled ?Economics of Detection and Control of Invasive Species? to address these issues. The purpose of this workshop was to present current findings on the subject of invasive species in agricultural trade and to structure the model for an in-depth research project examining this issue. Speakers included experts from the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service and the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, as well as professors of economics from North Dakota State University and other academic institutions. Discussion included the impact of invasive species on agricultural production and trade, the tools used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Customs and Border patrol to detect and control incoming species, and the creation of econometric models to capture and explain these processes and to analyze policy issues. This report contains abstracts from the presentations given at the workshop.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006

Multi-Agent Orbit Design For Perception Enhancement Purpose

This paper develops a robust optimization based method to design orbits on which the sensory perception of the desired physical quantities are maximized. It also demonstrates how to incorporate various constraints imposed by many spacecraft missions such as collision avoidance, co-orbital configuration, altitude and frozen orbit constraints along with Sun-Synchronous orbit. The paper specifically investigates designing orbits for constrained visual sensor planning applications as the case study. For this purpose, the key elements to form an image in such vision systems are considered and effective factors are taken into account to define a metric for perception quality. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for several scenarios on low and medium Earth orbits as well as a challenging Space-Based Space Surveillance program application.Comment: 12 pages, 18 figure

A comparison of multiprocessor scheduling methods for iterative data flow architectures

A comparative study is made between the Algorithm to Architecture Mapping Model (ATAMM) and three other related multiprocessing models from the published literature. The primary focus of all four models is the non-preemptive scheduling of large-grain iterative data flow graphs as required in real-time systems, control applications, signal processing, and pipelined computations. Important characteristics of the models such as injection control, dynamic assignment, multiple node instantiations, static optimum unfolding, range-chart guided scheduling, and mathematical optimization are identified. The models from the literature are compared with the ATAMM for performance, scheduling methods, memory requirements, and complexity of scheduling and design procedures