Municipal services: organisations, companies and alternatives

A review of the impact of international institutions and multinational companies on municipal services worldwide, and of campaigns for alternatives

The Quest for Integration: Australian Approaches to Security and Development in the Pacific Islands

With the deployment of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in July 2003, the former Howard Government initiated its robust new engagement with Australia's Pacific island neighbours. Interventions with an initial security focus have been portals to broader and ambitious state-building exercises. The quest to integrate security and development agendas lies at the heart of 'the new interventionism'. This article examines the evolution and character of this approach, as well as reviewing its implementation in the two case studies of Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and Papua New Guinea (ECP). It also discusses the significance for Australia/Pacific relations of the recent change of government in Canberra and the differences (and similarities) to be anticipated under Prime Minister Rudd's Labor Government

THE PERFORMANCE OF BDS RELATIVE POSITIONING USAGE WITH REAL OBSERVATION DATA

With the first phase of COMPASS/BeiDou-2 (BDS) completed, the assessment ofpositioning performance and the characterization of its system are analyzed andpresented. Pseudo-range and carrier phase measurements modulated on B1 and B2have been collected in Shanghai, from 00:00 to 24:00 on 28 December, 2012.Compared with GPS, visibility and measurement quality of BDS’s GEO, IGSO andMEO satellites are analyzed. DOP during the whole orbital period is also analyzedthe results demonstrate that BDS’s HDOP is better than GPS’s one, but VDOPopposite. Furthermore, the result of positioning is also presented and analyzed.Short baselines are estimated by standalone BDS and GPS’s carrier phasemeasurement, respectively, using 48 segmentations of observations during a wholeday (24 hours, each segmentation, is about 30 minutes observation). The analysis ofstatic relative positioning demonstrates that BDS could achieve to millimeter level,corresponding to GPS. Kinematic result is produced by double differenced carrierphase observations with the ambiguities fixed under the constraint of precise shortbaseline.The result shows that the centimeter accuracy could be achieved. Whencomparing the results of kinematic baseline solutions, performance of BDS is worsethan GPS on North and Up components, but oppositely on the component of East inthe kinematic baseline processing

Catalog of Approaches to Impact Measurement: Assessing Social Impact in Private Ventures

To inform action impact investors could take to measure impact in a coordinated manner, The Rockefeller Foundation commissioned the study of impact assessment approaches presented here.It is natural to hope to find a single, turnkey solution that can address all measurement needs. In this study we conducted a survey of impact investors and complemented it with seven years of experience in the field of impact investing to discover what these investors want from impact measurement, and conducted in-depth interviews with over twenty entities that have developed and implemented approaches to measuring impact. Our survey of existing approaches was thorough but surely is not comprehensive; however the approaches are a good representation of the current state of play. What we found is that there is not one single measurement answer. Instead the answer depends on what solution is most appropriate for a particular investor's "impact profile" defined as the investor's level of risk tolerance and desired financial return, the particular sector in which the investor operates, geography, and credibility level of information about impact that the investor requires

Mass-Market Receiver for Static Positioning: Tests and Statistical Analyses

Nowadays, there are several low cost GPS receivers able to provide both pseudorange and carrier phase measurements in the L1band, that allow to have good realtime performances in outdoor condition. The present paper describes a set of dedicated tests in order to evaluate the positioning accuracy in static conditions. The quality of the pseudorange and the carrier phase measurements let hope for interesting results. The use of such kind of receiver could be extended to a large number of professional applications, like engineering fields: survey, georeferencing, monitoring, cadastral mapping and cadastral road. In this work, the receivers performance is verified considering a single frequency solution trying to fix the phase ambiguity, when possible. Different solutions are defined: code, float and fix solutions. In order to solve the phase ambiguities different methods are considered. Each test performed is statistically analyzed, highlighting the effects of different factors on precision and accurac

Global Impacts Report 2017

Our fifth Global Impacts Report reflects on the progress of the MSC over the past 20 years, examines the sustainability performance of certified fisheries around the world and highlights areas of future interest

Polish grid infrastructure for science and research

Structure, functionality, parameters and organization of the computing Grid in Poland is described, mainly from the perspective of high-energy particle physics community, currently its largest consumer and developer. It represents distributed Tier-2 in the worldwide Grid infrastructure. It also provides services and resources for data-intensive applications in other sciences.Comment: Proceeedings of IEEE Eurocon 2007, Warsaw, Poland, 9-12 Sep. 2007, p.44

Developments in the Aviation Industry in Australia and Asia - Implications for Australian Tourism

The Asia-Pacific region is expected to be the main region of growth in airline travel for at least the next two decades. According to the forecasts, China will become one of the largest domestic airline markets in the world alongside Japan, already one of the most significant domestic markets outside the USA. The inability of government-owned airlines in the region to cope with rapid growth and with the need to upgrade their services in domestic markets has resulted in major changes in policy. As a result, new airlines have been permitted to operate in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Nepal and Pakistan with governments adopting a more liberal attitude towards competition. A common experience has been that the new airlines cannot survive on a domestic base and a number of countries have allowed the new carriers to fly international routes. These new airlines are more likely to fly between regional centres and so take away some of the pressures on the key hub airports that tend to be congested. Also, they provide direct links to tourist attractions away from the main metropolitan centres in Australia. This paper analyses these trends in aviation in the Asian region and explores their implications for the continuing development of Asian markets by Australian airlines and the tourism sector

Ambiguity resolution performance with GPS and BeiDou for LEO formation flying

The evolving BeiDou Navigation Satellite System constellation brings new opportunities for high-precision applications. In this contribution the focus will be on one such application, namely precise and instantaneous relative navigation of a formation of LEO satellites. The aim is to assess the ambiguity resolution performance with the future GPS and BeiDou constellations depending on system choice (GPS, BeiDou, or GPS+BeiDou), single- or dual-frequency observations, receiver noise, and uncertainties in ionosphere modelling. In addition, for the GPS+BeiDou constellation it will be shown how the growing BeiDou constellation in the years to come can already bring an important performance improvement compared to the GPS-only case. The performance will be assessed based on the percentage of time that the required precision can be obtained with a partial ambiguity resolution strategy