49,296 research outputs found
India Australia Relations: Retrospect and Prospect
It is under-appreciated that Perth and Chennai are closer to each other than Sydney is to Seoul to Shanghai or to Tokyo As the world sees the potential of an Asian Pacific century unfold Australia sees India at the heart of this historic shif
Research management of water economics in agriculture - an open agenda
It is indeed a privilege and an honour to deliver the FR Tomlinson Commemorative lecture this year. Although the invitation was quite unexpected, it is of course highly appreciated. When Prof Johann Kirsten phoned me with the request, I was initially not sure what topic I should address. The topic, which I have now formulated, is one which has fascinated me and certainly kept me busy for the most part of my career. I want to share with you some thoughts and perspectives, but will steer away from a laborious review or an abstract analysis. In doing so, I trust that this is appropriate within the spirit of the occasion, which is now a well established tradition in the Agricultural Economics Association of South Africa (AEASA). Let me start with a quotation which is at the core of the theme I want to unfold in this lecture. “Our most important resource is not land, nor capital and even less the climate. Our most important resource is not the gold under the earth’s crust, or the oil that might be there. Our most important resource is our human material. We must develop our human material and make full use of it.” (Groenewald JA, 1973a)Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,
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Evaluation based on critical systems heuristics
Introduction: Critical systems heuristics (CSH) draws on the substantive work and philosophy of C. West
Churchman, a systems engineer who, along with Russell Ackoff during the 1950s and 1960s, defined operations research in the United States. Churchman later pioneered developments in the 1970s of what is now known as 'soft' and 'critical' systemic thinking and practice in the domain of social or human activity systems. Churchman died in 2004. His legacy lies in signalling the importance of being alert to value-laden boundary judgements when making evaluations. Boundaries are what we socially construct
in designing and evaluating any human activity system of interest (e.g., any situation of concern from a kinship group, an organisation, or a larger entity such as a national health system). The primary boundary of any human activity systems is defined by 'purpose'. Churchman's work is characterised by a continual ethical commitment to the overarching purpose of improved human well-being. In order
to fulfil such purposeful activity, there is always a need to broaden inquiry from the particular system of focus so as to appreciate what Churchman calls the total relevant system. The effectiveness and efficiency of a system of interest depends on the actual boundary judgements associated with that system of interest. Churchman first identified 9 conditions or categories (including the category 'purpose�) associated with any purposeful system of interest in his book The Design of Inquiring
Systems [1, 2]. He later extended these to 12 categories in a book provocatively entitled The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, significantly taking into account 3 extra factors (�enemies�) that lie outside the actual system of interest but which can be affected by, and therein have an effect on, the performance of the system [1, 2]. In the early 1980s a doctorate student of Churchman from Switzerland, Werner Ulrich, translated Churchman's 12 categories into an operational set of 12 questions which he called critical systems heuristics [3]. Ulrich returned to Switzerland and worked with CSH as a public health and social welfare policy analyst and program evaluator [4].
Section 2 introduces the basic toolbox of CSH, along with suggestions on when to use it and the benefits of its use. Section 3 will guide you through a suggested operational use of CSH questions in a process of evaluation. Section 4 provides a summary of an extensive case study in which CSH was used for evaluating the role of public participation in natural resource-use planning. Section 5 provides
some advice for the practitioner in developing skills on using CSH for evaluation
Whitehead and Pythagoras
While the appeal of scientific materialism has been weakened by developments in theoretical physics, chemistry and biology, Pythagoreanism still attracts the allegiance of leading scientists and mathematicians. It is this doctrine that process philosophers must confront if they are to successfully defend their metaphysics. Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead were acutely aware of the challenge of Pythagoreanism, and attempted to circumvent it. The problem addressed by each of these thinkers was how to account for the success of mathematical physics if the world consists of creative processes. In this paper I critically examine the nature of the challenge posed by
Pythagoreanism to process philosophy and examine the efforts by process philosophers, particularly Whitehead, to overcome it, and offer some suggestions for advancing these efforts
Stream Fusion, to Completeness
Stream processing is mainstream (again): Widely-used stream libraries are now
available for virtually all modern OO and functional languages, from Java to C#
to Scala to OCaml to Haskell. Yet expressivity and performance are still
lacking. For instance, the popular, well-optimized Java 8 streams do not
support the zip operator and are still an order of magnitude slower than
hand-written loops. We present the first approach that represents the full
generality of stream processing and eliminates overheads, via the use of
staging. It is based on an unusually rich semantic model of stream interaction.
We support any combination of zipping, nesting (or flat-mapping), sub-ranging,
filtering, mapping-of finite or infinite streams. Our model captures
idiosyncrasies that a programmer uses in optimizing stream pipelines, such as
rate differences and the choice of a "for" vs. "while" loops. Our approach
delivers hand-written-like code, but automatically. It explicitly avoids the
reliance on black-box optimizers and sufficiently-smart compilers, offering
highest, guaranteed and portable performance. Our approach relies on high-level
concepts that are then readily mapped into an implementation. Accordingly, we
have two distinct implementations: an OCaml stream library, staged via
MetaOCaml, and a Scala library for the JVM, staged via LMS. In both cases, we
derive libraries richer and simultaneously many tens of times faster than past
work. We greatly exceed in performance the standard stream libraries available
in Java, Scala and OCaml, including the well-optimized Java 8 streams
Remixing Cinema: The case of the Brighton Swarm of Angels
Disintermediation, web 2.0, distributed problem solving, collaborative creation/art, user-centred innovation, creative common
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