Art/Sci Nexus, 9 Evenings Revisited

Following the exhibition of Hybrid Bodies at KKW in 2016 Andrew Carnie and I were invited back to act as mentors to a group of young artists and scientists from all over Europe undertaking a week long workshop designed to lead to new art/science collaborations. We were also invited to present the Hybrid Bodies project at a one day public event preceding the workshop

Competitiveness partnerships : building and maintaining public-private dialogue to improve the investment climate - a resource drawn from the review of 40 countries'experiences

The authors examine competitiveness partnerships, which consist of structured dialogue between the public and private sector to improve the investment climate. The paper is designed to be used as a resource by donors, governments, or businesspeople who are interested in establishing, maintaining, or improving a competitiveness partnership in their country or region. The political and economic context of a country determines the kind of partnership that is feasible and likely to succeed, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. But it is possible to distill some ideas and techniques from best practice as many public-private dialogue mechanisms face similar challenges. Drawing on the experiences of 40 countries, the authors make a positive case for building and maintaining competitiveness partnerships, and offer a selection of valuable insights into how practitioners can design them so as to avoid common pitfalls. They demonstrate that reforms that are designed through public-private dialogue are better conceived and more effectively implemented because they arise from increased mutual understanding between government and the businesscommunity. The paper has three parts. Part One outlines what competitiveness partnerships can achieve. Part Two describes how competitiveness partnerships function, presenting issues to consider when designing such partnerships and a range of ways in which they may be approached. Part Three identifies challenges that competitiveness partnerships have frequently faced and strategies that have been used to overcome them.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,National Governance,Health Economics&Finance,ICT Policy and Strategies,Economic Theory&Research

Decision Trees, Protocols, and the Fourier Entropy-Influence Conjecture

Given $f:\{-1, 1\}^n \rightarrow \{-1, 1\}$, define the \emph{spectral distribution} of $f$ to be the distribution on subsets of $[n]$ in which the set $S$ is sampled with probability $\widehat{f}(S)^2$. Then the Fourier Entropy-Influence (FEI) conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai (1996) states that there is some absolute constant $C$ such that $\operatorname{H}[\widehat{f}^2] \leq C\cdot\operatorname{Inf}[f]$. Here, $\operatorname{H}[\widehat{f}^2]$ denotes the Shannon entropy of $f$'s spectral distribution, and $\operatorname{Inf}[f]$ is the total influence of $f$. This conjecture is one of the major open problems in the analysis of Boolean functions, and settling it would have several interesting consequences. Previous results on the FEI conjecture have been largely through direct calculation. In this paper we study a natural interpretation of the conjecture, which states that there exists a communication protocol which, given subset $S$ of $[n]$ distributed as $\widehat{f}^2$, can communicate the value of $S$ using at most $C\cdot\operatorname{Inf}[f]$ bits in expectation. Using this interpretation, we are able show the following results: 1. First, if $f$ is computable by a read-$k$ decision tree, then $\operatorname{H}[\widehat{f}^2] \leq 9k\cdot \operatorname{Inf}[f]$. 2. Next, if $f$ has $\operatorname{Inf}[f] \geq 1$ and is computable by a decision tree with expected depth $d$, then $\operatorname{H}[\widehat{f}^2] \leq 12d\cdot \operatorname{Inf}[f]$. 3. Finally, we give a new proof of the main theorem of O'Donnell and Tan (ICALP 2013), i.e. that their FEI$^+$ conjecture composes. In addition, we show that natural improvements to our decision tree results would be sufficient to prove the FEI conjecture in its entirety. We believe that our methods give more illuminating proofs than previous results about the FEI conjecture

The Effect of Water Use and Water Availability on Net Revenues and Optimal Cropping Patterns on the Texas High Plains

Agricultural production in the High Plains region of Texas is a part of the foundation of the region’s economy. Part of the reason for this is the availability of groundwater for irrigation. Currently, the region relies on the Ogallala Aquifer for irrigation water; however, the High Plains is also home to a second aquifer, the Dockum Aquifer, which could be a viable resource for agricultural use. While the Dockum could partially replace the Ogallala, but differences in depth and pumping cost mean that it is not a perfect subsitute. The purpose of this paper is to determine how the use of water resources and crop production in the area would change if a new water resource was introduced. For each of the forty-one counties in the study area, a representative farm was established that reflects the attributes of the county including land, hydrologic, and crop specific characteristics. To estimate the optimal use of groundwater in the region and identify how the inclusion of the Dockum Aquifer affects regional production and groundwater use, a non-linear programing model was created with the objective to maximize net revenues for each county. Using the model to establish a baseline in which only Ogallala water is used, the effect of the using the Dockum Aquifer was estimated by restricting the amount of water available in the Ogallala, while making the Dockum available for use.Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

An Analysis of the Feasibility of Carbon Management Policies as a Mechanism to Influence Water Conservation Using Optimization Methods

Environmental Economics and Policy,

Trajectory Generation for Stair Ascent Walking using Rayleigh Oscillator

This paper describes a trajectory generation technique for stair-ascent walking. The knee, hip and ankle joint trajectory during stair ascent are generated using mutually coupled, nonlinear oscillators. The parameters of the oscillators are tuned using the harmonic balance method, which converts the nonlinear differential equations to a set of algebraic equations. Fourier analysis of data generated by stair-ascent walking is performed to extract the amplitude and the phase of the dominant frequency components for each joint trajectory. The solution for the oscillator is assumed to be a sinusoidal wave and then by harmonic balance method the parameters of the oscillator are found. Each oscillator is responsible for generating a single frequency component with a specific phase and amplitude. The complete trajectory is obtained by summing the output of the oscillators that are relevant to one joint and the coupling maintains the phase relationship between the oscillators