Water Development and Environment

It is evident that water development is essential for economic development of developing countries. Hence, the fundamental question that should be asked is not whether there should be water developments, but rather how to meet the basic human needs and aspirations of all the world's people, without simultaneously destroying the resource base, that is, the environment, from which these needs must be met. This means that "environment" must be looked at in a broader context: it can no longer be viewed only in terms of environmental pollution -- such as water, air and soil pollution -- just as economic and social developments can no longer be adequately measured solely in terms of growth in gross national products

The Holography Hypothesis and Pre-Big Bang Cosmology

The consequences of holography hypothesis are investigated for the Pre-big-bang string cosmological models. The evolution equations are obtained from the tree level string effective action. It is shown that $S/A$ is bounded by a constant in each case, $S$ being the entropy within the volume bounded by the horizon of area $A$.Comment: 11 pages, revtex, 1 eps fil

Climatic Constraints and Human Activities: Introduction and Overview

The volume of proceedings entitled "Climatic Constraints and Human Activities" contains a summary essay and seven invited papers from the Task Force meeting on the Nature of Climate Society Research convened in February 1980 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. This, the introductory essay, examines the differences in research methods on questions of short-term climate variability and longer-term climatic change, identifies some important avenues for research, and briefly surveys the papers. Ausubel and Meyer-Abich take broad looks at climate and public policy. Ausubel offers arguments from an economic point of view as to why the atmosphere is increasingly associated with developments, like climatic change, which are threatening to human activity. The paper by Meyer-Abich surveys from a political point of view the reasons that regulation of activities which could control or prevent climatic change is unlikely to take place, and why adaptation is the most likely path to be followed, especially given the current weakness of the interdisciplinary analysis of the problem of climatic change. The paper by Biswas narrows the focus and illuminates the uncertainty associated with one specific but very prominent area, the relationship between climate and crops, which one might easily assume otherwise to be a more secure area of knowledge. Three case study approaches follow, two emphasizing a geographical perspective and one a social group. Warrick's historical study of the possible "lessening" of drought impacts in the Great Plains of the United States emphasizes the need for a clear setting out of the hypotheses to be tested in research on the relationship of climate and society and the need for improvements of the modeling of the overall system. Spitz develops a model of a food producing class which is also self-provisioning, that is, where food has a dual nature as both a basic need and as merchandise to be traded, and explores the significance of drought to such a group, with particular reference to Eastern India. Czelnai's paper on the Great Plain of the Danube Basin offers interesting insights into the extent into which natural systems have already been transformed by man and proposes ways in which sensitivity and vulnerability to climatic factors may be defined and explored. Finally, Sergin proposes a method of estimating plausible patterns of climatic change based on the similarity between seasonal changes and climatic changes of physical fields on longer time scales

Climatic Constraints and Human Activities; Proceedings of a Task Force on the Nature of Climate and Society Research, February 4-6, 1980

This book contains a summary essay and seven invited papers from the Task Force meeting on the Nature of Climate Society Research. The introductory essay examines the differences in research methods on questions of short-time climatic change, and identifies some important avenues for research. The first two papers, by Ausubel and Meyer-Abich, take broad looks at climate and public policy. Ausubel offers arguments from an economic point of view as to why the atmosphere is increasingly associated with developments, like climatic change, that are threatening to human activity. The paper by Meyer-Abich surveys from a political point of view the reasons that regulation of activities which could control or prevent climatic change are unlikely to take place, and why adaptation is the most likely path to be followed, especially given the current weakness of the interdisciplinary analysis of the problem of climatic change. The paper by Biswas narrows the focus and illuminates the uncertainty associated with one specific but very prominent area, the relationships between climate and crops, which one might easily assume otherwise to be a more secure area of knowledge. Three case study approaches follow, two emphasizing a geographical perspective and one a social group. Warrick's historical study of the possible "lessening" of drought impacts in the Great Plains of the USA emphasizes the need for a clear setting out of hypotheses to be tested in research on the relationship of climate and society and the need for improvements of the modelling of the overall system. Spitz develops a model of a food-producing class which is also self-provisioning, i.e., where food has a dual nature as both a basic need and as merchandise to be traded, and explores the significance of drought to such a group, with particular reference to Eastern India. Czelnai's paper on the Great Plain of the Danube Basin offers interesting insights into the extent to which natural systems have already been transformed by man and proposes ways in which sensitivity and vulnerability to climatic factors may be defined and explored. Finally, Sergin proposes a method of estimating plausible patterns of climatic change based on the similarity between seasonal changes and climatic changes of physical fields on longer time scales

Prospect of common effluent treatment plant (CETP) in industrial sector

Prospect of common effluent treatment plant (CETP) in industrial secto

Alternative Patterns of Development for the Agricultural Sector

The benefits of the modern technological and industrial developments and the unprecedented postwar expansion in world economic activities benefited all nations, but the benefits, unfortunately, were very unevenly distributed among various countries, depending on many different factors, including the then stages of development of individual countries. This, plus the fact that the developing countries had a far larger population growth than the developed countries, both in absolute and percentage terms, have made the gap between the rich and the poor nations progressively wider. The latest demographic data, however, is cautiously encouraging

Nonlinear Effects and Multisolitons in Metamaterials

AbstractIn this paper, we outline a novel class of materials, called metamaterials, with negative refractive index and a high degree of nonlinearity. A brief summary is given on the basic theory of optics to show how this condition arrives for metamaterials to be designed into an antenna with split-ring-resonator (SRR). An example is given on the modeling of such SRR-based metamaterials. On a continuum Hamiltonian, a Klein-Gordon equation was derived which gave rise to both dark and bright solitons that showed interesting behavior against nondimensional time, even to the extent of revealing bi- and tri-breathers

Interregional Water Transfers: Projects and Problems

Shortage of water is one of the constraints for economic development in many regions of the world. One of the ways to alleviate the situation is the transfer of water from places with surplus to areas with deficit of water. Now very large projects exist implying diversions of big amounts of water from one distant basin to another one. These projects and their impacts should be regarded as large complex systems. The Resources and Environment Area at IIASA is carrying out systems studies of water problems from the foundation of the Institute. These studies deal with the resource, use and management of water. A task on "Interregional Water Transfers and their Geophysical, Ecological and Economic Aspects" lies along the lines of activity mentioned above. It was carried out at IIASA in 1977. The final task force meeting was held at IIASA 11-14 October 1977. This volume is the proceedings of the meeting and includes a bibliography on interregional water transfer problems

Cognitive load estimation in VR flight simulator

This paper discusses the design and development of a low-cost virtual reality (VR) based flight simulator with cognitive load estimation feature using ocular and EEG signals.  Focus is on exploring methods to evaluate pilot’s interactions with aircraft by means of quantifying pilot’s perceived cognitive load under different task scenarios. Realistic target tracking and context of the battlefield is designed in VR. Head mounted eye gaze tracker and EEG headset are used for acquiring pupil diameter, gaze fixation, gaze direction and EEG theta, alpha, and beta band power data in real time. We developed an AI agent model in VR and created scenarios of interactions with the piloted aircraft. To estimate the pilot’s cognitive load, we used low-frequency pupil diameter variations, fixation rate, gaze distribution pattern, EEG signal-based task load index and EEG task engagement index. We compared the physiological measures of workload with the standard user’s inceptor control-based workload metrics. Results of the piloted simulation study indicate that the metrics discussed in the paper have strong association with pilot’s perceived task difficulty