NGOs, Turnout, and the Left: A Sub-national Analysis of Brazil

This article is designed to examine the role non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in politics. Previous evidence suggests that NGOs mobilize communities to challenge existing patterns of authority or that they serve hand in glove with existing elites. We reconcile these two contradictory findings by identifying an important contextual feature that helps determine the extent NGOs mobilize or anesthetize. We argue that a community’s level of education influences not only whether people vote but how they vote. We employ a cross-sectional data set from Brazilian municipalities that allows us to estimate the relationship between NGOs, voting turnout, and electoral results. We find that although there is a significant statistical interaction between literacy and NGOs when explaining voting turnout, the effect is not substantively important. The interaction between literacy and NGOs is, however, an important consideration in determining how people vote: in communities with relatively low literacy rates, a robust NGO presence significantly increases the left’s electoral fortunes. Our findings imply the influence NGOs have on society is more political than social

Balanced scorecard design and performance impacts: some Australian evidence

consideration to the use of performance measurement systems, notably the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). However, there has been limited empirical investigation into the particular benefits that result from the use of the BSC (Ittner and Larcker, 1998). This study empirically examines how the BSC has been applied in practice and whether different BSC designs result in varying performance outcomes. Data is from a cross sectional survey, which provided a sample of 92 Australian firms using BSC. It is hypothesised that the BSC provides greater benefits when 1) cause and effect logic is used between measures 2) nonfinancial measures are tied to compensation and 3) implemented at multiple levels within the organisation. Results support the first proposition, although cause and effect logic appears to be more important if the BSC is tied to compensation. These results are discussed, and implications for practice and future research are presented

Biomarkers of chemical exposure: state of the art.

Establishing associations between environmental agents and disease presents challenges to both epidemiologists and toxicologists, particularly in cases of complex gene-environment interactions and when there is a long latency between exposure and disease. Biologic markers, physiological signals that reflect exposure, early cellular response, or inherent or acquired susceptibilities, provide a new strategy for resolving some of these problems. Biomarker research assumes that toxicant-induced diseases are progressive and that injury proceeds from entry of the toxicant into target cells, which induces subcellular biochemical events, to cell- and organ-level events that eventually induce irreversible or persistent organism dysfunction. The epidemiologic value of a biomarker lies in its ability to predict backward toward exposure and forward toward risk of clinical outcome, which is largely unknown. Research in mechanistic toxicology will advance the range of useful biomarkers in epidemiology and clinical medicine

Extracting the Groupwise Core Structural Connectivity Network: Bridging Statistical and Graph-Theoretical Approaches

Finding the common structural brain connectivity network for a given population is an open problem, crucial for current neuro-science. Recent evidence suggests there's a tightly connected network shared between humans. Obtaining this network will, among many advantages , allow us to focus cognitive and clinical analyses on common connections, thus increasing their statistical power. In turn, knowledge about the common network will facilitate novel analyses to understand the structure-function relationship in the brain. In this work, we present a new algorithm for computing the core structural connectivity network of a subject sample combining graph theory and statistics. Our algorithm works in accordance with novel evidence on brain topology. We analyze the problem theoretically and prove its complexity. Using 309 subjects, we show its advantages when used as a feature selection for connectivity analysis on populations, outperforming the current approaches

The application of a management procedure to regulate the directed and bycatch fishery of South African sardine sardinops sagax

The South African sardine Sardinops sagax resource is subjected to both directed fishing that targets adult fish, and bycatch of both juvenile and adult fish taken in the directed fisheries for anchovy Engraulis capensisand round herring Etrumeus whiteheadi. Two separate TACs (Total Allowable Catch) for sardine are calculated in the management procedures considered. The first is a directed TAC linked to sardine abundance, and the second is a bycatch TAC with an “anchovy” component coupled to the anchovy population dynamics as a proportion of the anchovy TAC, plus a “round herring” component reflecting a fixed tonnage independent of round herring abundance. Requirements from the pelagic industry, such as a minimum economically viable annual directed catch and a maximum percentage decrease in the directed TAC that could be tolerated from year to year are also incorporated. The selection of a single management procedure for implementation is based on the comparison of performance statistics such as risk of severe depletion and average annual catch, which incorporate the consequences of random error in survey estimates of abundance and random fluctuations in recruitment from year to year. Sensitivity tests are carried out to ensure robustness over a range of alternative assumptions concerning resource dynamics. A description is given of the development of the management procedure for sardine thatwas implemented in 1994, and the rationale for its selection. A wide range of variants to this procedure, including those that consider alternative approaches for handling bycatch, are investigated. Performance of the management procedures considered demonstrates extreme sensitivity to the choice of the proportion of the anchovy TAC used in the sardine bycatch TAC calculation. A lack of robustness of the selected management procedure to possible bias in estimates of spawner biomass from hydroacoustic surveys, and poor precision of recruit survey estimatesare argued as justification for adopting a conservative approach for managing sardine

Tropical Peatland Vegetation Structure and Biomass: Optimal Exploitation of Airborne Laser Scanning

Accurate estimation of above ground biomass (AGB) is required to better understand the variability and dynamics of tropical peat swamp forest (PSF) ecosystem function and resilience to disturbance events. The objective of this work is to examine the relationship between tropical PSF AGB and small-footprint airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) discrete return (DR) and full waveform (FW) derived metrics, with a view to establishing the optimal use of this technology in this environment. The study was undertaken in North Selangor peat swamp forest (NSPSF) reserve, Peninsular Malaysia. Plot-based multiple regression analysis was performed to established the strongest predictive models of PSF AGB using DR metrics (only), FW metrics (only), and a combination of DR and FW metrics. Overall, the results demonstrate that a Combination-model, coupling the benefits derived from both DR and FW metrics, had the best performance in modelling AGB for tropical PSF (R2 = 0.77, RMSE = 36.4, rRMSE = 10.8%); however, no statistical difference was found between the rRMSE of this model and the best models using only DR and FW metrics. We conclude that the optimal approach to using airborne LiDAR for the estimation of PSF AGB is to use LiDAR metrics that relate to the description of the mid-canopy. This should inform the use of remote sensing in this ecosystem and how innovation in LiDAR-based technology could be usefully deployed