Estimating the Value of Water in Alternative Uses

Many public and private decisions regarding water use, allocation, and management require estimation of water's value in alternative uses. This paper discusses economic concepts essential in valuing water, outlines and compares market and nonmarket based approaches used to estimate water values, and reviews the application of these methodologies for valuing water in instream, irrigation, municipal and industrial uses in the western United States

Introduction to 'Death and the Contemporary', a themed issue of New Formations

Since Michel Foucault aligned the ‘power of sovereignty’ with the ‘disqualification of death’ in his 1975 essay ‘Society Must be Defended’, death has been at the forefront of biopolitical and geopolitical debates. Through a contemporary lens Achille Mbembe, writing in 2003, stated that the expression of sovereignty ultimately resides ‘in the capacity to dictate who may live and who may die.’ Yet Mbembe’s necropolitics also questions the sufficiency of biopower to account for the question of death and sovereignty in the twenty-first century. This themed issue in many ways extends Mbembe’s challenge by taking up the complex, often contentious subject of death in present-day culture as it is thought, and as it operates, within and beyond biopolitics. In bringing together articles from scholars across the fields of politics, biomedicine, law, philosophy, and literature, this issue interrogates the conceptual status of death in biopolitical discourse by considering emerging post-biopolitical and post-human contexts. Foucault understood the status of death in 1975 as ‘something to be hidden away.’ With twenty-first century global conditions, death as a subject has become more visible, imbricated with, and paramount to ideas of the postcolony, necro-economics, the necropolitical, and ethical and legal debates surrounding the right-to-die. At the same time, new technologies of warfare in the ‘War on Terror’ have meant that death has acquired new forms, through modes of violence that often annihilate the body. Such forms of death challenge traditional ritualizations of death and render death increasingly invisible. The issue intervenes at the intersection of biopolitical and post-biopolitical fields of knowledge, entering current debates on critical social and political issues such as euthanasia, the death penalty, and contemporary geopolitics. A number of the essays collected in the volume examine new forms of geopolitical violence, reveal unacknowledged bioethical states of exception, and engage with new liminal states of death created by medical advances. These articles are brought into a transdisciplinary dialogue with studies that explore the way in which contemporary visual art and literature offer new ways of representing death and emerging biomedical phenomena. In doing so, the scholarship of this issue offers theoretical means to navigate contemporary conceptions of death at the juncture of biopolitical and post-biopolitical discourses

Imaginary Intimacies: Death and New Temporalities in the Work of Denise Riley and Nicholas Royle

In The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014), Julia Kristeva understands there to be two forms of relation to death in contemporary culture. The ‘imaginary intimacy with death, which transforms melancholy or desire into representation and thought’ is opposed in Kristeva’s work to ‘the rational realization’ of the act of capital punishment, the former epitomizing ‘vision’ in contrast to the ‘action’ of the latter. This essay proposes that Kristeva’s idea of an ‘imaginary intimacy’ with death can be read in the context of contemporary literary responses to the death of a loved one by Denise Riley and Nicholas Royle. In particular, this essay addresses the relationship between death and new temporalities in Riley’s essay Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), her recent collection of poems Say Something Back (2016), and Royle’s Quilt (2010). The non-linear models of time found in Riley’s and Royle’s works are contextualised via the attempts in phenomenology to theorise the relations between temporality and finitude, as well as via Stephen J Gould’s work on geological time. For Riley, the experience of the death of her son brings with it an ‘altered condition of life’ in which time takes the form of ‘a-temporality.’ Questioning the limits of the sentence, and collapsing the narrative boundaries between the living narrator and the deceased father, Quilt traverses the boundaries between experience lived and an experience impossible to claim. Through such an analysis the essay explores the capacity of experimental works to harbour new non-linear temporalities that reflect on the relation between temporality and finitude in the contemporary

Engaged Disengagement: Reframing as Feminist Critique in Vanessa Place’s Tragodí a

This essay positions Vanessa Place’s Tragodía (2011) as an instance of reframing as contemporary feminist cultural critique. An enquiry into allegory, hermeneutics, and the performative use of indifference in Place’s conceptual writing generates insights into new narrative conditions produced by Place’s work. Tragodía does not represent trauma but rather generates trauma through a poetic practice that has a bipartite structure: conceptual writing (allegory) and Place’s performances of the narratives. Place’s performance is read in this analysis as an ancillary act of reframing that raises the question of what might be at stake in the performative use of indifference. Understood as a strategy of failure, Place’s performance parallels the lack of mediation in the conceptual act of reframing. Positioned counter to the linguistic deformation of the subjects' speech acts and the erasure of affect that occurs in the legal narratives through the act of interpretation, the refusal to interpret implicit in the act of reframing in Tragodía is an ethical gesture, a paratextual pathway to metamorphosis. In its refusal to interpret, Tragodía creates a site of contextual resistance to the oppression of the subjects’ organic narratives by the institutional language of the law, and offers a new textual field of meaning-making

Thematic mapper design parameter investigation

This study simulated the multispectral data sets to be expected from three different Thematic Mapper configurations, and the ground processing of these data sets by three different resampling techniques. The simulated data sets were then evaluated by processing them for multispectral classification, and the Thematic Mapper configuration, and resampling technique which provided the best classification accuracy were identified

Achieving Foundation Accountability and Transparency: Lessons From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s \u3ci\u3eScorecard\u3c/i\u3e

· The purpose of this article is to help foundations in their accountability and transparency efforts by sharing lessons from one foundation’s journey to develop a scorecard. · A commitment to funding and sharing the results from rigorous evaluations set the tone for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) accountability. · The Scorecard is a powerful tool for RWJF to set goals, track organizational effectiveness, and motivate responses to shortcomings. · Foundations can tailor their scorecard to include what best serves their needs. · With its Scorecard, RWJF found that comparative and quantitative measures are the most powerful forces to motivate change. · Setting targets motivates staff to focus their efforts on certain areas and make improvements

Mitigating Environmental Externalities through Voluntary and Involuntary Water Reallocation: Nevada's Truckee-Carson River Basin

A transition from the era of building water projects and developing new supplies to an era of water reallocation is well underway in most of the West. Two decades ago, experts were debating the ability of western water institutions, originally conceived to serve the earliest non-native water diverters-irrigators and mines -- to adapt to the growing demands of cities. By acquiring water formerly used to grow crops, through voluntary market transactions, western cities have demonstrated that water law and policy prove flexible when the economic and political stakes are high enough.Initially fueled by urban growth, water reallocation is now being stimulated by a new array of forces. Throughout the West, water reallocation is beginning to reflect environmental benefits alongside the traditional uses for water in irrigation, cities, and industry. Some reallocations have involved market transfers of water arranged through voluntary negotiations; others have involved involuntary reallocations prompted by court rulings. This article argues that both types of reallocation will continue to be important in managing western water resources, but that each has quite different implications for the distribution of benefits and costs from reallocation

Sources of Water I: Agriculture – The Deep Pool?

34 pages (includes illustration). Contains 2 pages of references