Devising A Method of ‘Expected Damage’ Estimation for a Polyphagous Invertebrate Pest Exotic to Western Australia

With increasing efficiency in human and freight transport fuelled by the creation of the global market place, pressure is mounting on quarantine administrators to target their resources strategically. A managed approach to decision-making is therefore becoming an integral part of quarantine management since target species and/or entry pathways must be identified and policed effectively. Using the example of Melon Thrips in Western Australia, this paper presents an economic framework that allows decision-makers to prioritise exotic pests based on the damage and production cost increases they are capable of imposing on affected industries. In doing so it identifies a critical level of expected damage associated with the pest that can then be used as a ceiling for incursion response expenditure.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Multiparticle States and the Hadron Spectrum on the Lattice

The Clebsch-Gordan decomposition is calculated for direct products of the irreducible representations of the cubic space group. These results are used to identify multiparticle states which appear in the hadron spectrum on the lattice. Consideration of the cubic space group indicates how combinations of both zero momentum and non-zero momentum multiparticle states contribute to the spectrum.Comment: v2) Little groups for lattice momenta corrected. Includes a more consistent labeling scheme. (13 pages

Legacy in major sport events: empirical insights from the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa

The awarding of the 2010 FIFA World Cup to South Africa was an historic moment for all of Africa as football’s biggest event travelled to the continent for the first time. This study, set five years on, seeks to identify the legacies left by the construction of two new stadiums in Durban and Cape Town. As part of the EU-funded CARNiVAL project, which seeks to investigate the legacies and impacts of hosting such events, interviews were conducted with key stakeholders involved in the planning of legacies in the two cities. Using Chappelet and Junod’s (2006) framework to analyse the legacies, this study found that Durban and Cape Town have used different strategies to leverage the legacies with differing results. Yet, both stadiums have suffered from the same issue; a seeming lack of need for two stadiums with capacities over 54,000, for domestic sport leagues which average fewer than 10,000 spectators Publisher statement: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits users to copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes providing it is properly cited

Adaptive Governance: An Introduction and Implications for Public Policy

Adaptive governance is a concept from institutional theory that deals with the evolution of institutions for the management of shared assets, particularly common pool resources and other forms of natural capital. This paper is the first of a set of four papers on adaptive governance, providing a brief overview of the history of the concept, the distinguishing features of the literature, and key insights provided for economists and policy advisors. We argue that adaptive governance provides an interesting lens for examining the political economy of policy responses akin to the concept of market failure within economics, but applied to wider processes of social learning and collective choice, including collective choices about the scope and structure of institutions that govern lower level choices by individuals and organizations.adaptive governance, public policy, common pool resources, natural resource management, wicked problems, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Panel III: Implications of the New Telecommunications Legislation

We present a method that employs a tree-based Neural Network (NN) for performing classification. The novel mechanism, apart from incorporating the information provided by unlabeled and labeled instances, re-arranges the nodes of the tree as per the laws of Adaptive Data Structures (ADSs). Particularly, we investigate the Pattern Recognition (PR) capabilities of the Tree-Based Topology-Oriented SOM (TTOSOM) when Conditional Rotations (CONROT) [8] are incorporated into the learning scheme. The learning methodology inherits all the properties of the TTOSOM-based classifier designed in [4]. However, we now augment it with the property that frequently accessed nodes are moved closer to the root of the tree. Our experimental results show that on average, the classification capabilities of our proposed strategy are reasonably comparable to those obtained by some of the state-of-the-art classification schemes that only use labeled instances during the training phase. The experiments also show that improved levels of accuracy can be obtained by imposing trees with a larger number of nodes

CD4+ T cell hyporesponsiveness after repeated exposure to Schistosoma mansoni larvae is dependent upon interleukin-10

The effect that multiple percutaneous exposures to Schistosoma larvae has on the development of early CD4+ lymphocyte reactivity is unclear, yet it is important in the context of humans living in areas where schistosomiasis is endemic. In a murine model of multiple infections, we show that exposure of mice to repeated doses (4×) of Schistosoma mansoni cercariae, compared to a single dose (1×), results in CD4+ T cell hyporesponsiveness within the skin-draining lymph nodes (sdLN), manifested as reduced CD4+ cell proliferation and cytokine production. FoxP3+ CD4+ regulatory T cells were present in similar numbers in the sdLN of 4× and 1× mice and thus are unlikely to have a role in effecting hyporesponsiveness. Moreover, anergy of the CD4+ cell population from 4× mice was slight, as proliferation was only partly circumvented through the in vitro addition of exogenous interleukin-2 (IL-2), and the in vivo blockade of the regulatory molecule PD1 had a minimal effect on restoring responsiveness. In contrast, IL-10 was observed to be critical in mediating hyporesponsiveness, as CD4+ cells from the sdLN of 4× mice deficient for IL-10 were readily able to proliferate, unlike those from 4× wild-type cohorts. CD4+ cells from the sdLN of 4× mice exhibited higher levels of apoptosis and cell death, but in the absence of IL-10, there was significantly less cell death. Combined, our data show that IL-10 is a key factor in the development of CD4+ T cell hyporesponsiveness after repeated parasite exposure involving CD4+ cell apoptosis

A Study of Two Dwarf Irregular Galaxies with Asymmetrical Star Formation Distributions

Two dwarf irregular galaxies, DDO 187 and NGC 3738, exhibit a striking pattern of star formation: intense star formation is taking place in a large region occupying roughly half of the inner part of the optical galaxy. We use data on the H i distribution and kinematics and stellar images and colors to examine the properties of the environment in the high star formation rate (HSF) halves of the galaxies in comparison with the low star formation rate halves. We find that the pressure and gas density are higher on the HSF sides by 30%–70%. In addition we find in both galaxies that the H i velocity fields exhibit significant deviations from ordered rotation and there are large regions of high-velocity dispersion and multiple velocity components in the gas beyond the inner regions of the galaxies. The conditions in the HSF regions are likely the result of large-scale external processes affecting the internal environment of the galaxies and enabling the current star formation there

Modifying the Einstein Equations off the Constraint Hypersuface

A new technique is presented for modifying the Einstein evolution equations off the constraint hypersurface. With this approach the evolution equations for the constraints can be specified freely. The equations of motion for the gravitational field variables are modified by the addition of terms that are linear and nonlocal in the constraints. These terms are obtained from solutions of the linearized Einstein constraints.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, uses REVTe

Spatial Cluster Detection for Weighted Outcomes Using Cumulative Geographic Residuals

Spatial cluster detection is an important methodology for identifying regions with excessive numbers of adverse health events without making strong model assumptions on the underlying spatial dependence structure. Previous work has focused on point or individual-level outcome data and few advances have been made when the outcome data are reported at an aggregated level, e.g. at the county- or census tract-level. This paper proposes a new class of spatial cluster detecion methods for point or aggregate data, comprising of continuous, binary, and count data. Compared with the existing spatial cluster detection methods it has the following advantages. First, it readily incorporates region-specific weights, for example, based on a region’s population or a region’s outcome variance, which is key for aggregate data. Second, the established general framework allows for area-level and individual-level covariate adjustment. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the method. The proposed method is then applied to assess spatial clustering of high Body Mass Index in a HMO population in the Seattle, Washington USA area

Clustering of solutions in the random satisfiability problem

Using elementary rigorous methods we prove the existence of a clustered phase in the random $K$-SAT problem, for $K\geq 8$. In this phase the solutions are grouped into clusters which are far away from each other. The results are in agreement with previous predictions of the cavity method and give a rigorous confirmation to one of its main building blocks. It can be generalized to other systems of both physical and computational interest.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur