Modelling Water Trade in the Southern Murray-Darling Basin

Released in November 2004, the paper uses TERM-Water, a bottoms-up regional CGE model of the Australian economy, to examine the regional effects of expanding trade of irrigation water in the southern Murray- Darling Basin. The study finds that water trading dampens the impact of water allocation cuts on gross regional product (GRP). The benefits of introducing trading within irrigation districts are greater than the further benefits of expanding trade to between these regions. Permitting trade of seasonal allocations allows irrigators to reallocate water in reaction to climatic conditions and water availability - and it is this flexibility that enables GRP reductions to be minimised.southern murray-darling basin, CGE model, irrigation water, water allocation, water trade,

AVIRIS data characteristics and their effects on spectral discrimination of rocks exposed in the Drum Mountains, Utah: Results of a preliminary study

Airborne Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data collected over a geologically diverse field site and over a nearby calibration site were analyzed and interpreted in efforts to document radiometric and geometric characteristics of AVIRIS, quantify and correct for detrimental sensor phenomena, and evaluate the utility of AVIRIS data for discriminating rock types and identifying their constituent mineralogy. AVIRIS data acquired for these studies exhibit a variety of detrimental artifacts and have lower signal-to-noise ratios than expected in the longer wavelength bands. Artifacts are both inherent in the image data and introduced during ground processing, but most may be corrected by appropriate processing techniques. Poor signal-to-noise characteristics of this AVIRIS data set limited the usefulness of the data for lithologic discrimination and mineral identification. Various data calibration techniques, based on field-acquired spectral measurements, were applied to the AVIRIS data. Major absorption features of hydroxyl-bearing minerals were resolved in the spectra of the calibrated AVIRIS data, and the presence of hydroxyl-bearing minerals at the corresponding ground locations was confirmed by field data

Display controller architectures for computer graphics

The currently prevalent forms of display controller hardware are discussed in terms of their architecture, and their relationship to the software which forms the graphics packages with which they are to be used. New architectures are proposed utilising both conventional, commercially available components and special purpose Large Scale Integrated circuits. The concept of a "hardware graphics package" Is developed and implementation details presented. The conclusions drawn from this work are that in order to provide an appropriate environment for the type of interactive graphics capabilities which will form the hub of much future software, more emphasis must be placed on intelligent display systems. This distributed approach requires that a host computer provides a display controller with a high-level scene description which is subsequently rendered to constituent polygonal facets by the controller. Substantial benefits accrue from this reduced dependence upon a single Central Processing element

The social security rights of older international migrants in the European Union

Europe is now home to a significant and diverse population of older international migrants. Social and demographic changes have forced the issue of social security in old age onto the European social policy agenda in the last decade. In spite of an increased interest in the financial well-being of older people, many retired international migrants who are legally resident in the European Union face structured disadvantages. Four linked factors are of particular importance in shaping the pension rights and levels of financial provision available to individual older migrants: migration history, socio-legal status, past relationship to the paid labour market, and location within a particular EU Member State. Building on a typology of older migrants, the paper outlines the ways in which policy at both the European Union and Member State levels serves to diminish rather than enhance the social security rights of certain older international migrants

Contestable adulthood: variability and disparity in markers for negotiating the transition to adulthood

Recent research has identified a discreet set of subjective markers that are seen as characterizing the transition to adulthood. The current study challenges this coherence by examining the disparity and variability in young people’s selection of such criteria. Four sentence-completion cues corresponding to four differentcontexts in which adult status might be contested were given to 156 British 16- to 17-year-olds. Their qualitative responses were analyzed to explore patterns whilst capturing some of their richness and diversity. An astonishing amount of variability emerged, both within and between cued contexts.The implications of this variability for how the transition to adulthood is experienced are explored. The argument is made that markers of the transition to adulthood are not merely reflective of the bio–psycho–social development of young people. Rather, adulthood here is seen as an essentially contested concept,located within the discursive interactional environment in which young people participate

Characterizing upward lightning with and without a terrestrial gamma-ray flash

We compare two observations of gamma-rays before, during, and after lightning flashes initiated by upward leaders from a tower during low-altitude winter thunderstorms on the western coast of Honshu, Japan. While the two leaders appear similar, one produced a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) so bright that it paralyzed the gamma-ray detectors while it was occurring, and could be observed only via the weaker flux of neutrons created in its wake, while the other produced no detectable TGF gamma-rays at all. The ratio between the indirectly derived gamma-ray fluence for the TGF and the 95% confidence gamma-ray upper limit for the gamma-ray quiet flash is a factor of $1\times10^7$. With the only two observations of this type providing such dramatically different results -- a TGF probably as bright as those seen from space and a powerful upper limit -- we recognize that weak, sub-luminous TGFs in this situation are probably not common, and we quantify this conclusion. While the gamma-ray quiet flash appeared to have a faster leader and more powerful initial continuous current pulse than the flash that produced a TGF, the TGF-producing flash occurred during a weak gamma-ray "glow", while the gamma-ray quiet flash did not, implying a higher electric field aloft when the TGF was produced. We suggest that the field in the high-field region approached by a leader may be more important for whether a TGF is produced than the characteristics of the leader itself.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmosphere

New collections of p-subgroups and homology decompositions for classifying spaces of finite groups

Let G be a finite group and p a prime dividing its order. We define new collections of p-subgroups of G. We study the homotopy relations among them and with the standard collections of p-subgroups. We determine their ampleness and sharpness properties.Comment: 14 pages, some revisions made, final version to appear in Communications in Algebr

Statistical interaction modeling of bovine herd behaviors

While there has been interest in modeling the group behavior of herds or flocks, much of this work has focused on simulating their collective spatial motion patterns which have not accounted for individuality in the herd and instead assume a homogenized role for all members or sub-groups of the herd. Animal behavior experts have noted that domestic animals exhibit behaviors that are indicative of social hierarchy: leader/follower type behaviors are present as well as dominance and subordination, aggression and rank order, and specific social affiliations may also exist. Both wild and domestic cattle are social species, and group behaviors are likely to be influenced by the expression of specific social interactions. In this paper, Global Positioning System coordinate fixes gathered from a herd of beef cows tracked in open fields over several days at a time are utilized to learn a model that focuses on the interactions within the herd as well as its overall movement. Using these data in this way explores the validity of existing group behavior models against actual herding behaviors. Domain knowledge, location geography and human observations, are utilized to explain the causes of these deviations from this idealized behavior

The homotopy theory of dg-categories and derived Morita theory

The main purpose of this work is the study of the homotopy theory of dg-categories up to quasi-equivalences. Our main result provides a natural description of the mapping spaces between two dg-categories $C$ and $D$ in terms of the nerve of a certain category of $(C,D)$-bimodules. We also prove that the homotopy category $Ho(dg-Cat)$ is cartesian closed (i.e. possesses internal Hom's relative to the tensor product). We use these two results in order to prove a derived version of Morita theory, describing the morphisms between dg-categories of modules over two dg-categories $C$ and $D$ as the dg-category of $(C,D)$-bi-modules. Finally, we give three applications of our results. The first one expresses Hochschild cohomology as endomorphisms of the identity functor, as well as higher homotopy groups of the \emph{classifying space of dg-categories} (i.e. the nerve of the category of dg-categories and quasi-equivalences between them). The second application is the existence of a good theory of localization for dg-categories, defined in terms of a natural universal property. Our last application states that the dg-category of (continuous) morphisms between the dg-categories of quasi-coherent (resp. perfect) complexes on two schemes (resp. smooth and proper schemes) is quasi-equivalent to the dg-category of quasi-coherent complexes (resp. perfect) on their product.Comment: 50 pages. Few mistakes corrected, and some references added. Thm. 8.15 is new. Minor corrections. Final version, to appear in Inventione