Controlling evaporation loss from water storages

[Executive Summary]: Evaporation losses from on-farm storage can potentially be large, particularly in irrigation areas in northern New South Wales and Queensland where up to 40% of storage volume can be lost each year to evaporation. Reducing evaporation from a water storage would allow additional crop production, water trading or water for the environment. While theoretical research into evaporation from storages has previously been undertaken there has been little evaluation of current evaporation mitigation technologies (EMTs) on commercial sized water storages. This project was initiated by the Queensland Government Department of Natural Resources and Mines (NRM) with the express aim of addressing this gap in our knowledge. The report addressed i) assessment of the effectiveness of different EMT’s in reducing evaporation from commercial storages across a range of climate regions, ii) assessment of the practical and technical limitations of different evaporation control products, and iii) comparison of the economics of different EMT’s on water storages used for irrigation

Classifying Nominal Voltage of Electric Power Transmission Lines Using Remotely-Sensed Data

Geospatial data of national infrastructure are a valuable resource for visualization, analysis, and modeling. Building these geospatial foundation-level infrastructure datasets presents numerous challenges. Among those challenges is that of acquiring non-visible attribution of particular infrastructure entities for which there is no viable tabular source. In the case of electric power transmission lines, these data are difficult to acquire, particularly nation-wide. The route, or geometry of transmission lines can be determined from aerial imagery, but nominal voltage, a fundamental requirement for analysis and modeling, is not readily apparent. However, inferences can be made about the nominal voltage based on visual characteristics, or predictors. This study develops a methodology to extract predictors from high-resolution aerial imagery and test the efficacy of those predictors for classifying the nominal voltage of transmission lines using a supervised classifier

Crossing Over: Rauschenberg, Kafka, and the Boundaries of Imagination

How do we make sense of something we don’t recognize? This topic raises an important background question: how do we recognize or come to imaginatively experience the subject that a work of art or fiction presents to us? When philosophers address this topic they often assume the act of experiencing or recognizing something through that work is directly under a reader or viewer’s control. The imaginative act, they tell us, is something that a viewer or reader does with the material presented by a given work. This limits the scope of what we might fail to recognize to cases of ambiguity or under-determination. I suggest that this approach ignores the way in which some works of art or fiction puzzle us not because their content is ambiguous but because they frustrate the imaginative act itself. They do this by making it difficult to navigate the imaginary space a fictional object might occupy. To develop this claim I closely examine several works by Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kafka and suggest that they undermine the common assumption that the activity of imaginatively engaging a work of fiction is under our control. I conclude by suggesting some implications this lack of control might have for two prominent debates related to the activity of recognizing or experiencing something through an engagement with a work of fiction

And yet, it moves: Lobbying Regulation in the Council of Ministers of the European Union

This study aims to explain the commitment of the Council of the European Union to the Inter-Institutional Agreement on a common Transparency Register for interest representatives with the Commission and European Parliament in 2021. To scrutinize this surprising turn in the hitherto transparency-averse position of the Council, this study draws on a set of elite interviews with Council sources and transparency stakeholders. The emerging data are analyzed through a theoretical framework grounded in institutionalist theory, grouped in a strategic, institutional, and ideational dimension. Evidence on a strategic dimension suggests a transparency-averse majority in the Council that explains the overall skepticism of the institution towards advancing lobbying transparency. The institutional dimension reveals the Council as compelled by norm-entrepreneurship and a logic of appropriateness instilled by other institutional actors in the Inter-Institutional Agreement. Lastly, the ideational dimension reveals shifting notions of transparency, as well as effective change agency and knowledge sharing through pro-transparency actors within the Council. The study concludes that, while a merely strategic analysis of institutional change fails to explain reform, a holistic institutionalist perspective, considering different dimensions of institutional change, is well suited to explain the advance of lobbying transparency in the Council. Further research could draw on the tentative findings of this research and attempt a longitudinal assessment of drivers and inhibitors of lobbying transparency in the Council

Karakterisation af oversættelse for de til Chomsky-hierarkiet hørende automater

This publication is the author's master's thesis. It treats the following problem: If one takes a ''Chomsky-automaton'' (i. e. a finite state automaton, a push-down automaton, a linear bounded automaton or a Turing Machine) and equips it with output one obtains the corresponding translator. Define the graph of a translator as the set of pairs (x, y) where input x belongs to the language accepted by the automaton and y is the ouput produced while processing x . How can such graphs be characterized ?A characterization is given for all Chomsky types in terms of pair grammars generating the graphs as well as in terms of homomorphic images of a language of corresponding type. The publication was intended to be used as material in connection with a course on automata theory and hence it contains proofs of theorems appearing elsewhere in the literature