Impact Of Greenhouse Gas Abatement Targets On Agricultural Activity

As part of its continuing commitment to address the causes of climate change, the EU has agreed reduction targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be achieved by 2020. In the case of Ireland the target is a reduction of 20 percent relative to the 2005 level. Agriculture is a major source of GHG emissions in Ireland, comprising 26.8 percent of total GHG emissions in 2007. Understanding the scale and cost of the decrease in agricultural production required to achieve this reduction in GHG emissions is particularly important, as is the comparison of the cost of this approach with a range of possible other means of achieving emissions reductions in the sector. This study finds that, even with reduced fertiliser usage and more extensive production practices, a very substantial decrease in the livestock population is required to meet the emission reduction targets by 2020. The paper concludes that a solution involving a mix of measures may ultimately be requiredagriculture, policy analysis, partial equilibrium modelling, baseline, scenario analysis, GHG, Kyoto, climate, Ireland, FAPRI, EU Gold Model, abatements, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q11, Q17, Q18, Q54,

Isolation of a Housefly Head Protein Fraction that Exhibits High Affinity Binding of Cholinergic Ligands

The purification is described of a protein fraction, isolated from the central nervous system of housefly heads, that exhibits high affinity for cholinergic ligands. The purified material was found tq bind with high affinity acetylcholine, nicotinic ligands such as nicotine and decamethonium as well as atropine, dexetimide a:qg pilocarpine which are of a muscarinic nature. With all the ligands there appeared to be only a single site for binding with measured dissociation constants varying from 6.2 X 10-s M (dexetimide) to 5.4 x 10-6 M (pilocarpine). The concentration of binding sites was in the range of 381 nmol g-1 of protein (atropine) to 560 nmol g-1 of protein (pilocarpine)

Linking Large Numbers of Individual National Models: The Case of the AGMEMOD Partnership

The AGMEMOD Partnership seeks to capture the inherent heterogeneity of the agricultural systems existing by combining individual country models of 27 EU Member States and several accession countries into one single model while still maintaining analytical consistency. Although this approach facilitates the comparison of the impact of a policy across different Member States, it generates challenges in practical implementation, ranging from high communication and administration requirements to aggregation and consistency issues. This contribution provides insights into the different challenges posed to the scientists and discusses the key issues for maintenance and further development of such a complex system. Specific attention is paid to technical devices and tools as well as to the design of institutional settings for avoiding inconsistencies.Linking Models, Policy Analysis, Partial Equilibrium Modelling, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Agricultural and Food Policy,

How to deal with the challenges of linking a large number of individual national models: the case of the AGMEMOD Partnership

The AGMEMOD Partnership seeks to capture the inherent existing heterogeneity of agricultural systems by linking together individual EU Member State models, an aggregated EU model and several accession countries into one single model, while still maintaining analytical consistency. Although this approach facilitates the comparison of the impact of a policy change across different Member States, it generates challenges in practical implementation, ranging from significant communication and administration requirements, to aggregation and consistency issues. This contribution provides insights into the different challenges posed to the scientists and discusses the key issues for maintenance and further development of such a complex system. Specific attention is paid to technical devices and tools as well as to the design of institutional settings to achieve consistency.linking models, policy analysis, partial equilibrium modelling, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Agricultural and Food Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Systematic procedural and sensitivity analysis of the pattern informatics method for forecasting large (M > 5) earthquake events in southern California

Recent studies in the literature have introduced a new approach to earthquake forecasting based on representing the space-time patterns of localized seismicity by a time-dependent system state vector in a real-valued Hilbert space and deducing information about future space-time fluctuations from the phase angle of the state vector. While the success rate of this Pattern Informatics (PI) method has been encouraging, the method is still in its infancy. Procedural analysis, statistical testing, parameter sensitivity investigation and optimization all still need to be performed. In this paper, we attempt to optimize the PI approach by developing quantitative values for "predictive goodness" and analyzing possible variations in the proposed procedure. In addition, we attempt to quantify the systematic dependence on the quality of the input catalog of historic data and develop methods for combining catalogs from regions of different seismic rates.Comment: 39 pages, 4 tables, 9 figures. Submitted to Pure and Applied Geophysics on 30 November 200

MTR and the EU Commission Proposal for the WTO: - An analysis of their effect on the EU and Irish agricultural sector

Further information may be found at http://www.tnet.teagasc.ie/fapri/pubandrep2003.htmIn the short history of the FAPRI-Ireland Partnership there has been no shortage of policy proposals to analyse. As part of the Agenda 2000 process the CAP is undergoing significant reform following the agreement made at the European Council in Berlin in 1999. This agreement had widespread implications for agriculture in Ireland, particularly for the beef sector. The changes that were agreed at that time have not even been fully implemented and there is already another reform document on the table, containing even more radical proposals for reform

Space-Time Clustering and Correlations of Major Earthquakes

Earthquake occurrence in nature is thought to result from correlated elastic stresses, leading to clustering in space and time. We show that occurrence of major earthquakes in California correlates with time intervals when fluctuations in small earthquakes are suppressed relative to the long term average. We estimate a probability of less than 1% that this coincidence is due to random clustering.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to PR

FAPRI-Ireland 2003 EU Baseline Briefing Book

For six years the FAPRI-Ireland Partnership has been producing analysis of agricultural policy for the EU, with a focus on the impacts for Ireland. The process that generates this analysis involves first developing a baseline, a set of figures produced under the assumption that current policies remain in place. In the case of Europe, this means that agricultural policy in the EU is that which prevailed in January 2003. The baseline does include the reforms that were agreed under Agenda 2000 that have yet to be implemented for the dairy sector, where intervention prices were scheduled to fall between 2005 and 2007, and provisions from the Uruguay round

Detecting inconsistent responding on the youth psychopathic traits inventory-short form

The Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short Form (YPI-S) is a convenient measure for assessing psychopathy in settings with constraints on resources. However, the YPI-S does not contain a means of detecting careless or random response styles. The present study describes the development and evaluation of an inconsistent responding scale for the YPI-S using five archival samples that vary in language (English, German, Italian, Dutch) and other participant characteristics (juvenile offenders, adolescent students). Inconsistency scores resulting from the new scale effectively distinguished genuine participant responses from randomly generated cases (area under the ROC curve [AUC] = .85-.90) and from cases in which 50% of original responses were replaced with random data (AUC = .75-.82). The associations between the YPI-S and theoretically relevant correlates were reduced among participants exceeding proposed cutoff scores for profile validity compared with associations among more consistent respondents

Isolation of a Housefly Head Protein Fraction that Exhibits High Affinity Binding of Cholinergic Ligands

The purification is described of a protein fraction, isolated from the central nervous system of housefly heads, that exhibits high affinity for cholinergic ligands. The purified material was found tq bind with high affinity acetylcholine, nicotinic ligands such as nicotine and decamethonium as well as atropine, dexetimide a:qg pilocarpine which are of a muscarinic nature. With all the ligands there appeared to be only a single site for binding with measured dissociation constants varying from 6.2 X 10-s M (dexetimide) to 5.4 x 10-6 M (pilocarpine). The concentration of binding sites was in the range of 381 nmol g-1 of protein (atropine) to 560 nmol g-1 of protein (pilocarpine)