The Drivers of Income Inequality in Rich Countries

Rising income inequality has recently come centre-stage as a core societal concern for rich countries. The diagnosis of the forces driving inequality upwards and their relative importance remains hotly contested, notably with respect to the roles of globalization versus technology and of market forces versus institutions and policy choices. This survey provides a critical review and synthesis of recent research. The focus is on income inequality across the entire distribution, rather than only on what has been happening at the very top. We pay particular attention to including what has been learned from the analysis of micro-data, to ensuring that the coverage is not unduly US-centric, and to analyses of the interrelations between the different drivers of inequality. The marked differences in inequality trends across countries and time-periods reflect how global economic forces such as globalisation and technological change have interacted with differing national contexts and institutions. Major analytical challenges stand in the way of a consensus emerging on the relative importance of different drivers in how income inequality has evolved in recent decades

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

THE RATE OF BINARY BLACK HOLE MERGERS INFERRED FROM ADVANCED LIGO OBSERVATIONS SURROUNDING GW150914

A transient gravitational-wave signal, GW150914, was identi fi ed in the twin Advanced LIGO detectors on 2015 September 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC. To asse ss the implications of this discovery, the detectors remained in operation with unchanged con fi gurations over a period of 39 days around the time of t he signal. At the detection statistic threshold corresponding to that observed for GW150914, our search of the 16 days of simultaneous two-detector observational data is estimated to have a false-alarm rate ( FAR ) of < ́ -- 4.9 10 yr 61 , yielding a p -value for GW150914 of < ́ - 210 7 . Parameter estimation follo w-up on this trigger identi fi es its source as a binary black hole ( BBH ) merger with component masses ( )( ) = - + - + mm M ,36,29 12 4 5 4 4 at redshift = - + z 0.09 0.04 0.03 ( median and 90% credible range ) . Here, we report on the constraints these observations place on the rate of BBH coalescences. Considering only GW150914, assuming that all BBHs in the universe have the same masses and spins as this event, imposing a search FAR threshold of 1 per 100 years, and assuming that the BBH merger rate is constant in the comoving frame, we infer a 90% credible range of merger rates between – -- 2 53 Gpc yr 31 ( comoving frame ) . Incorporating all search triggers that pass a much lower threshold while accounting for the uncerta inty in the astrophysical origin of each trigger, we estimate a higher rate, ranging from – -- 13 600 Gpc yr 31 depending on assumptions about the BBH mass distribution. All together, our various rate estimat es fall in the conservative range – -- 2 600 Gpc yr 31

Differences in water use efficiency among annual forages used by the dairy industry under optimum and deficit irrigation

The increasing cost and scarcity of water for irrigation is placing pressure on Australian dairy farmers to utilize water more efficiently, and as result, water use efficiency (WUE) of forages is becoming an important criterion for sustainable dairy production. This study was conducted to identify more water use efficient forage species than the dominant dairy forage, perennial ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.). Seventeen annual forage species were investigated under optimum irrigation (I1) and two deficit irrigation treatments (nominally 66 and 33% of irrigation water applied to the optimal level), over 3 years at Camden, NSW, on a brown Dermsol in a warm temperate climate. Forages with the highest yield generally had the highest WUEt (total yield/evapotranspiration). Under optimal irrigation, there was a three-fold difference in mean annual WUEt between forages, with maize (Zea mays L.) having the highest (42.9 kg ha-1 mm-1) and cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.) the lowest (13.5 kg ha-1 mm-1), with 11 of the forage species having a greater WUEt than perennial ryegrass. The 'harvested' forages maize, wheat, triticale (Triticosecale rimpaui Wittm.) and maple pea (Pisum sativium L.) generally had higher mean WUEt (26.7-42.9 kg ha-1 mm-1) than the remaining forages which were defoliated multiple times to simulate grazing (13.5-30.1 kg ha-1 mm-1). The reduction in annual WUEt in response to deficit irrigation was greatest for the warm season forages with up to 30% reduction for maize, while most of the cool season annuals were not significantly affected by deficit irrigation at the levels imposed. In order to maximize WUEt of any forage, it is necessary to maximize yield, as there is a strong positive relationship between yield and WUEt. However, while WUEt is an important criterion for choosing dairy forages, it is only one factor in a complex system. Choice of forages must be considered on a whole farm basis and include consideration of yield, nutritive value, cost of production and risk.Dairy cows Water accounting Corn Grasses Crops Pastures Legumes Forbs

Grazing Management Decision Making in the Pastoral Zone of Western Australia: An Application Using Control Theory

Rangeland degradation within the arid zone of Western Australia has occurred as a consequence of sheep overstocking. Optimum grazing management strategies and rangeland rehabilitation techniques are needed to maintain the resource base for future use. In this paper an optimal control framework is developed for the derivation of grazing management decisions. " An integrated model of an arid grazing ecological system (IMAGES)" is used to derive the rangeland dynamics. The state of the grazing ecological system is summarized into four variables: the population of mature desirable perennial plants, young desirable perennial seedlings, old desirable perennial seedlings and total forage biomass. The controls are a set of different seasonal stocking rates within the year. Optimal decision rules are derived for both a deterministic and stochastic case study. Generally, the optimum stocking rate increase with increasing value for the 4 state variables. In deterministic case it combines both uniform and varied stocking rates while in the stochastic case only the uniform stocking rates prevails. Compared to the stochastic case, the net present value is higher for most cases under deterministic climate sequences, although there are some exceptions. The differences in the deterministic and stochastic cases can be dramatic. The reason appears to be highly variable rainfall combined with nonlinear production functions and adjustment costs. An over-optimistic expectation about the weather can be very expensive. Work to verify the stochastic results is continuing