Economic Growth in South Africa since the late nineteenth century

Rereading D Hobart Houghton’s The South African Economy (1967) and Economic Development1865-1965 (1971) brings to mind the stark theoretical and empirical differences between his account of thirty years ago and current views of economic growth. Hobart Houghton wrote within the optimistic and conceptually quite simple framework of W W Rostow’s five stages of economic growth - only get to “take off†and your economic future is assured - whereas analysis of economic growth now draws on a more extended and technical literature which comes to no such simple conclusion. Hobart Houghton was writing after three decades of sustained growth in real per capita income; since then an extended period of falling real per capita income has inscribed itself on the South African record (see Figure 1), during a period of political instability and change. Hobart Houghton wrote in the Bretton Woods world which had gathered to itself a sense of stability: we are more uncomfortably aware that international trade and finance regimes have changed several times since the middle of the nineteenth century, usually with sharp and widespread transition costs. And thirty years ago, comparative information on economic growth was limited to a small (and biased) sample of countries. As more and more countries are brought within the scope of the World Bank’s World Development Report, for instance, it has become apparent that middle income countries (of which South Africa is one) can regress economically just as easily as they can progress. Governments and peoples now understand themselves as engaged in the elusive quest for economic growth.

Querying a regulatory model for compliant building design audit

The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a BIM model containing the design information, an electronic regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computerised representations. There have been numerous approaches to computer-aided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of standardisation. The current research project therefore focuses on using an open standard regulatory knowledge and BIM representations in conjunction with open standard executable compliant design workflows to automate the compliance audit process. This paper provides an overview of different approaches to access information from a regulatory model representation. The paper then describes the use of a purpose-built high-level domain specific query language to extract regulatory information as part of the effort to automate manual design procedures for compliance audit

On proper splinters in positive characteristic

While the splinter property is a local property for Noetherian schemes in characteristic zero, Bhatt observed that it imposes strong conditions on the global geometry of proper schemes in positive characteristic. We show that if a proper scheme over a field of positive characteristic is a splinter, then its Nori fundamental group is trivial and its Kodaira dimension is negative. In another direction, Bhatt also showed that any splinter in positive characteristic is a derived splinter. We ask whether the splinter property is a derived-invariant for smooth projective varieties in positive characteristic and give a positive answer for varieties with big anticanonical divisor. For that purpose, we introduce the notion of O-equivalence and show that the derived splinter property for pseudo-rational excellent schemes of finite type and separated over a fixed Noetherian base is preserved under O-equivalence. Finally, we show that global F-regularity is a derived-invariant for smooth projective varieties in positive characteristic.Comment: 33 page

Intensive versus Extensive Dairy Production Systems: Dairy States in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. and Key Pasture Countries the E.U.: Determining the Competitive Edge

In recent years, significant structural and production system changes have been noted in the U.S. and European Union, as well as increased interest in pasture-based dairy systems. Technical efficiency, returns to scale, and farm characteristics are compared by size and production system in traditional U.S. dairy states and E.U. countries.U.S., EU Countries, Dairy Systems, Technical Efficiency, Returns To Scale, Size, Technology, Land Prices, Production Economics, Q12,

Economic Efficiency of U.S. Organic Versus Conventional Dairy Farms: Evidence from 2005 and 2010

We estimate an input distance function for U.S. dairy farming to examine the competitiveness of organic and non-organic dairy production by system and size. Across organic/non-organic systems and size classes, size is the major determinant of competitiveness based on various measures of productivity and returns to scale.Organic, Non-organic, Input Distance Function, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics,

Long-range elastic guidance mechanisms for electrostatic comb-drive actuators

The range of motion and output force of the often used electrostatic comb-drive with folded flexure straight guidance, as shown in Figure 1, is limited by sideways instability due to poor sideways stiffness of the folded flexure at relatively large deflections [1]

Towards a Semantic Perceptual Image Metric

We present a full reference, perceptual image metric based on VGG-16, an artificial neural network trained on object classification. We fit the metric to a new database based on 140k unique images annotated with ground truth by human raters who received minimal instruction. The resulting metric shows competitive performance on TID 2013, a database widely used to assess image quality assessments methods. More interestingly, it shows strong responses to objects potentially carrying semantic relevance such as faces and text, which we demonstrate using a visualization technique and ablation experiments. In effect, the metric appears to model a higher influence of semantic context on judgments, which we observe particularly in untrained raters. As the vast majority of users of image processing systems are unfamiliar with Image Quality Assessment (IQA) tasks, these findings may have significant impact on real-world applications of perceptual metrics