Structural adjustment and forest resources - the impact of World Bank operations

Over two decades, the World Bank has undertaken many structural adjustment operations withgovernments of developing countries. During negotiations for structural adjustment loans (SALs), partner governments agree to specific policy reforms, whose implementation becomes a condition for disbursement of SAL funds. Conditionality varies with local circumstances, but generally supports privatization of state enterprises, liberalization of the domestic economy, and openness in international trade. Structural adjustment operations have often been controversial because they are explicitly political. Opposition, or support reflects ideological perspectives, perceptions of who gains, and who loses economically from a SAL, or beliefs about its environmental, and social impacts. Environmental groups express particular concern about SALs'impacts on the rate of deforestation. Debate about adjustment, and deforestation has been fueled largely by anecdotes, and a few country cases bases on limited time-series data. The authors broaden the analysis by combining a complete record of Bank SAL operations, with a 38-year socioeconomic database for 112 developing countries. They find that adjustment has greatly affected imports, exports, consumption, and production in many forest products sectors (such as fuel-wood, sawn-wood, panels, pulp, and paper). Some activities have increased, and some declined, but overall, the effects have balanced each other. The net impact on domestic round-wood production, the authors'proxy for forest exploitation, has been almost exactly zero. Their results suggest that growth in round-wood production is explained well by population growth, urbanization, and world demand for forest products. Their findings suggest that adjustment has not promoted domestic deforestation, but it has increased net imports of wood products, implying some displacement of pressure onto other countries'forest resources. They also find that devaluations have significantly increased the exploitation of forest resources.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Silviculture,Consumption,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Silviculture,Forestry,Consumption

Sculpting the band gap: a computational approach

Materials with optimized band gap are needed in many specialized applications. In this work, we demonstrate that Hellmann-Feynman forces associated with the gap states can be used to find atomic coordinates with a desired electronic density of states. Using tight-binding models, we show that this approach can be used to arrive at electronically designed models of amorphous silicon and carbon. We provide a simple recipe to include a priori electronic information in the formation of computer models of materials, and prove that this information may have profound structural consequences. An additional example of a graphene nanoribbon is provided to demonstrate the applicability of this approach to engineer 2-dimensional materials. The models are validated with plane-wave density functional calculations.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review Letters on June 12, 201

Towards a Theory of Practice: Critical Transdisciplinary Multiliteracies

About the book: Education institutions and organizations throughout the world are currently being held accountable for achieving and maintaining historically unmatched standards of academic quality and performance. Accreditation bodies; policy makers; boards of trustees; and teacher, parent, and student groups all place educational institutions and organizations under unprecedented accountability pressures. The aim of this volume is to explore and better understand how these pressures are impacting a broad range of social and cultural issues and, subsequently, how these issues impact student motivation and learnin

Analysis of curtailment at The Geysers geothermal Field, California

Geothermal energy has traditionally been viewed as a baseload energy source, but the rapid growth of intermittent renewable energy has led to a need for more flexibility in power generation to avoid mandatory curtailment imposed by grid operators. This study of curtailment at The Geysers provides insights into the magnitude, duration, frequency, temporal and spatial distribution, and potential causes of curtailment events between 2013 and 2018. Annual levels of curtailment range during this period from 9 to 47 GW h, representing 0.15 to 0.81 % of the net generation. Most curtailments occurred at the power plants connected to a lower capacity transmission line and may result from transmission constriction. There is a clear link between negative pricing and economic curtailment, especially when solar production is higher. Economic curtailment events tend to be only a few hours and vary in magnitude up to almost 300 MW, whereas transmission-related curtailment events can be up to several weeks in duration. It is likely that curtailment of geothermal power will be an increasing concern, and could be mitigated by flexible generation strategies and increases in energy storage. It is critical to know the nature of curtailment events so that flexible generation options can be assessed properly

A Novel Beamformed Control Channel Design for LTE with Full Dimension-MIMO

The Full Dimension-MIMO (FD-MIMO) technology is capable of achieving huge improvements in network throughput with simultaneous connectivity of a large number of mobile wireless devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In FD-MIMO, with a large number of antennae at the base station and the ability to perform beamforming, the capacity of the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) has increased a lot. However, the current specifications of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not allow the base station to perform beamforming techniques for the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), and hence, PDCCH has neither the capacity nor the coverage of PDSCH. Therefore, PDCCH capacity will still limit the performance of a network as it dictates the number of users that can be scheduled at a given time instant. In Release 11, 3GPP introduced enhanced PDCCH (EPDCCH) to increase the PDCCH capacity at the cost of sacrificing the PDSCH resources. The problem of enhancing the PDCCH capacity within the available control channel resources has not been addressed yet in the literature. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel beamformed PDCCH (BF-PDCCH) design which is aligned to the 3GPP specifications and requires simple software changes at the base station. We rely on the sounding reference signals transmitted in the uplink to decide the best beam for a user and ingeniously schedule the users in PDCCH. We perform system level simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed design and show that the proposed BF-PDCCH achieves larger network throughput when compared with the current state of art algorithms, PDCCH and EPDCCH schemes

Evaluation of gabapentin in attenuating pressor response to direct laryngoscopy and tracheal intubation

Background: To evaluate effect of gabapentin in attenuation of haemodynamic responses to direct laryngoscopy and tracheal intubation.Methods: Hundred patients undergoing elective surgery were randomly allocated to two groups of 50 patients each. Patients in group A received gabapentin 800 mg and patients in group B received placebo capsules the night before and on the morning of surgery. Anaesthesia was induced with propofol and vecuronium. Systolic, diastolic, mean arterial blood pressures (SAP, DAP, MAP) and heart rate (HR) were recorded before and after the induction of anesthesia and 0, 1, 3, 5 and 10 min after tracheal intubation.Results: SAP was significantly lower in the gabapentin as compared to the control group 0, 1, 3, 5 and 10 min after intubation [121 vs 135 (P < 0.001), 117 vs 132 (P < 0.001), 112 vs 124 (P < 0.001), 110 vs 118 (P < 0.05) and 107 vs 112 (P < 0.05) respectively]. DAP also was lower in the gabapentin group 0, 1, 3, and 5 min after intubation [77 vs 87 (P < 0.001), 74 vs 84 (P < 0.001), 70 vs 78 (P < 0.001) and 68 vs 74 (P < 0.05)]. MAP also was lower in the gabapentin group 0, 1, 3, and 5 min after intubation [92 vs 103 (P < 0.001), 88 vs 100 (P < 0.001), 84 vs 93 (P < 0.001) and 82 vs 88 (P < 0.05)]. HR also was lower in the gabapentin group 0, 1 and 3 min after intubation [90 vs 98 (P < 0.05), 88 vs 95 (P < 0.001) and 84 vs 90 (P < 0.05)].Conclusion: Gabapentin, under the present study design attenuates the pressor response associated with laryngoscopy and tracheal intubation but tachycardiac response is not completely eliminated