7,184 research outputs found
Standards and Best Practices - Two NASA Examples
Formal international standards as well as promotion of community or recommended practices have their place in ensuring "FAIRness" of data. Data management in NASA's Earth Observation System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) has benefited from both of these avenues to a significant extent. The purpose of this paper is to present one example of each of these, which promote (re)usability. The first is an ISO standard for specifying preservation content from Earth observation missions. The work on this started in 2011, informally within the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) in the US, while the European Space Agency (ESA) was leading an effort on Long-Term Data Preservation (LTDP). Resulting from the ESIP discussions was NASA's Preservation Content Specification, which was applied in 2012 as a requirement for NASA's new missions. ESA's Preserved Data Set Content (PDSC) document was codified into a document adopted by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS). It was recognized that it would be useful to combine PCS and PDSC into an ISO standard to ensure consistency in data preservation on a broader international scale. This standard, numbered ISO 19165-2 has been under development since mid-2017. The second is an example of developing recommendations for "best practices" within more limited (still fairly broad) communities. A Data Product Developers' Guide (DPDG) is currently being developed by one of NASA's Earth Science Data System Working Groups (ESDSWGs). It is for use by developers of products to be derived from Earth observation data to improve product (re)usability. One of the challenges in developing the guide is the fact that there are already many applicable standards and guides. The relevant information needs to be selected and expressed in a succinct manner, with appropriate pointers to references. The DPDG aims to compile the most applicable parts of earlier guides into a single document outlining the typical development process for Earth Science data products. Standards and best practices formally endorsed by the Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Standards Office (ESO), outputs from ESDSWGs (e.g., Dataset Interoperability Working Group, and Data Quality Working Group), and recommendations from Distributed Active Archive Centers and data producers are emphasized
Facing west, facing north: Canada and Australia in East Asia
This report, published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), calls for Canada and Australia to deepen their regional security cooperation in East Asia.
The risk of regional instability is growing, due to Chinaâs re-emergence, continued speculation about US strategic engagement in Asia and increased competition over disputed maritime boundaries. These developments provide opportunities for collaboration between countries like Canada and Australia. Non-traditional security threats, including natural disasters, climate change, food security and cyber security, point to a range of areas where the two countries can work more closely together.
The report contains several policy recommendations for Canada and Australia to:
strengthen regional security
bolster regional governance mechanisms
enhance bilateral defence cooperation
boost defence industry and economic cooperation
CO-OPERATIVE ORGANIZATION IN RURAL CANADA AND THE AGRICULTURAL CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT IN CHINA: A COMPARISON
Agribusiness,
An interacting replica approach applied to the traveling salesman problem
We present a physics inspired heuristic method for solving combinatorial
optimization problems. Our approach is specifically motivated by the desire to
avoid trapping in metastable local minima- a common occurrence in hard problems
with multiple extrema. Our method involves (i) coupling otherwise independent
simulations of a system ("replicas") via geometrical distances as well as (ii)
probabilistic inference applied to the solutions found by individual replicas.
The {\it ensemble} of replicas evolves as to maximize the inter-replica
correlation while simultaneously minimize the local intra-replica cost function
(e.g., the total path length in the Traveling Salesman Problem within each
replica). We demonstrate how our method improves the performance of rudimentary
local optimization schemes long applied to the NP hard Traveling Salesman
Problem. In particular, we apply our method to the well-known "-opt"
algorithm and examine two particular cases- and . With the aid of
geometrical coupling alone, we are able to determine for the optimum tour
length on systems up to cities (an order of magnitude larger than the
largest systems typically solved by the bare opt). The probabilistic
replica-based inference approach improves even further and determines
the optimal solution of a problem with cities and find tours whose total
length is close to that of the optimal solutions for other systems with a
larger number of cities.Comment: To appear in SAI 2016 conference proceedings 12 pages,17 figure
Three Discourses on Practice: A Postmodern Re-appraisal
The current debate about the knowledge claims of modernity has profound implications for theories and practices of social welfare, though postmodern critiques of its foundational beliefs should be approached cautiously. This paper suggests that a postmodern critique of three historically significant discourses -American casework, British social administration and Marxist social work - illustrates what might be learned from a deconstruction of their modernist assumptions as a stage in a reconstruction of social welfare ideas appropriate to postmodern conditions
The Social Networks of Rural Business Owners in East Central Alberta
Community/Rural/Urban Development,
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