The economic implications of a multiple species approach to bioeconomic modelling : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Economics at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Human activity frequently leads to the endangerment or extinction of other species. While ecologists study the biological facets of species loss, economics, as the science of understanding people's behaviour, has been charged with investigating the incentives underlying the actions people take that lead to this loss. One approach economists have taken to gain this understanding is to develop models of endangered species that include both economic and biological components, known as bioeconomic models. While ecologists frequently note the importance of modelling entire ecosystems rather than single species, most bioeconomic models in the current literature focus only on a single species. This thesis addresses the economic significance of this assumption through the development of a series of multiple species models and demonstrates, using African Wildlife as an example, the importance of interrelationships and economic values to the survival of endangered species. From these models one can infer the conditions under which a single species model may be appropriate, at least in general terms. If species are independent, and either the opportunity cost of capital or the value of habitat is very low relative to the value of the species in question, then a single species model may yield results similar to that of a multiple species model. In contrast, if species are independent and these additional conditions are not met, a single species model may significantly underestimate both optimal stock levels and land allocation. However, species do not live independently; they interact with species with which they share habitat and, when species interact, the potential for misapplication of the single species framework is even greater. When species compete, the single species framework consistently produces higher stock levels than the multiple species framework, the greater the level of competition the greater the difference. In a predator-prey relationship, the relative values of predator and prey are critical to determining the outcome of the multiple species model. It is demonstrated that the inclusion of at least all economically valuable species in an ecosystem is important when constructing bioeconomic models. Using single species models where multiple species are economically significant could lead to misleading results and ultimately to incorrect policy decisions

How does pre-reduction MRI affect surgeon's behaviour when reducing Distraction-Flexion injuries of the cervical spine?

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references

A Methodology for Training International Space Station Crews to Respond to On-Orbit Emergencies

Most spaceflight crewmembers agree that emergency training is among the most important training they receive. If an emergency event occurs on-orbit crewmembers want to be able to rely on a thorough and proficient knowledge of emergency operations and procedures. The inherent complexity of ISS and the international nature of the onboard operations have resulted in emergency procedures that are complex by any measure; as a result, a very robust apparatus has been developed to give crewmembers initial training on emergency procedures and ensure proficiency up to (and even after) launch. One of the most important aspects of complex onboard operations in general, and emergency operations specifically, is learning how to coordinate roles and responsibilities with fellow crewmembers. A primary goal of NASA s emergency training program is to allow the crewmembers who will actually be together on-orbit to practice executing the emergency responses together before they fly. As with any operation that includes the use of software and hardware, the fidelity of the simulation environment is a critical element to successful training. The NASA training division has spent considerable time and effort to develop a simulator that addresses the most important aspects of emergency response, working within very difficult space and budgetary constraints

Moving on from CODES - The keystones for a whole systems approach to low carbon schools

Moves towards reducing the carbon footprint of new buildings require a new way of thinking. Design research suggests that the development of more innovative and sustainable solutions increasingly highlight the benefits arising from the integration and participation of multiple actors with a wide range of technical and contextual knowledge and expertise. The need to address complex problems more systematically has escalated the importance of cross-disciplinary collaborations and partnerships between stakeholders (Coley and Lemon, 2009). It is also becoming more widely accepted that the inter-connected dynamics of a system’s component parts is what determines its complexity suggesting that a holistic approach to problem solving cannot always rely on conventional methods. A mechanical problem is typically broken down into its parts before being able to systematically solve the problem piece by piece. Whilst this is powerful for some problems, and often requires extensive knowledge that aligns with the complicatedness of the task, complex issues, invariably involving people and their relationship with other actors (not necessarily human), do not lend themselves to such a reductionist approach. The design and subsequent operation of a school is one such complex phenomenon that requires a holistic approach which acknowledges the process of continual change that emerges from these interrelationships and patterns (Anarow, Greener et.al., 2003); it also requires collaboration, partnership and trust. This chapter will return to the Keystones on School Community Collaboration that emerged from the ENSI-CoDeS project (Collaboration of schools and communities for Sustainable Development, 2011-2014) and are summarised and reflected upon, with examples, in Espinet and Zachariou (2014). It will focus on the continuation of city based collaborations in the UK (Leicester)that were designed to ensure that the legacy of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) Programme was one of enhanced sustainability facilitated through collaboration and partnership. The next section will summarise the BSF programme and will introduce the projects that will be considered alongside the CoDeS Keystones. The Keystones will then be introduced alongside examples derived from the projects and a final concluding section will explore what these projects and the Keystone concepts might tell us about the generic capabilities that have been introduced above and might underpin such collaboration in very different contexts

SQUARING THE CIRCLE: An analysis of programmes in Dublin schools to prevent early school leaving. With recommendations for effective best practice

THE DUBLIN EMPLOYMENT PACT represents a very broad range of interests across the Dublin Region. Its aim is to promote practical solutions and recommendations regarding unemployment (particularly long-term unemployment), future sustainable employment policy and the economic growth and development of the Dublin Region. The Pact recognises the key role of educational disadvantage in the continuing problems of long-term unemployment, social exclusion and skills deficits in the labour force in Dublin. The Focus Group on Youth Employment and Education established by the Pact decided that there was a critical need for an in-depth examination of the wide range of interventions and pilot projects implemented in Dublin to tackle early school-leaving. Such a study needed to establish the nature, aims and achievements of these diverse interventions and establish clear and coherent parameters for future policy development in this area. Disadvantaged communities in Dublin in particular have been affected by very high rates of early school-leaving, which is known to be a key adverse factor in the life chances of young people. Tackling this issue is now a major priority of government policy, which includes ambitious national targets for increased retention rates at school. A very large range of quality interventions have been developed and tried, both by the Department of Education and Science and also by youth organisations, schools, other statutory and voluntary agencies and Partnership companies at the local level. Many of these, however, have remained as local pilots, sometimes even in competition for funding. The very diversity, range and uneven spread of these interventions has possibly prevented a coherent overview of their individual and combined effect. The Pact therefore commissioned Dr Ted Fleming and Dr Mark Murphy of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to examine the nature and structure of the diverse preventative education projects in Dublin and to produce recommendations towards establishing models of best practice. Based on a detailed examination of existing reports and evaluations, the study establishes that interventions tend to be based on one or more of a range of specific assumptions, viz. that the cause of early school leaving lies primarily with either the individual, the parents, the local community, the school or with society. The underlying assumption of a given intervention necessarily influences the intervention. Where the individual child is the focus, programmes will be aimed at enhancing social skills and developing self-esteem. Where the school is the focus, programmes will tend to concentrate on resources, training and syllabus, and where the family is the focus, programmes will concentrate on homework facilities, breakfast provision and parent support. The researchers introduce the concept of the overall âcapital contextâ of early school-leaving, involving personal, social, cultural and economic factors. Each type of capital plays a role in deciding whether or not a child stays on at school. They stress that all of these capital elements must be included in any interventionist programme and to omit any one of them fragments and reduces the effectiveness of the response. The researchers further suggest that, given the strong correlation between socio-economic background and early school leaving, policy must be directed as much towards inequalities in society as towards schools, districts, parents and pupils. In tackling educational disadvantage it is essential that a level playing field be established with access by all children to the key forms of capital. In proposing a model of best practice applicable to all programmes of intervention, they categorise the main components of an integrated response. This must include both adequate human and material resources as well as close attention to how projects are organised internally and externally â i.e. including the involvement of parents, students and the community. The study concludes with a range of recommendations regarding this model of best practic

SQUARING THE CIRCLE: An analysis of programmes in Dublin schools to prevent early school leaving. With recommendations for effective best practice

THE DUBLIN EMPLOYMENT PACT represents a very broad range of interests across the Dublin Region. Its aim is to promote practical solutions and recommendations regarding unemployment (particularly long-term unemployment), future sustainable employment policy and the economic growth and development of the Dublin Region. The Pact recognises the key role of educational disadvantage in the continuing problems of long-term unemployment, social exclusion and skills deficits in the labour force in Dublin. The Focus Group on Youth Employment and Education established by the Pact decided that there was a critical need for an in-depth examination of the wide range of interventions and pilot projects implemented in Dublin to tackle early school-leaving. Such a study needed to establish the nature, aims and achievements of these diverse interventions and establish clear and coherent parameters for future policy development in this area. Disadvantaged communities in Dublin in particular have been affected by very high rates of early school-leaving, which is known to be a key adverse factor in the life chances of young people. Tackling this issue is now a major priority of government policy, which includes ambitious national targets for increased retention rates at school. A very large range of quality interventions have been developed and tried, both by the Department of Education and Science and also by youth organisations, schools, other statutory and voluntary agencies and Partnership companies at the local level. Many of these, however, have remained as local pilots, sometimes even in competition for funding. The very diversity, range and uneven spread of these interventions has possibly prevented a coherent overview of their individual and combined effect. The Pact therefore commissioned Dr Ted Fleming and Dr Mark Murphy of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to examine the nature and structure of the diverse preventative education projects in Dublin and to produce recommendations towards establishing models of best practice. Based on a detailed examination of existing reports and evaluations, the study establishes that interventions tend to be based on one or more of a range of specific assumptions, viz. that the cause of early school leaving lies primarily with either the individual, the parents, the local community, the school or with society. The underlying assumption of a given intervention necessarily influences the intervention. Where the individual child is the focus, programmes will be aimed at enhancing social skills and developing self-esteem. Where the school is the focus, programmes will tend to concentrate on resources, training and syllabus, and where the family is the focus, programmes will concentrate on homework facilities, breakfast provision and parent support. The researchers introduce the concept of the overall âcapital contextâ of early school-leaving, involving personal, social, cultural and economic factors. Each type of capital plays a role in deciding whether or not a child stays on at school. They stress that all of these capital elements must be included in any interventionist programme and to omit any one of them fragments and reduces the effectiveness of the response. The researchers further suggest that, given the strong correlation between socio-economic background and early school leaving, policy must be directed as much towards inequalities in society as towards schools, districts, parents and pupils. In tackling educational disadvantage it is essential that a level playing field be established with access by all children to the key forms of capital. In proposing a model of best practice applicable to all programmes of intervention, they categorise the main components of an integrated response. This must include both adequate human and material resources as well as close attention to how projects are organised internally and externally â i.e. including the involvement of parents, students and the community. The study concludes with a range of recommendations regarding this model of best practic

Stochastic MPC for additive and multiplicative uncertainty using sample approximations

© 2019 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved. We introduce an approach for model predictive control (MPC) of systems with additive and multiplicative stochastic uncertainty subject to chance constraints. Predicted states are bounded within a tube and the chance constraint is considered in a “one step ahead” manner, with robust constraints applied over the remainder of the horizon. The online optimization is formulated as a chance-constrained program that is solved approximately using sampling. We prove that if the optimization is initially feasible, it remains feasible and the closed-loop system is stable. Applying the chance-constraint only one step ahead allows us to state a confidence bound for satisfaction of the chance constraint in closed-loop. Finally, we demonstrate by example that the resulting controller is only mildly more conservative than scenario MPC approaches that have no feasibility guarantee

Space Station Freedom coupling tasks: An evaluation of their space operational compatibility

The development of the Space Station Freedom tasks that are compatible with both telerobotic as well as extravehicular activity is a necessary redundancy in order to insure successful day to day operation. One task to be routinely performed aboard Freedom will be the changeout of various quick disconnect fluid connectors. In an attempt to resolve these potentially contradictory issues of compatibility, mock-ups of couplings suitable to both extravehicular as well as telerobotic activity were designed and built. An evaluation performed at the Remote Operator Interaction Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center is discussed, which assessed the prototype couplings as well as three standard coupling designs. Data collected during manual and telerobotic manipulation of the couplings indicated that the custom coupling was in fact shown to be faster to operate and generally preferred over the standard coupling designs

A Third Pandemic is on the Horizon

The emergence of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus and the resultant COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to a standstill. In the United States, the morbidity and mortality associated with COVID-19 infection has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, highlighting an underlying “second pandemic” perpetuated by the deeply-rooted health care inequities and social determinants of health. In this manuscript, we warn about a “Third Pandemic” on the horizon which could be driven by federal policies that fail to ensure equitable access to COVID-specific therapeutics for BIPOC communities, and the potential inequitable implementation of such policies that could further perpetuate disparities in health outcomes