MARKET SHARE, CAPACITY UTILIZATION, RESOURCE CONSERVATION, AND TRADABLE QUOTAS

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) on catch, market share, and capacity utilization of firms in the Mid Atlantic Surf Clam and Ocean Quahog (SCOQ) Fishery. Via the production function framework, catch and market share regression models are utilized in examining the effects of operator size, vessel age, and alternative product catch variables on industrial structure and how such effects changed after ITQs were introduced. Results indicate that in both fisheries, the ITQ system enhanced the value of each vessel by allowing vessel owners to apply greater effort to fewer boats, thus reducing excess capacity in the fishery. Results also indicate an overall resource conservation effect of ITQ introduction in the surf clam fishery. These results suggest that in the presence of ITQs, overall efficiency was enhanced in the SCOQ fishery.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

E-teaching professional development: Designing a sustainable program for multilocation teacher

This poster informs the community of a project being undertaken at The University of Wollongong (UOW) to develop a program to support teachers involved in multi-location teaching. UOW has incorporated blended and distributed teaching throughout many Courses. These models rely heavily on educational technologies for delivery, as well as part time and sessional staff, for delivery. This project aims to address the needs of these staff. By examining barriers to utilisation, it will develop a professional development program that utilises flexible delivery strategies for delivery.published_or_final_versio

Combining Concept- with Content-based Multimedia Retrieval

The arrival of the XML standard opened new doors for structured document search. Common approach in XML retrieval is to directly exploit the documents structure. However this is likely to fail for two reasons. First of all, it neglects the rich multimedia character of documents on the Internet, where a wide variety of multimedia objects can be found such as text, images and streaming video. Secondly, using the document structure as the basis for searching the content of a document can easily lead to semantical misinterpretation of the document's content. This chapter discusses an approach for searching rich multimedia document collections, that tackles these two problems using a combination of conceptual search and content-based retrieval

Indexing real-world data using semi-structured documents

We address the problem of deriving meaningful semantic index information for a multi-media database using a semi-structured docu-ment model. We show how our framework, called {em feature grammars, can be used to (1)~exploit third-party interpretation modules for real-world unstructured components, and (2)~use context-free grammars to convert such poorly or unstructured input to semi-structured output. The basic idea is to enrich context-free grammars with special symbols called detectors, which provide for the necessary structure {em just-in-time to satisfy a parser look-ahead. A prototype implementation has been constructed in the Acoi project to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for indexing both images and audio documents

A Biohistorical Approach to Spanish Conquest and Colonization

European introduction into the Western Hemisphere brought unprecedented physical and cultural changes to Native Americans. The goal of this thesis is to explore why North and South American Native groups experienced a variety of levels of contact experience with the Spanish. This thesis employs a historical and bioarchaeological interdisciplinary approach to identify a variable that could predict the degree of biological impact that Native Americans experienced during Spanish conquest and colonization. To analyze Native-Spanish interactions I present an in-depth look into three bioarchaeological case studies, including the Guale of the Georgia Bight, the Tipu Maya of Belize, and the Moche of Mórrope, Peru. I found that despite these three sites all interacting with the Spanish, the consequences of Spanish contact were different in each location. The Tipu Maya displayed little negative biological impact due to their location in the Spanish borderlands. The Guale and Moche both experienced the negative biological impacts of aggregation. The Moche specifically experienced the establishment of reducciónes and the Guale had the additional physical burden of the repartimiento labor system. Additional comparisons with other sites that had commonalities with the Guale, Tipu Maya, and Moche revealed little overlap in contact experience. Given the current state of contact research, I found that there are limited variables that could predict the consequences of Native-Spanish contact. The variation in the impacts of European contact is dependent upon the individual context and circumstances of each site or Native group. This research is important because if we can understand the outcome of past cross-cultural interactions on individual and population health, then we can understand modern interactions and the consequences it could be having on our own health.No embargoAcademic Major: Anthropological Science

Acoi: A System for Indexing Multimedia Objects

The explosion of the number of Web pages also leads to countless accessible multimedia objects. Their abundance makes the Internet an interesting application for multimedia retrieval systems. Many search engines are going about to supply some retrieval functionality for independent retrieval of these objects. However, most of these multimedia search engines aim at a fixed set of multimedia index attributes. The Acoi system provides an extensible framework for retrieving multimedia objects of any type on basis of their content, based on both low-level features and high-level concepts, and context

Querying XML Documents Made Easy: Nearest Concept Queries

Due to the ubiquity and popularity of XML, users often are in the following situation: they want to query XML documents which contain potentially interesting information but they are unaware of the mark-up structure that is used. For example, it is easy to guess the contents of an XML bibliography file whereas the mark-up depends on the methodological, cultural and personal background of the author(s). Nonetheless, it is this hierarchical structure that forms the basis of XML query languages. In this paper we exploit the tree structure of XML documents to equip users with a powerful tool, the meet operator, that lets them query databases with whose content they are familiar, but without requiring knowledge of tags and hierarchies. Our approach is based on computing the lowest common ancestor of nodes in the XML syntax tree: eg, given two strings, we are looking for nodes whose offspring contains these two strings. The novelty of this approach is that the result type is unknown at query formulation time and dependent on the database instance. If the two strings are an author's name and a year, mainly publications of the author in this year are returned. If the two strings are numbers the result mostly consists of publications that have the numbers as year or page numbers. Because the result type of a query is not specified by the user we refer to the lowest common ancestor as nearest concept We also present a running example taken from the bibliography domain, and demonstrate that the operator can be implemented efficiently