Data, Metrics and Monitoring in CGIAR - a strategic study

This document contains the final report of the Panel together with the ISPC commentary. The Panel Report presents an analysis of the current activities within CGIAR concerning data, metrics and indicators, and offers a series of recommendations to address the key issues and challenges identified

Impact of technological events and trends on audit evidence in the year 2000: Phase I

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/dl_proceedings/1166/thumbnail.jp

Identifying Place Histories from Activity Traces with an Eye to Parameter Impact.

Events that happened in the past are important for understanding the ongoing processes, predicting future developments, and making informed decisions. Important and/or interesting events tend to attract many people. Some people leave traces of their attendance in the form of computer-processable data, such as records in the databases of mobile phone operators or photos on photo sharing web sites. We developed a suite of visual analytics methods for reconstructing past events from these activity traces. Our tools combine geocomputations, interactive geovisualizations, and statistical methods to enable integrated analysis of the spatial, temporal, and thematic components of the data, including numeric attributes and texts.We also support interactive investigation of the sensitivity of the analysis results to the parameters used in the computations. For this purpose, statistical summaries of computation results obtained with different combinations of parameter values are visualized in a way facilitating comparisons. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on two large real data sets, mobile phone calls in Milano during 9 days and flickr photos made on British Isles during 5 years

Analysis of a diffusive effective mass model for nanowires

We propose in this paper to derive and analyze a self-consistent model describing the diffusive transport in a nanowire. From a physical point of view, it describes the electron transport in an ultra-scaled confined structure, taking in account the interactions of charged particles with phonons. The transport direction is assumed to be large compared to the wire section and is described by a drift-diffusion equation including effective quantities computed from a Bloch problem in the crystal lattice. The electrostatic potential solves a Poisson equation where the particle density couples on each energy band a two dimensional confinement density with the monodimensional transport density given by the Boltzmann statistics. On the one hand, we study the derivation of this Nanowire Drift-Diffusion Poisson model from a kinetic level description. On the other hand, we present an existence result for this model in a bounded domain

Linking transitions to sustainability: A study of the societal effects of transition management

Sustainability transitions as processes of fundamental change in societal systems are open-ended, nonlinear and uncertain. Respective research and governance approaches, e.g., transition management, propose a reflexive way of governing, aiming for a number of societal effects to help facilitating a transition. Effects include empowerment, social learning and social capital development. Jointly mentioned effects shall allow for reflexivity and innovation in developing socially robust and contextualized solutions to sustainability challenges that work in practice. But, understanding the mentioned societal effects and their interplay in more depth is necessary to design and assess transition management processes. While such understanding and related assessment framework is under development in the transition management literature, transdisciplinary sustainability research can provide a rich body of tools and experiences. Building on a review of the literature, this article develops an evaluation framework focusing on social learning, empowerment and social capital as important and hitherto under-conceptualised aspects of the sustainability transition literature. This framework is used to empirically investigate the effects of two specific transition management processes at the local scale. In doing so, the article provides a conceptual and empirical understanding of how social learning, empowerment and social capital contribute to a transition towards sustainability. The three effects are shown to be interrelated, mutually supportive and bridging different scale levels from individuals to groups, niches and beyond. Results highlight possibilities to facilitate and assess societal effects, addressing sustainability as their inherent quality

Impact of Bi-directional Loading on the Seismic Performance of C-shaped Piers of Core Walls

Reinforced concrete structural walls are commonly used as the primary lateral load resisting system in modern buildings constructed in high seismic regions. Most walls in high-rise buildings are C-shaped to accommodate elevators or other architectural features. C-shaped walls have complex loading and response including: (1) symmetric response in the direction of the web, (2) asymmetric response in the direction of the flange and (3) high compression and shear demands when used as a pier in a coupled-wall configuration. A research study was conducted on C-shaped walls tested under (1) uni-directional and (2) bi-directional loading of an isolated walls and (3) bi-directional loading of a c-shaped pier in a coupled wall system. Each of the walls failed in flexure with strength loss resulting from low-cycle fatigue of the boundary element longitudinal reinforcement with buckling followed by fracture. The damage progression was as follows: (1) cracking at the wall-foundation interface, (2) concrete spalling in the web, (3) buckling and fracture of web reinforcement, (4) spalling in the flanges, (5) buckling and fracture of the bars in the boundary elements. Concrete spalling and steel bar damage occurred at lower strong-axis drift levels for the bi-directionally loaded, resulting in lower drift capacities for these loading protocols. However, for the strong-axis direction, bi-directional loading does not reduce flexural or shear effective stiffness values suggesting that current values are appropriate for design and evaluation of buildings with c-shaped walls

New European Union fisheries regulations could benefit conservation of marine animals

Peer Reviewe

The Role of Integrated Reporting in Enhancing Corporate Transparency and Communication

The primary purpose of the research is to analyze and evaluate the prospects for the success of Integrated Reporting in terms of its potential to increase corporate transparency and enhance corporate communication. The relevance of the decision of this scientific problem is that the European Union published a proposal for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in April 2021 that highlights the importance of intangible assets and value creatio

Metabolic characterization of overweight and obese adults

Traditional evaluations of metabolic health may overlook underlying dysfunction in individuals who show no signs of insulin resistance or dyslipidemia. The purpose of this study was to characterize metabolic health in overweight and obese adults using traditional and non-traditional metabolic variables. A secondary purpose was to evaluate differences between overweight/obese and male/female cohorts, respectively

A Perfect Metamaterial Absorber

We present the design for an absorbing metamaterial element with near unity absorbance. Our structure consists of two metamaterial resonators that couple separately to electric and magnetic fields so as to absorb all incident radiation within a single unit cell layer. We fabricate, characterize, and analyze a metamaterial absorber with a slightly lower predicted absorbance of 96%. This achieves a simulated full width at half maximum (FWHM) absorbance of 4% thus making this material ideal for imaging purposes. Unlike conventional absorbers, our metamaterial consists solely of metallic elements. The underlying substrate can therefore be chosen independently of the substrate's absorptive qualities and optimized for other parameters of interest. We detail the design and simulation process that led to our metamaterial, and our experiments demonstrate a peak absorbance greater than 88% at 11.5 GHz