Extended Benefit-Cost Analysis of Management Alternatives: Pagbilao Mangrove Forest

Mangroves are important fish hatcheries. It prevents coastal erosion and provides timber resources. However, it limits land access to coastal and fishpond areas. This article presents a cost-benefit analysis on mangrove preservation.natural resources and environment, environmental issues

Getting Ready for New Governance Freedoms: A Survey of Further Education College Governance 2012

Further education corporations were formed by the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 and came into being as exempt charities on 1 April 1993. From 1 April 2012 the enactment of the Education Act 2011 provided the governing bodies of further education corporations with a range of structural and procedural choices beyond the prescribed rules and regulations that have been in force for the period 1993-2012. The purpose of this study was to gain an appreciation of the views of clerks to the corporation in anticipation of these new freedoms and to gauge very early responses to them. It aimed to identify potential areas where additional support in terms of training, development and consultancy may be required, for example to make sense of the new freedoms and in understanding the possible implications of any changes made. To this end an e-questionnaire was sent for completion by clerks to the corporation of 332 colleges in England and Wales. The survey was undertaken shortly before the changes came into force and at a time when some important governance material (such as the Financial Memorandum and Audit Code of Practice) had yet to be revised for the new governance operating context. 119 responses were received. This report presents a descriptive overview of those responses. It does not seek to make interpretive judgements, although inferences will be drawn where the data strongly supports it. There are contradictions and inconsistencies in some of the responses which may reflect the fact that only 8 Colleges consider themselves (as perceived by their clerk) ‘well prepared’ for the new governance freedoms. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that assistance in preparation for governance in the context of the new freedoms may be required. Responses indicate most governing bodies will not rush into making changes, although 44 colleges stated that they would wish to take advantage of the new freedoms to make changes to the Instrument and Articles of Government in the next 12 months

Volatility Spillovers from the Chinese Stock Market to Economic Neighbours

This paper examines whether there is evidence of spillovers of volatility from the Chinese stock market to its neighbours and trading partners, including Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and USA. China’s increasing integration into the global market may have important consequences for investors in related markets. In order to capture these potential effects, we explore these issues using an Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) return equation. A univariate GARCH model is then adopted to test for the persistence of volatility in stock market returns, as represented by stock market indices. Finally, univariate GARCH, multivariate VARMA-GARCH, and multivariate VARMA-AGARCH models are used to test for constant conditional correlations and volatility spillover effects across these markets. Each model is used to calculate the conditional volatility between both the Shenzhen and Shanghai Chinese markets and several other markets around the Pacific Basin Area, including Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, during four distinct periods, beginning 27 August 1991 and ending 17 November 2010. The empirical results show some evidence of volatility spillovers across these markets in the pre-GFC periods, but there is little evidence of spillover effects from China to related markets during the GFC. This is presumably because the GFC was initially a US phenomenon, before spreading to developed markets around the globe, so that it was not a Chinese phenomenon.Volatility spillovers;VARMA-GARCH; VARMA-AGARCH; Chinese stock market

The motif problem

Fix a choice and ordering of four pairwise non-adjacent vertices of a parallelepiped, and call a motif a sequence of four points in R^3 that coincide with these vertices for some, possibly degenerate, parallelepiped whose edges are parallel to the axes. We show that a set of r points can contain at most r^2 motifs. Generalizing the notion of motif to a sequence of L points in R^p, we show that the maximum number of motifs that can occur in a point set of a given size is related to a linear programming problem arising from hypergraph theory, and discuss some related questions.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figur

A High-Scoring Scrabble Game

Games between average Scrabble players are likely to produce a total score somewhere between 400 and 60 points; games between experts (e.g., those who qualify for the National Scrabble Championships held in London each June) often score twice as much. However, if the two Scrabble players co-operate instead of compete with each other, far higher scores can be achieved. For example, in the May 1972 Word Ways, Darryl Francis detailed a Scrabble game in which the combined scores of the two players was 3108 points

Field Evaluations of Herbicides on Vegetable, Small Fruit, and Ornamental Crops, 2000, 2001, & 2002

Field evaluations of herbicides provide the chemical industry, governmental agencies, such as IR-4, and the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station with an evaluation of herbicide performance on small fruit, vegetable, and ornamental crops grown under Arkansas conditions. This report provides a means for disseminating information to interested private and public service weed scientists

Continuous and discrete models of cooperation in complex bacterial colonies

We study the effect of discreteness on various models for patterning in bacterial colonies. In a bacterial colony with branching pattern, there are discrete entities - bacteria - which are only two orders of magnitude smaller than the elements of the macroscopic pattern. We present two types of models. The first is the Communicating Walkers model, a hybrid model composed of both continuous fields and discrete entities - walkers, which are coarse-graining of the bacteria. Models of the second type are systems of reaction diffusion equations, where the branching of the pattern is due to non-constant diffusion coefficient of the bacterial field. The diffusion coefficient represents the effect of self-generated lubrication fluid on the bacterial movement. We implement the discreteness of the biological system by introducing a cutoff in the growth term at low bacterial densities. We demonstrate that the cutoff does not improve the models in any way. Its only effect is to decrease the effective surface tension of the front, making it more sensitive to anisotropy. We compare the models by introducing food chemotaxis and repulsive chemotactic signaling into the models. We find that the growth dynamics of the Communication Walkers model and the growth dynamics of the Non-Linear diffusion model are affected in the same manner. From such similarities and from the insensitivity of the Communication Walkers model to implicit anisotropy we conclude that the increased discreteness, introduced be the coarse-graining of the walkers, is small enough to be neglected.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures in 13 gif files, to be published in proceeding of CMDS