Monitoring Strategies for REDD+: Integrating Field, Airborne, and Satellite Observations of Amazon Forests

Large-scale tropical forest monitoring efforts in support of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation plus enhancing forest carbon stocks) confront a range of challenges. REDD+ activities typically have short reporting time scales, diverse data needs, and low tolerance for uncertainties. Meeting these challenges will require innovative use of remote sensing data, including integrating data at different spatial and temporal resolutions. The global scientific community is engaged in developing, evaluating, and applying new methods for regional to global scale forest monitoring. Pilot REDD+ activities are underway across the tropics with support from a range of national and international groups, including SilvaCarbon, an interagency effort to coordinate US expertise on forest monitoring and resource management. Early actions on REDD+ have exposed some of the inherent tradeoffs that arise from the use of incomplete or inaccurate data to quantify forest area changes and related carbon emissions. Here, we summarize recent advances in forest monitoring to identify and target the main sources of uncertainty in estimates of forest area changes, aboveground carbon stocks, and Amazon forest carbon emissions

Strengthening Mission through Strategy: An Analysis of the Mission-Driven Excellence Strategy

The Office of Strategy and Research (OSR) for the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) churches in the North America Division (NAD) is beginning to implement a new strategy that focuses on mission. The OSR designed the strategy, created tools and materials to support the churches in implementing the Mission-driven Excellence (MdX) strategy. MdX combines planning and direction that helps church leaders to think strategically. MdX is a combination of pre-events, processes, and resources combined with local church strategies toward mission. The purpose of this study was to suggest strengths and improvements to the Mission-driven Excellence (MdX) strategy by seeking to better understand how the participants in the NAD pilot churches perceived the MdX strategy through its strengthens and weaknesses, and how it could be improved. This study used a qualitative method design and formative research methodology to focus on what worked well, what did not work well, and gathered suggestions for improvement on the MdX phenomena. The study’s population is found within the 67 pilot churches involved with the MdX implementation in the NAD. Thus, the population for this study is the pastors and selected church leaders within the 67 pilot churches who participated in leading the implementation of the MdX strategy at their local church. The sample involved six of the 11 pilot churches in the Ontario Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) in Canada. The study found that MdX, besides being a unique NAD and SDA strategy, was also a step-by-step strategy that provides clear direction to the churches focusing on goals versus outcomes. Participants urged that MdX should not be optional and should provide more training for the leaders. Among many improvements suggested, three of them were (a) to improve the MdX materials, (b) to make [MdX] simpler by simplifying the language as well as by instead of ten, no more than five habits in total, and (c) to improve the kind of leadership the MdX needs. The MdX strategy can be used by any church as a model or tool for implementing their local strategies. As a theoretical strategy, MdX needs to be periodically re-evaluated to maintain the theory’s relevancy, refinement, and improvement

New Algorithms for Computing a Single Component of the Discrete Fourier Transform

This paper introduces the theory and hardware implementation of two new algorithms for computing a single component of the discrete Fourier transform. In terms of multiplicative complexity, both algorithms are more efficient, in general, than the well known Goertzel Algorithm.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. In: 10th International Symposium on Communication Theory and Applications, Ambleside, U

Characterizing videos, audience and advertising in Youtube channels for kids

Online video services, messaging systems, games and social media services are tremendously popular among young people and children in many countries. Most of the digital services offered on the internet are advertising funded, which makes advertising ubiquitous in children's everyday life. To understand the impact of advertising-based digital services on children, we study the collective behavior of users of YouTube for kids channels and present the demographics of a large number of users. We collected data from 12,848 videos from 17 channels in US and UK and 24 channels in Brazil. The channels in English have been viewed more than 37 billion times. We also collected more than 14 million comments made by users. Based on a combination of text-analysis and face recognition tools, we show the presence of racial and gender biases in our large sample of users. We also identify children actively using YouTube, although the minimum age for using the service is 13 years in most countries. We provide comparisons of user behavior among the three countries, which represent large user populations in the global North and the global South