Leptodactylus bufonius

Number of Pages: 22Integrative BiologyGeological Science

NSW Great Artesian Basin water market assessment pre and post auction

The NSW Cap & Pipe the Bores Program is a jointly funded Commonwealth and State initiative that operates within the Australian Government's Great Artesian Basin Sustainability Initiative framework. Under the Water Sharing Plan for the NSW Great Artesian Basin Groundwater Sources 2008, 70 per cent of the water savings made since 1999 shall be retained in the aquifers of the Basin to improve pressures and provide for groundwater dependent ecosystems. The remaining 30 per cent of the water savings may be released to extractive users over the term of the Water Sharing Plan to facilitate the continued economic and social welfare of regional western NSW. As the first step in this water release, part of the water savings from the Cap & Pipe the Bores program were auctioned in July 2009 in the western NSW town of Walgett. All lots offered at auction were sold. The study reviews the pre auction analysis of demand, and outlines the auction process and outcomes as well as the implications for future water sales. The outcomes of the auction will inform ongoing water allocation policy.water auction, economics, Great Artesian Basin, groundwater, Cap & Pipe the Bores, Water Sharing Plan., Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Decentralisatie: maatwerk of uniformiteit? Het Wmo-beleid van Nederlandse gemeenten

A main motive for policy decentralization is the belief that municipalities are better able to customize public policy to local circumstances, and to realize made-to-measure service provision. In this respect, the introduction of the Social Support Act (Wmo) is an interesting example. With the lack of ‘vertical’ accountability obligations to the national government, the Wmo is governmentally innovative. Whether the decentralization results in customized forms of social support is a fascinating one because a detailed reading of the Wmo and its implementation displays possible incentives as well as barriers to made-to-measure service provision. The empirical exploration in this article uses data from the 2007-2009 evaluation of the Wmo conducted by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP). The evaluation shows that municipalities involve diverse stakeholders in formulating Wmo policy, and that their involvement seems to lead to customized service provision. At the same time, municipalities follow nationwide models, and information provided by the central government seems to have a major impact on local social care policy. The article concludes with an outlook on future directions in local debates on social care and the recommendation to give time for major decentralization trajectories such as the Wmo

Following the excited state relaxation dynamics of indole and 5-hydroxyindole using time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy

Time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy was used to obtain new information about the dynamics of electronic relaxation in gas-phase indole and 5-hydroxyindole following UV excitation with femtosecond laser pulses centred at 249 nm and 273 nm. Our analysis of the data was supported by ab initio calculations at the coupled cluster and complete-active-space self-consistent-field levels. The optically bright 1La and 1Lb electronic states of 1\u3c0\u3c0* character and spectroscopically dark and dissociative 1\u3c0\u3c3* states were all found to play a role in the overall relaxation process. In both molecules we conclude that the initially excited 1La state decays non-adiabatically on a sub 100 fs timescale via two competing pathways, populating either the subsequently long-lived 1Lb state or the 1\u3c0\u3c3* state localised along the N-H coordinate, which exhibits a lifetime on the order of 1 ps. In the case of 5-hydroxyindole, we conclude that the 1\u3c0\u3c3* state localised along the O-H coordinate plays little or no role in the relaxation dynamics at the two excitation wavelengths studied.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye