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,

Actively coping with violation:Exploring upward dissent patterns in functional, dysfunctional, and deserted psychological contract end states

Recently, scholars have emphasized the importance of examining how employees cope with psychological contract violation and how the coping process contributes to psychological contract violation resolution and post-violation psychological contracts. Recent work points to the important role of problem-focused coping. Yet, to date, problem-focused coping strategies have not been conceptualized on a continuum from constructive to destructive strategies. Consequently, potential differences in the use of specific types of problem-focused coping strategies and the role these different strategies play in the violation resolution process has not been explored. In this study, we stress the importance of focusing on different types of problem-focused coping strategies. We explore how employee upward dissent strategies, conceptualized as different forms of problem-focused coping, contribute to violation resolution and post-violation psychological contracts. Two sources of data were used. In-depth interviews with supervisors of a Dutch car lease company provided 23 case descriptions of employee-supervisor interactions after a psychological contract violation. Moreover, a database with descriptions of Dutch court sentences provided eight case descriptions of employee-organization interactions following a perceived violation. Based on these data sources, we explored the pattern of upward dissent strategies employees used over time following a perceived violation. We distinguished between functional (thriving and reactivation), dysfunctional (impairment and dissolution) and deserted psychological contract end states and explored whether different dissent patterns over time differentially contributed to the dissent outcome (i.e., psychological contract end state). The results of our study showed that the use of problem-focused coping is not as straightforward as suggested by the post-violation model. While the post-violation model suggests that problem-focused coping will most likely contribute positively to violation resolution, we found that this also depends on the type of problem-focused coping strategy used. That is, more threatening forms of problem-focused coping (i.e., threatening resignation as a way to trigger one's manager/organization to resolve the violation) mainly contributed to dysfunctional and deserted PC end states. Yet, in some instances the use of these types of active coping strategies also contributed to functional violation resolution. These findings have important implications for the literature on upward dissent strategies and psychological contract violation repair

Illiberal Norm Diffusion: How Do Governments Learn to Restrict Non-Governmental Organizations?

Recent decades have witnessed a global cascade of restrictive and repressive measures against nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We theorize that state learning from observing the regional environment, rather than NGO growth per se or domestic unrest, explains this rapid diffusion of restrictions. We develop and test two hypotheses: (1) states adopt NGO restrictions in response to nonarmed bottom-up threats in their regional environment (“learning from threats”); (2) states adopt NGO restrictions through imitation of the legislative behavior of other states in their regional environment (“learning from examples”). Using an original dataset on NGO restrictions in ninety-six countries over a period of twenty-five years (1992–2016), we test these hypotheses by means of negative binomial regression and survival analyses, using spatially weighted techniques. We find very limited evidence for learning from threats, but consistent evidence for learning from examples. We corroborate this finding through close textual comparison of laws adopted in the Middle East and Africa, showing legal provisions being taken over almost verbatim from one law into another. In our conclusion, we spell out the implications for the quality of democracy and for theories of transition to a postliberal order, as well as for policy-makers, lawyers, and civil-society practitioners.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Unexpected sound omissions are signaled in human posterior superior temporal gyrus: An intracranial study

Context modulates sensory neural activations enhancing perceptual and behavioral performance and reducing prediction errors. However, the mechanism of when and where these high-level expectations act on sensory processing is unclear. Here, we isolate the effect of expectation absent of any auditory evoked activity by assessing the response to omitted expected sounds. Electrocorticographic signals were recorded directly from subdural electrode grids placed over the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Subjects listened to a predictable sequence of syllables, with some infrequently omitted. We found high-frequency band activity (HFA, 70-170 Hz) in response to omissions, which overlapped with a posterior subset of auditory-active electrodes in STG. Heard syllables could be distinguishable reliably from STG, but not the identity of the omitted stimulus. Both omission- and target-detection responses were also observed in the prefrontal cortex. We propose that the posterior STG is central for implementing predictions in the auditory environment. HFA omission responses in this region appear to index mismatch-signaling or salience detection processes

Decentralization in the Netherlands: from blueprints to tailor-made services?

The politics and administration of institutional chang

Fermi observations of high-energy gamma-ray emission from GRB 090217A

The Fermi observatory is advancing our knowledge of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) through pioneering observations at high energies, covering more than 7 decades in energy with the two on-board detectors, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM). Here we report on the observation of the long GRB 090217A which triggered the GBM and has been detected by the LAT with a significance greater than 9 sigma. We present the GBM and LAT observations and on-ground analyses, including the time-resolved spectra and the study of the temporal profile from 8 keV up to 1 GeV. All spectra are well reproduced by a Band model. We compare these observations to the first two LAT-detected, long bursts GRB 080825C and GRB 080916C. These bursts were found to have time-dependent spectra and exhibited a delayed onset of the high-energy emission, which are not observed in the case of GRB 090217A. We discuss some theoretical implications for the high-energy emission of GRBs.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures. Contact Authors: Fred, Piron; Sara, Cutini; Andreas, von Kienli