An insight into the impact of arable farming on Irish biodiversity: A scarcity of studies hinders a rigorous assessment

peer-reviewedTo help understand and counteract future agronomic challenges to farmland biodiversity, it is essential to know how present farming practices have affected biodiversity on Irish farms. We present an overview of existing research data and conclusions, describing the impact of crop cultivation on biodiversity on Irish arable farms. An extensive literature review clearly indicates that peer-reviewed publications on research conducted in Ireland on this topic are quite scarce: just 21 papers investigating the effect of conventional crop cultivation on Irish biodiversity have been published within the past 30 years. Principally, these studies have concluded that conventional crop cultivation has had an adverse impact on biodiversity on Irish farms, with 15 of the 21 studies demonstrating negative trends for the taxa investigated. Compared to other EU states, the relative dearth of baseline data and absence of monitoring programmes designed to assess the specific impacts of crop cultivation on Irish biodiversity highlight the need to develop long-term research studies. With many new challenges facing Irish agriculture, a research programme must be initiated to measure current levels of biodiversity on arable land and to assess the main farming ‘pressures’ causing significant biodiversity loss or gains in these systems.This work was funded under the EPA ERTDI Research Programme (Grant 2006-B-MS-46)

Inflation and inequality bias in the presence of bulk purchases for food and drinks

The aim of this article is the estimation of annual food expenditures with limited information about bulk purchases with data from a Spanish household-budgest survey for 1990-1991. Three alternatives are compared. The first, currently used for official purposes, does not use all the information. The second uses all the available information in a rough way. The third assumes a formal model for the unknown frequency of purchases. The three alternatives are compared by a regression model that should be homogeneous with respect to the dummy variables that represent the partial information of the groups and should show a distinct pattern of outliers under each alternative. Finally, we study the effect of the official and the best alternative on food inflation and inequality measures. We find that they lead to similar inflation rates but to different inequality estimates.Publicad

Inflation and inequality bias in the presence of bulk purchases for food and drinks

We study how to improve the estimation of annual food expenditures from household budget surveys with limited information on bulk purchases. We compare three alternative imputation methods by i) estimating the average amount of over or undervaluation according to a Poisson model of the frequency of purchase, ii) measuring the impact on a food share regression of belonging to household types with different bulk purchase habits, and iii) analyzing the outliers exclusively attributable to the shortcomings of each imputation procedure. Finally, we study the implications of different alternatives on the measurement of food price inflation, food expenditure inequality, and household total expenditure inequality

Minutes 2003-2004

The records of the Administrative Staff Council (UA-022) are available in print in the Center for Archival Collections

Social policy and income distribution: An empirical analysis for the Netherlands

In most OECD-countries income inequality has increased during the last two decades. In this paper, we investigate to what extent changes in the overall distribution of incomes can be attributed to social policy measures. The case for the Netherlands is particularly interesting, because the Dutch welfare state has been reformed rather fundamentally in recent years. The budget incidence analysis indicates that in the period 1981-1996 inequality of adjusted disposable household income increased sharply. The main force behind this phenomenon was a more unequal distribution of market incomes, but social transfers also explain a substantial large part of the rise in inequality. Social security reforms indeed seem to have made the income distribution less equal. The results of a more detailed analysis for 1996 on the redistributive impact of social policy and of specific social programs - using data from an unique income panel survey - can be summarised as follows: - The first five income deciles clearly gain from social security, while the higher deciles loose. Social security causes a reduction in inequality by 26 to 50 percent, depending on the indicator used. - The public old age program and the social assistance program explain by far the largest part of redistribution by the social system, while the disability and unemployment programs do not have strong redistributive effects.Social Policy, Income Distribution (Indices), Taxes and Transfers

Spartan Daily, May 13, 2015

Volume 144, Issue 42https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2135/thumbnail.jp

Minutes 2002-2003

The records of the Administrative Staff Council (UA-022) are available in print in the Center for Archival Collections

Cavitation Inception - A Selective Review

This paper reviews recent developments in selected cavitation research areas which have been active mainly within the past two years. The new understanding resulting from this work is summarized. Research topics discussed are cavitation inception on smooth surfaces, on vortex cavitation and scaling, on the measurement of cavitation nuclei, and on the effects of polymer additives. Because of the selective nature of the review, a fairly comprehensive listing of recent contributions to the literature on these and related aspects of cavitation research is an essential part of the exposition