Remotely Engaged? A Framework for Monitoring the Success of Stakeholder Engagement in Remote Regions

The importance of stakeholder engagement for the success of natural resources management processes is widely acknowledged, yet evaluation frameworks employed by administrators of environmental programs continue to provide limited recognition of or insistence upon engagement processes. This paper presents a framework for monitoring and evaluation of engagement that aims to better incorporate community engagement into mainstream environmental programs, in particular in remote regions such as arid and desert regions of the world. We argue that successful monitoring of engagement should not only comprise a generic set of indicators but rather, in addition to the principles of good monitoring practice, should take into account a variety of the stakeholder interests as well as key regional drivers, addressing them at right geographic, institutional and time scale.engagement, evaluation, governance, natural resources, participation, stakeholders

Expectations in Micro Data: Rationality Revisited

An increasing number of longitudinal data sets collect expectations information regarding a variety of future individual level events and decisions, providing researchers with the opportunity to explore expectations over micro variables in detail. We provide a theoretical framework and an econometric methodology to use that type of information to test the Rational Expectations hypothesis in models of individual behavior, and present tests using two different panel data sets.

Ultrafast Magnetism Dynamics Measure Using Tabletop Ultrafast EUV Sources

In our work to date, we made two significant advances. First we demonstrated element-selective demagnetization dynamics for the first time, with a record time resolution for x-ray probing of 55 fs. Second, in new work, we were able to probe the timescale of the exchange interaction in magnetic materials, also for the first time. Our measurements were made using the transverse magneto-optic Kerr effect (T-MOKE) geometry, since the reflectivity of a magnetic material changes with the direction of the magnetization vector of a surface. In our experiment, we periodically reversed the magnetization direction of a grating structure made of Permalloy (Ni80Fe20) using an external magnetic field. To achieve maximum contrast, we used HHG light spanning the M-shell (3p) absorption edges of Fe and Ni. Our characterization of the static magnetization of a Permalloy sample shows high magnetic asymmetry at photon energies just above and below the absorption edges at 55 eV and 65 eV, respectively. This result is in excellent agreement with measurements done on the same using a synchrotron source