Tacitus, Stoic Exempla , And The Praecipuum Munus Annalium

Tacitus\u27 claim that history should inspire good deeds and deter bad ones (Annals 3.65) should be taken seriously: his exempla are supposed to help his readers think through their own moral difficulties. This approach to history is found in historians with clear connections to Stoicism, and in Stoic philosophers like Seneca. It is no coincidence that Tacitus is particularly interested in the behavior of Stoics like Thrasea Paetus, Barea Soranus, and Seneca himself. They, and even non-Stoic characters like Epicharis and Petronius, exemplify the behavior necessary if Roman freedom was to survive the monarchy

A GeoSocial Intelligence Framework for Studying & Promoting Resilience to Seasonal Flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia

PetaJakarta.org is a web-based platform developed to harness the power of social media to gather, sort, and display information about flooding for Jakarta residents in real time. The platform runs on the open source software CogniCity—an OSS platform developed by the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong—which allows data to be collected and disseminated by community members through their location-enabled mobile devices. The project uses a GeoSocial Intelligence Framework to approach the complexity of Jakarta’s entangled hydraulic, hydrological and meteorological systems and thereby converts the noise of social media into knowledge about urban infrastructure and situational conditions related to flooding and inundation. In this paper, PetaJakarta.org co-directors Dr Tomas Holderness, Geomatics Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Dr Etienne Turpin, Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, and Dr Rohan Wickramasuriyam, GIS Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, will discuss their GeoSocial Intelligence Framework as it applies to their current research in Jakarta. They will also present their preliminary findings from their 2014 Twitter #DataGrant, which has allowed them to develop a correlative analysis between historic social media information, the Jakarta government’s flood maps, and the infrastructure used to manage critical flood emergencies. Finally, they will speculate on several future applications of the CogniCity OSS and suggest how it might be developed to further promote an integrated civic co-management platform with the support of business, industry, government and community organizations

External Review and Options Appraisal of the Global Fund for Community Foundations

This Strategic Review and Options Appraisal was undertaken for the Global Fund for Community Foundations (GFCF). This Report is not an evaluation of the work of the GFCF, while it nonetheless 'reviews' the work and achievements of the organisation, particularly in the light of where the organisation stands at the present time. In this sense, it is more of a 'snapshot' view of the GFCF, and the Report, recognising that the GFCF is at an important moment in its life at a time of both challenge and opportunity, then presents a set of Options for decision

Acceptable Reforms of Agri-Environmental Policies

We consider a model of regulation for nonpoint source water pollution through non linear taxation/subsidization of agricultural production. Farmers are heterogenous along two dimensions, their ability to transform inputs into final production and the available area they possess. Asymmetric information and participation of farmers to the regulation scheme put constraints on the optimal policy that we characterize. We show that a positive relationship between size of land and ability may exacerbate adverse selection effects. We then introduce acceptability constraints and show that the intervention under acceptability amounts to reallocate production towards inefficient farmers who benefit from the reform at the expense of efficient producers. Last, we calibrate the model using datas on a french watershed (Don watershed). Simulations indicate that satisfying a high degree of acceptability does not entail high welfare losses compared to low degree of acceptability.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Free Space Optical Polarization De-multiplexing and Multiplexing by means of Conical Refraction

Polarization de-multiplexing and multiplexing by means of conical refraction is proposed to increase the channel capacity for free space optical communication applications. The proposed technique is based on the forward-backward optical transform occurring when a light beam propagates consecutively along the optic axes of two identical biaxial crystals with opposite orientations of their conical refraction characteristic vectors. We present experimental proof of usefulness of the conical refraction de-multiplexing and multiplexing technique by increasing in one order of magnitude the channel capacity at optical frequencies in a propagation distance of 4m