Insurance and deliberation as drought disaster risk reduction strategies

As the international community is moving from response to disaster risk reduction, it becomes imperative to take the whole risk chain into consideration, from prevention to rehabilitation of a droughtstricken area. To assess impacts on drought-stricken groups, it is useful to take a close look at risk spreading strategies these groups already use, which reduce their vulnerability to shocks. In Turkey, there is a very little coordination between adjacent water user groups on a river or in an irrigation scheme. This means there is no mutual coordination mechanism in times of unexpected drought. The article argues that a deliberative multi-stakeholder approach can enhance Disaster Risk Reduction, as currently practiced in Latin America and South Asia, and explores avenues for mutual crop and drought insurance initiatives such as currently practiced as pilot projects in India, and assess its applicability for the drought prone regions in Turkey, which experienced a coordination gap in the 2007-2008 drought

A decision support system to improve service quality in multimodal rapid rail systems: A bayesian perspective

Copyright @ 2011 International Conference on Computers and Industrial EngineeringIn this study, the accessibility of the rail transit stations in a multimodal network formed by a trunk line and its feeder lines are defined. Connectivity between lines and the accessibility of the nodes identify the overall spatial structure of the network. The factors influencing the access choices of rail transit stations and satisfaction of transit travelers in rapid rail transit systems are investigated in order to gain insights into the factors and their interrelationships. The quantitative indications of the relationships are produced and the complexity of evaluating the performance of transit services is exhibited. As the interrelationships are mainly stochastic, the problem on hand is treated as a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). A BBN approach that presents a learning mechanism is employed and is used as an alternative decision making tool to analyze the rapid rail transit services and identify policies to improve the traveler’s level of service

Design and low-power implementation of an adaptive image rejection receiver

This paper deals with and details the design and implementation of a low-power; hardware-efficient adaptive self-calibrating image rejection receiver based on blind-source-separation that alleviates the RF analog front-end impairments. Hybrid strength-reduced and re-scheduled data-flow, low-power implementation of the adaptive self-calibration algorithm is developed and its efficiency is demonstrated through simulation case studies. A behavioral and structural model is developed in Matlab as well as a low-level architectural design in VHDL providing valuable test benches for the performance measures undertaken on the detailed algorithms and structures

Synthesis of surveillance strategies via belief abstraction

We provide a novel framework for the synthesis of a controller for a robot with a surveillance objective, that is, the robot is required to maintain knowledge of the location of a moving, possibly adversarial target. We formulate this problem as a one-sided partial-information game in which the winning condition for the agent is specified as a temporal logic formula. The specification formalizes the surveillance requirement given by the user by quantifying and reasoning over the agent's beliefs about a target's location. We also incorporate additional non-surveillance tasks. In order to synthesize a surveillance strategy that meets the specification, we transform the partial-information game into a perfect-information one, using abstraction to mitigate the exponential blow-up typically incurred by such transformations. This transformation enables the use of off-the-shelf tools for reactive synthesis. We evaluate the proposed method on two case-studies, demonstrating its applicability to diverse surveillance requirements

Application of asymptotic waveform evaluation for time domain analysis of nonlinear circuits

Cataloged from PDF version of article.A method is described to exploit asymptotic waveform evaluation (ATNE) in the time-domain analysis of nonlinear circuits by using SPICE models for nonlinear devices such as diodes, transistors, etc. Although AWE has been used for linearized circuits only, the aim is to enhance the accuracy of the simulation while preserving the computational efficiency obtained with AWE and to eliminate the piecewise-linear modelling problem. Practical examples are given to illustrate significant improvements in accuracy. For circuits containing weakly nonlinear devices, it is demonstrated that this method is typically at least one order of magnitude faster than SPICE

A novel algorithm for DC analysis of piecewise-linear circuits: popcorn

Cataloged from PDF version of article.A fast and convergent iteration method for piecewise-linear analysis of nonlinear resistive circuits is presented. Most of the existing algorithms are applicable only to a limited class of circuits. In general, they are either not convergent or too slow for large circuits. The new algorithm presented in the paper is much more efficient than the existing ones and can be applied to any piecewise-linear circuit. It is based on the piecewise-linear version of the Newton-Raphson algorithm. As opposed to the Newton-Raphson method, the new algorithm is globally convergent from an arbitrary starting point. It is simple to understand and it can be easily programmed. Some numerical examples are given in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of the amount of computation

Computer aided frequency planning for the radio and tv broadcasts

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The frequency planning of the VHF and UHF broadcasts in Turkey is described. This planning is done with the aid of computer databases and digital terrain map. The frequency offset is applied whenever applicable to increase the channel capacity. The offset assignment is done through Simulated Annealing algorithm. The international rules and regulations concerning Turkey are also considered

Modelling for water management: first calibration of yield-SAFE for irrigated maize in Mediterranean regions

In the Mediterranean region, careful management of water and nitrogen utilization is required to achieve high crop yields in a sustainable and economic way. Prediction models are useful tools for deriving site/region–specific optimum management strategies for irrigation and nitrogen use. Yield-SAFE, a simple and robust model for growth and resource use in agroforestry systems, simulates crop yields under rainfed and irrigated conditions. This paper represents a refined calibration with respect to the fluxes of water, based on, data from an irrigation/fertilisation experiment with maize in the South-East of Turkey. The model performs satisfactorily and further development will includede nitrogen leaching calibration and validation

Synthesis of minimum-cost shields for multi-agent systems

In this paper, we propose a general approach to derive runtime enforcement implementations for multiagent systems, called shields, from temporal logical specifications. Each agent of the multi-agent system is monitored, and if needed corrected, by the shield, such that a global specification is always satisfied. The different ways of how a shield can interfere with each agent in the system in case of an error introduces the need for quantitative objectives. This work is the first to discuss the shield synthesis problem with quantitative objectives. We provide several cost functions that are utilized in the multi-agent setting and provide methods for the synthesis of cost-optimal shields and fair shields, under the given assumptions on the multi-agent system. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach via a detailed case study on UAV mission planning for warehouse logistics and simulating the shielded multi-agent system on ROS/Gazebo

Mycobacterial infection of intraparenchymal bronchogenic cysts

Bronchogenic cysts (BCs) may rarely cause some interesting and unusual complications. Although infection is a common complication of BCs, there are only two patients with BC infected with mycobacterium in English literature. Two intraparencymal BCs infected with mycobacterium are presented here as unusual complications. Cystectomy was performed for the cysts. They were given antituberculosis treatment. No complication or recurrences were detected in follow up period. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved