The meaning of some common terms used in sampling toxic phytoplankton

The author explains some aspects of sampling phytoplankton blooms and the evaluation of results obtained from different methods. Qualitative and quantitative sampling is covered as well as filtration, freeze-drying and toxin separation

Connecting the Dots: Towards Continuous Time Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Continuous time Hamiltonian Monte Carlo is introduced, as a powerful alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for continuous target distributions. The method is constructed in two steps: First Hamiltonian dynamics are chosen as the deterministic dynamics in a continuous time piecewise deterministic Markov process. Under very mild restrictions, such a process will have the desired target distribution as an invariant distribution. Secondly, the numerical implementation of such processes, based on adaptive numerical integration of second order ordinary differential equations is considered. The numerical implementation yields an approximate, yet highly robust algorithm that, unlike conventional Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, enables the exploitation of the complete Hamiltonian trajectories (hence the title). The proposed algorithm may yield large speedups and improvements in stability relative to relevant benchmarks, while incurring numerical errors that are negligible relative to the overall Monte Carlo errors

Secondary social science teacher training in Papua New Guinea and secondary social studies teacher training in New Zealand : a comparative study : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Education at Massey University

This thesis is presented in a form of a report on a comparative documentary survey of secondary social science teacher training in Papua New Guinea and secondary social studies teacher training in New Zealand. But because of the complexity of the field, the study has encompassed a number of related areas. The thesis is organized into five chapters. Chapter one introduces the nature of study. Chapter two presents the descriptive information on education and the secondary social science teacher training in Papua New Guinea. Chapter three follows a similar pattern to chapter one but focuses on New Zealand and on secondary social studies teacher training at Auckland in particular. Taken together, these chapters investigate such issues as, firstly, who goes to school and for how long. Secondly, they investigate the background information of the staff and students of the teachers college. Thirdly, these chapters examine the college curricula, how and why they are organized in that manner. In general, these two chapters set the scene and provide the background information as the basis for discussion in chapter four. In chapter four there is an analysis and comparison of education and social science teacher training in Papua New Guinea, and education and social studies teacher training in New Zealand. In doing so, the chapter reveals some of the significant weaknesses of secondary social science teacher training in Papua New Guinea. The final chapter is devoted to making general conclusions and some suggestions for further studies for Papua New Guinea on the basis of the weaknesses identified in chapter four

Crime and Unemployment: Evidence from Europe

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment on crime using a country-level panel data set from Europe that contains consistently-measured crime and police force statistics. Unemployment has a positive impact on monetary crimes, and instrumenting unemployment with the exchange rate produces larger estimates than those obtained from OLS specifications. The unemployment rate is decomposed into various components such as gender-specific and education-specific unemployment. The analysis of specific population sub-groups’ unemployment reveals that about 65% of the overall impact of unemployment on crime is attributable to the unemployment of males with low education.

Phenotypic evolution studied by layered stochastic differential equations

Time series of cell size evolution in unicellular marine algae (division Haptophyta; Coccolithus lineage), covering 57 million years, are studied by a system of linear stochastic differential equations of hierarchical structure. The data consists of size measurements of fossilized calcite platelets (coccoliths) that cover the living cell, found in deep-sea sediment cores from six sites in the world oceans and dated to irregular points in time. To accommodate biological theory of populations tracking their fitness optima, and to allow potentially interpretable correlations in time and space, the model framework allows for an upper layer of partially observed site-specific population means, a layer of site-specific theoretical fitness optima and a bottom layer representing environmental and ecological processes. While the modeled process has many components, it is Gaussian and analytically tractable. A total of 710 model specifications within this framework are compared and inference is drawn with respect to model structure, evolutionary speed and the effect of global temperature.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS559 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

TV Advertising, Program Quality, and Product-Market Oligopoly

We present a model of the TV-advertising market that encompasses both the product markets and the market for TV programs. We argue that the TV industry has several idiosyncratic characteristics that need to be modeled, and show that the strategic interaction in this industry differs from other industries in many respects. We find that a move from a TV monopoly to a TV duopoly may reduce both the total number of viewers and the total amount of TV advertising. A softening of price competition in each product market results in more investment in program quality, higher price per advertising slot, and more advertising. A reduction of the number of firms in each product market may have the opposite effect if the price competition in the product market is sufficiently soft initially. Finally, we find that even small asymmetries between product markets can cause large asymmetries with respect to which producers buy advertising on TV.